Today’s most important battleground is people, not places.
.......... Since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of American expats has doubled, many of them young professionals seeking opportunity across fast growing economies from Eastern Europe to the Far East. .......... Now comes the remote revolution. .......... more than forty percent of the global workforce—at least 1.5 billion people—is “location independent.” ...... At the moment, asynchronous collaboration is Google Docs and Slack, but soon enough it will be more Github and Metaverse. ........ they plan to hire the best people anywhere for each new position. Suddenly the Bay Area coder may be competing with talent in Kenya .........“If you can do your job from anywhere, then someone anywhere can do your job.”
.......... From Tulum, Mexico, to Athens, Greece, to Phuket, Thailand, entire colonies have sprung up catering to mobile youth in search of sunny, low-tax hubs. Digital nomads are geographically mercenary, using websites like Expatistan and nomad-themed message boards to calculate where to find the best balance between cost of living and quality of life. And those websites are steering them towards Berlin, Prague, Tbilisi, and Bali—not New York and Los Angeles. ............. Americans are making Europe great again. ........ Today’s young professionals don’t identify themselves by their nationality—they identify as talent. Millennial and Gen-Z are content with portfolio careers and working abnormal hours, even for less pay, in exchange for less work and more time for travel and passion projects. .......... an MBA is a passport. The world’s eight hundred business schools spread across fifty countries are perhaps the leading agents in stirring the pot in the global war for talent. They recruit worldwide for students and compete fiercely to feed their graduates into multinationals, which then circulate them around the world. ............ The end-state for global companies might resemble the“Twenty hubs but no HQ”
model business guru CK Prahalad prophesied nearly two decades ago. ....... Smart governments are rolling out the red carpet for this new global nomadic class. Before Covid, almost no nation had special “nomad visas” save for Estonia. Now almost 70 countries do. Dubai’s Golden Visa program has attracted hundreds of young entrepreneurs who are given grants and other perks to innovate the country’s AI and drone programs. Sweden and Singapore have “tech pass” programs that actively give grants to start-ups. More broadly, many governments have adopted more clearly tiered migration systems, ladders that residents climb on the pathway from migrant and stakeholder to resident and citizen. .......... America is history’s greatest winner in the war for talent, but the competition is heating up. A decade ago, the U.S. still took in as many migrants as the rest of the rich world combined. But as of 2019, according to a recent CATO Institute study, that gap had narrowed to zero—and that was before COVID-19 travel restrictions. Continued suspicions over Chinese espionage have turned off many Chinese students and scholars. Universities are losing billions of dollars in tuition, property owners are losing tenants, and the cottage industry of language tutors and professional coaches have far fewer clients to assimilate into American life. As Stanford professor and Nobel laureate Steven Chu put it,“We’re shooting ourselves not in the foot but in something close to the head.”
Until foreign students are guaranteed a green card with their degree, talented foreign youth may take their brains elsewhere. ..........Canada appears to be the new home of the American Dream.
Canada’s points-based immigration policy is luring young people from around the world with the promise of a pathway to citizenship. ............ The U.K. capitalized on Trump’s odious image, admitting a record number of foreign students in 2020. Aging Europe has few children and needs to fill its classrooms with foreigners. Across Europe’s IT sector one finds Indian software engineers and data scientists with degrees from Manchester or Amsterdam, and they’re snapping up EU blue cards instead of American green cards. .......... immigration reform remains an epic mess, held up by Congressional inaction on the Build Back Better Act whose provisions include a massive overhaul of green card processing that would immediately affect nearly one million current foreign workers. .......... Hundreds of millions of young people are becoming geography-free. But where they physically go matters. America’s national debt has exploded (100 percent of GDP and climbing), and young workers and taxpayers are needed to power a real recovery beyond today’s artificial stimulus. An aging country with a declining population and crumbling infrastructure isn’t fit to prevail over China, much less outlast its 1.4 billion people in the long run. ..........America will need an army of migrants to truly build back better.
Demographic renewal requires vigorously competing to attract the next generation. Collecting people is collecting power. .......... The war on terror lasted twenty years. The war for talent should be America’s main mission for the next twenty.The Man Putin Fears What Putin truly fears is what Navalny’s movement seeks—a change of power in Russia, followed by cashiering its corrupt clan of oligarchs and spies. It isn’t NATO that keeps Putin up at night; it’s the space for democratic dissent that NATO opens up along his border. This fear, Navalny argues, is what drives all the conflicts Russia wages with the West. “To consolidate the country and the elites,” he writes, “Putin constantly needs all these extreme measures, all these wars—real ones, virtual ones, hybrid ones or just confrontations at the edge of war, as we’re seeing now.” .......... Rather than convening talks or offering concessions,
Navalny wants the U.S. to pressure the Kremlin from without while Navalny and his supporters pressure it from within.
The combination, he believes, will split the elites around Putin, ushering in what Navalny’s followers like to call “the beautiful Russia of the future,” one that is free, democratic, at peace with its neighbors and the West.......... he stood out as the only dissident organized and popular enough to pose even a distant threat to Putin’s rule. ......... His headquarters back then were a cheaply furnished office in Moscow with low ceilings and a heavy metal door. Hunched over laptops in its dim rooms sat the staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Navalny’s activist group. He founded it in 2011 to exploit the main weakness he saw in Putin’s system: the insatiable greed of its courtiers. .............. On social media, the foundation became famous for exposing the garish wealth of these elites. Its reports were often based on forensic accounting and bank records. Some used drone footage of Italian villas owned by Putin’s underlings. Others plucked evidence from photos that these officials or their relatives posted online, flaunting a yacht or luxury watches. One technocrat had a habit of flying his pet corgis to dog shows on a private jet. In his videos, Navalny delivered these findings in an irreverent style, like a wisecracking detective for the YouTube generation. ............ On balance, his agenda struck me as center-right: he supported gun rights, strong borders, less government spending—nothing more radical than a typical Republican in Texas, or a Christian Democrat in Bavaria. But Navalny’s politics were not driven by ideology. Above all, he wanted democratic change. .......... As one Kremlin-aligned newspaper noted, putting Navalny behind bars “could turn him into Russia’s version of Nelson Mandela.” Yet setting him free brought risks too. When Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, the official tally gave him nearly 30% of the vote. ............A few months later, the revolution in Ukraine reminded Putin just how quickly a regime can fall.
........... At home, he continued building defenses against a similar revolt. Roughly 400,000 troops were hired into a new police force, a praetorian guard trained to put down popular unrest. Its commander, a longtime Putin bodyguard, later issued a personal warning to Navalny, announcing in a video message that he would pound the dissident “into a juicy slab of meat.” .......... In 2016, he announced plans to run for President. Authorities kept him off the ballot. But his campaign still set up offices nationwide. Its activists then ran in local elections, exposed corruption among the regional elites and spread the promise of a democratic Russia. Navalny spent much of his time visiting his regional offices around the country, often drawing massive crowds. ............ he had been poisoned with Novichok, a chemical weapon first synthesized by Soviet scientists and banned under international law........... Experts suspected the poison had been smeared on Navalny’s clothes, passing through his skin into the bloodstream. When Putin was asked about the crime at a press conference, he made a joke of it. “Who needs him?” the President said of Navalny with a laugh. If Russia had wanted to poison him, Putin added, “we would probably have finished the job.” .............. the assailants, mostly Russian security officers. Navalny himself called one of them, pretending to be a senior Kremlin official, and demanded to know why the attack had failed to kill its target. The would-be assassin, apparently believing he was on the phone with his superior, discussed the crime in detail, explaining that agents had sneaked into Navalny’s hotel room in Siberia and smeared the toxin on his underwear. ............. Within two days of his arrest, they released a second investigation their team had prepared while in Germany. It took aim directly at Putin, linking him to a secret palace on the Black Sea coast. Navalny’s team had used a drone to film the property, which features an underground ice rink, two helipads, an arboretum, an amphitheater and a casino. The film racked up 100 million views on YouTube in a matter of days. .......... the film inspired tens of thousands of Russians to protest in the streets, chanting, “Putin is a thief!” as they marched through Moscow. Anti-corruption rallies broke out in more than 100 cities and towns across Russia that weekend. ............ The Kremlin’s response was fierce. .......... “We’re talking about Putin’s public enemy No. 1.” ......... Last June, a court in Moscow designated Navalny’s foundation an extremist group. Under Russian law, the ruling made it a crime to work with or support the organization, a legal status similar to that of ISIS or al-Qaeda. .......... “We’re all tired of rolling our eyes, watching the U.S. impose sanctions on some colonels and generals, who don’t even have any money abroad.” It would be far more effective, he says, to go after Putin’s own fortune and the bagmen who keep it for him in Western banks. “It’s really simple,” Navalny writes. “You want to influence Putin, then influence his personal wealth. It’s right under your backside.” .......... Navalny’s foundation sent a similar message to the White House early last year, asking for sanctions against 35 of Russia’s most senior officials and oligarchs close to Putin. The proposal has bipartisan support in Congress, where the blacklist was dubbed the Navalny 35. Its most vocal advocate has been U.S. Representative Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat and former diplomat in the Obama Administration. Navalny’s “central insight,” Malinowski told me, “is thatcorruption is both the Putin regime’s reason for being and its greatest political vulnerability.”
........... A few days later, he held the movement’s first official fundraiser in New York City, inviting wealthy Russian expats to back their cause. Hundreds showed up, snapping selfies with Navalny’s surrogates like they were celebrities. ....... The resulting windfall from such donors has helped pay for their new bases of operation in Eastern Europe. When I visited in January, their office in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, looked more like a media startup than a revolutionary lair, though freshly exiled activists are welcome to use its shower and rest on the beanbags that lean against the walls. Technicians were busy setting up a new TV studio, where Navalny’s allies film video investigations that are broadcast into Russia, routinely finding an audience of millions. ............. “Our history obliges us to welcome such people,” Vytautas Landsbergis, the founding father of modern Lithuania, told me recently in his Vilnius apartment. “The question for us is whether they can liberate Russia from Putin the way we liberated ourselves from the KGB.” ..........Lithuania is honored to offer a “safe space” for Navalny’s organization to envision a Russia beyond Putin.
...... Russia’s most famous dissident, once poisoned and now imprisoned, daring the state to do its worst. .......... The paradox helps explain why Navalny decided to return. In exile he would be just another gadfly, too easy for Putin to ignore. In prison he is a reminder of what Russia has become, and a symbol of the freedoms that it lost. ......... “It’s clear that this was a personal, emotional decision on Putin’s part. First I didn’t die from the poison. Then I didn’t turn into a vegetable as the doctors had feared. Then I had the gall not only to return but, once in Russia, to release an investigation about Putin’s own corruption.”
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