I’m One of You Now
A vignette on elite migration
Sitting in a cafe in Mumbai, India, I notice a hand on my shoulder. I turn around to recognize an acquaintance (let’s call him Viraj) whom I haven’t seen in four or five months. We met briefly last year before he suddenly left for Canada, where he had been working for the intervening time before returning to his family’s home in Mumbai.
Viraj, in his early thirties with a charming smile and an appealing earnestness about him, informs me that he had returned to India from Canada two days ago. We get to chatting and I soon find out that he recently obtained Canadian citizenship.
“I’m one of you now,” he proclaims.
As an American citizen who has never been to Canada in my life, I’m perplexed by Viraj’s confident proclamation. However, in the interests of maintaining the conversational flow, I overlook this comment.
“So, when are you going back to Canada,” I ask, assuming that his newfound citizenship meant that he had decided to settle there.
“I’m not—I’m just living here in India right now.”
Even more confused, I seek further clarification: “So you’re living in India indefinitely on a visa. What do you plan to do with your Canadian citizenship, then?”
Viraj enthusiastically responds: “Well, first of all, it allows me to work anywhere in the world, which is great. But I see it mostly as an investment for the future. When I get married and my future wife says, ‘we need to bounce,’ then I’ll be able to take her to Canada.”
Poor and working-class migrants from Latin America receive the lion’s share of media attention in the United States. This is in many ways justifiable since these immigrants make up the majority of the foreign-born population in the United States. However, the phenomenon of elite migration—largely but not exclusively from Asia—is an important issue in itself. Though Viraj is statistically unlikely reach the spectacular first-generation immigrant heights of Indian-born tech CEOs like Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Arvind Krishna (IBM), and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), he is united with them in his status as an elite migrant from India.
My interaction with Viraj prompted me to reflect on three aspects of elite migration.
“We Need to Bounce”
First, Viraj’s attitude toward citizenship bypasses any sense of moral or political commitment toward both Canada and India.
In the case of Canada, the calculation is clear: the country serves as an escape valve for him and his future family should he feel the need to leave India. In the meantime, he works remotely for a Canadian tech firm and has no interest in participating in Canadian life beyond this transactional employment arrangement. For Viraj, Canadian politics and civil society are not things that demand his engagement in the present. Rather, it is assumed that the country will take care of itself in his absence and stand waiting with open arms whenever he feels the need to move.
India doesn’t fare any better. Since he has Canadian citizenship to fall back on, Viraj has little reason to involve himself in the life of the Indian nation. I got the sense from our conversation that his relocation to Canada was a matter of “when,” not “if.” With Canada waiting in the wings, he is free to take a purely instrumental attitude toward his home country, which is—given his own forecast—already assumed to become unworthy of his residence at a to-be-determined future date. While Viraj may be living in India now, his predetermined escape route to Canada renders any personal investment in the future of the Indian nation unnecessary.
This peculiar state of affairs amounts to a lose-lose situation for Canada and India: Viraj’s individual economic mobility and career advancement trump any sense of duty to either country. Even if his case is a particularly extreme one, this mentality is widespread among members of the global professional-managerial class (PMC).
The PMC is most closely associated with left-liberal cosmopolitanism, but also boasts ample representatives on the right who have consolidated in recent years under the ideological tendency that
calls “Right-Wing Progressivism.” The PMC’s left- and right-wing elements share a natural affinity for elite migration. Building on Lyons’ analysis, observes the following in an article entitled, “The Future Belongs to the Right-Wing Progressives”:How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask. Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion. The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration—provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likelihood of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.
While the populist right and increasingly prominent elements of the populist left are both opposed to the unfettered movement of this global elite, this ascendant right-wing progressive tendency has moved closer to the cultural left on the question of immigration. Right-wing progressives and cultural leftists may be divided on the issue of poor and working-class migration, but they are united in their conviction that PMC elites ought to be able to move effortlessly across the globe.
Elite migrants like Viraj treat citizenship as a means to the end of global economic mobility. It appears that countries like Canada are more than willing to oblige. While granting citizenship to the global PMC may prompt a short-term GDP boost, the long-term result is what
calls “the end of citizenship”—the replacement of the nation-state by the global-state.As consummate “global citizens,” elite migrants play a decisive role in this erasure of the nation-state. But this begs the question: What enabled them to become so “global” in the first place?
“It Allows Me to Work Anywhere in the World”
This brings me to my second observation. Viraj’s comment that Canadian citizenship “allows me to work anywhere in the world,” demonstrates that the global labor arbitrage is not limited to working-class jobs, but also operates at the elite level. John Smith defines the “global labor arbitrage” as:
the efforts by firms in Europe, North America, and Japan to cut costs and boost profits by replacing higher-waged domestic labor with cheaper foreign labor, achieved either through emigration of production (“outsourcing,” as used here) or through immigration of workers.
Most of us are familiar with the “outsourcing” side of this equation. As I have discussed previously on Handful of Earth, efforts to “reshore” production have been a consistent theme across both Trumpism and Bidenomics, solidifying a drastic post-neoliberal policy shift that has brought into sharp relief just how pivotal the “emigration of production” was in the neoliberal era. On the other side of the global labor arbitrage equation, (at least when the “immigration of workers” discussion isn’t dominated by fake news of pet-eating migrants), we often hear about low-wage immigrant workers taking domestic working-class jobs. The role of elite migrant labor in the global labor arbitrage gets much less air time.
The ample supply of globally mobile elite migrant labor disincentivizes Western governments from investing in the training of their own domestic populations for high-skill, high-paying jobs. For example, in the United States (a context with which I am more familiar than Canada) there are now more foreign-born than American-born workers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. A 2024 report by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics observes that:
In 2021, a larger portion of foreign-born workers held STEM occupations (26%) than U.S.-born workers (24%). Proportionally, more naturalized citizens worked in S&E-related occupations (11%) than noncitizens (5%) or U.S.-born citizens (9%). Additionally, larger proportions of noncitizens worked in STEM middle-skill occupations (12%) than naturalized citizens (8%) or U.S.-born workers (9%).
What’s the point of investing in the education and training of native-born poor and working-class children to fill these positions when this labor can easily be imported from abroad? The United States government and American corporations have no incentive to do this when they can rely on elite immigrants to keep the STEM machine running.
No wonder the American ruling class doesn’t seem concerned that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 84 percent of black American students lack proficiency in mathematics and 85 percent lack proficiency in reading skills. With elite migrant labor at its fingertips, the United States government and corporate world couldn’t care less if the domestic dispossessed are provided the opportunity for upward mobility.
While the domestic working class of all races loses out due to the insidious function of elite migration, foreign-born professional-managerial class employees also get the short end of the stick. The Economic Policy Institute reports that skilled migrants on H-1B visas have been subject to millions of dollars in wage theft by their employers.
The H-1B visa program, codified during the heyday of neoliberalism by the Immigration Act of 1990, permits American companies to hire college-educated skilled migrant workers. The program can provide a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship, but this process is controlled by the H-1B employers themselves. Hence, any employee who rocks the boat is likely to be denied permanent residency, a trend that contributes to the creation of an exceedingly docile and pliable foreign-born workforce (especially in Silicon Valley, where the H-1B regime reigns supreme). The aforementioned Economic Policy Institute report reveals that:
Since the creation of the program, the abuses of the program have been many, included [sic] vastly underpaying workers, laying off U.S. workers and replacing them with much lower-paid H-1B workers, forcing U.S. workers to train their H-1B replacements as a condition of receiving severance and unemployment insurance, and cheating the H-1B lottery to acquire additional visas.
Just as elite migration creates a lose-lose situation for both countries involved, it also contributes to the deprivation of native-born working-class communities and the exploitation of foreign-born workers. The big winners are the multinational corporations that have convinced progressives (of both the left- and right-wing varieties) that everyone is better off from the shell game of global elite migration.
“I’m One of You Now”
Third, Viraj’s declarative statement, “I’m one of you now,” illustrates a disposition toward the nation-state that is quite literally foreign to most people located outside the world of the globally mobile PMC. This statement speaks to the realities of elite migration on a more existential level than what I have discussed so far. “I’m one of you now,” implies that national differences—such as the one between the United States and Canada—are irrelevant. What matters for Viraj is holding citizenship in a Western country, and presumably any one of them will do.
European colonialism produced the idea of “the West” as a distinct geopolitical entity. On the one hand, this process artificially separated Europe from its historically organic integration with Asia and Africa. On the other hand, it created a sense of abstract “Western” identity that gradually began to displace the importance of more concrete local, regional, and national communities within Europe. The result of these twin phenomena was a world increasingly divided along the lines of “the West” and “the rest.”
Paradoxically, in the contemporary moment, it is often elite migrants like Viraj who play a pivotal role in upholding this colonial worldview. The statement “I’m one of you now” illustrates that he sees the world as divided fundamentally along the fault line of the West and the rest. Viraj did not become American, Cascadian, Oregonian or anything else that would communally affiliate him with me. He didn’t even become Canadian, other than on paper. What he became was “Western,” a conveniently capacious identity that—and this is the most important part—supersedes local, regional, national, ethnic, linguistic, and ecological rootedness.
While many elite migrants reinforce this colonial conception of the West, large swathes of native-born populist voters in Western countries have begun to turn against it. From the attraction of “America First” politics in the United States to the rising popularity of Euroskeptic parties across Europe, right and left populism alike have begun to turn away from affiliation with “the West” and toward other forms of communal affinity. Chief among these is the nation, but other forms of local and regional community have also emerged as the divide between Western(ized) PMC “Anywheres” and the global majority of “Somewheres” deepens.
For Viraj, the “you” in “I’m one of you now” signifies membership in and identification with the Western world. This is the meaning of the “you” fostered by the global elite migration regime, which demands little from its participants beyond a utility-maximizing spirit and a default assumption that the fundamental division of the world is between the West and the rest.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The “you” in “I’m one of you now” could mean many different things. In the era of what
aptly calls “existential politics,” the struggle over the meaning of the “you” in this statement is crucial.Who Are “You”?
Crawford argues that “one factor” in the advent of existential politics “is surely that sense one has that there is something new and voracious in the world that feeds on local sovereignty and hard-won, personal knowledge of the material world.”
The point of my vignette on elite migration is not to bash on Viraj in particular or on immigrants in general. I’m quite fond of Viraj and have good friends who are elite migrants. I share this vignette and analysis to elucidate one aspect of the “new and voracious” force that weaponizes elite migrants against their home and adopted countries alike, against native-born workers and, in the end, against themselves.
For it is not only wages that many elite migrants are robbed of in the global labor arbitrage. They are robbed of something—to quote Crawford again—“more existential than economics.” This something is an intangible sense of place, a rootedness, a groundedness.
In his essay collection entitled Becoming Native to This Place, Wes Jackson writes of America:
It has never been our national goal to become native to this place. It has never seemed necessary even to begin such a journey. And now, almost too late, we perceive its necessity. Unfortunately, the nature of the nativeness toward which we must work has been not merely altered but severely compromised.
Jackson wrote these words in 1994. In the intervening 30 years, the rapacious forces of technological progress, economic globalization, and cultural homogenization have gathered even more steam. He saw much of this coming, but nonetheless made a strong case for the imperative of becoming native to this place in the face of seemingly impossible odds:
We are unlikely to achieve anything close to sustainability in any area unless we work for the broader goal of becoming native in the modern world, and that means becoming native to our places in a coherent community that is in turn embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape.
On a policy level, I believe that elite migration must be drastically limited so that the dust kicked up by global hypermobility can settle and the journey of becoming native to this place can begin in earnest. But the reality is that elite migration is here to stay, at least for the immediate future. It will take more than populist rhetoric to roll back its deracinating and destabilizing effects. In light of this reality, we must ask not only “What should we do about elite migration?” but, also, “What are elite migrants to do?”
Jackson’s clarion call is a reminder that the way forward for elite (and, non-elite, for that matter) migrants is not altogether different from the task faced by native-born Americans: becoming truly native to this place. Yes, there are many compelling reasons to curb elite migration. But even more significant than this much-needed policy pivot is the existential challenge that elite migration poses to us all. It is a challenge that turns the mirror squarely back on native-born Americans who have, as Jackson perceptively notes, failed to make becoming native to this place a national priority.
When an elite migrant says, “I’m one of you now,” we are compelled to ask ourselves what the “you” in this sentence means in the first place—not just to the elite migrant, but to us. Only by beginning to move toward a working definition of who “we” are can we embark on the journey of becoming native to this place.
"On the one hand, this process artificially separated Europe from its historically organic integration with Asia and Africa."
A good part of this had already been accomplished via Islamic Imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa, followed by the conquests of the Mongol Empire. The Mediterranean was turned from an economic engine into a battlefield and any sort of sense of continuous civilization was broken as both sides were intent on depicting the other as essentially maleficent.