I want to be preface this post (and the rest of this blog) by saying I'm no expert on immigration policy around the globe. This is an extremely difficult and complicated problem, and I have no better solutions than the next person. What I do uniquely have, is first-hand experience with many of the difficulties of the situation as they are now, as well as the means to spread the awareness about this. And that's what I primarily aim to do. I will try to cite references for everything I state as fact here (and I consider Wikipedia plenty citation), but a significant portion of this blog will be anecdotal and personal opinion.
Globalization is a good thing for everyone.
By the Wikipedia definition, globalization is "the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture." Yes, globalization can lead to some short-term negative effects, but for the rest of this post, and everywhere henceforth in this blog, I will be referring to this holistically positive (and Wikipedia endorsed) definition of the term "globalization". I'm not qualified to project these trends much, but I think if immigration policies around the world stay the way they are, those graphs will show much less jolly a trend far before the decade is out. For this to continue to happen, there are actually surprisingly few, albeit demanding, requirements:
1. People should be allowed to be creative.
This video is probably only tangentially related, but it's amazing, better conveys some points I want to reiterate here.
I also just really wanted to post it anyway.
Creative people are happy people. Happy people are communicative, productive and cooperative people.Those are the kinds of people that make the good parts of globalization a reality.
2. People should move.
This is obvious -- it's the most efficient way that the things that define globalization propagate -- yet not obvious. People shouldn't just be given the option to move. They should be encouraged to move. But not just "go traveling." Not how stereotypical 22-year-old college grad Jeremy goes to visit the slums of Ghana or the tribes in Kerala or overflowing Asian metropolises, with the conspicuous awareness that they will return to their comfortable air-conditioned homes and 6-figure salary corporate jobs that he already secured with his coveted technical degree from an Ivy League school. And yet thinks he "knows how life is around the world," because he may have roughed some of it while traveling.
Of course, there is a lot of value to that kind of traveling, even if just as a tourist (besides the recreation), and I don't want to take away from that. It is still the life-changing experience that everyone who has done it says it is. Many people decide to bring about globalization in a meaningful way after having gone on some epic traveling. I just want to point out it's not the same, and by itself does not bring about the globalization and unification the world needs. We all know that there is so much of the life, and the culture that Jeremy neither experienced nor understands from the places he traveled to, because he doesn't even think about building a life there. All Jeremy did was little better than remove the glass screen between the History channel on his widescreen LED TV and his post-grad face.
That's pretty much it. However, the magnitude of these two requirements is noticeably massive. It is far out of the scope of this single post for me to further analyze these two points. In fact, that's probably the purpose of this entire blog, and still beyond scope.
As my good friend and college classmate who has had very similar experiences to my own put it:
From my research, there are still very few places in the world where you can live and open a company as a non-national for an extended period of time. Here's to a future of increased (international) labor mobility – something I think is a vital next step to this thing we call globalisation.
