The narrative is so familiar that it borders on cliché: Go to school to study something practical and, importantly, profitable. Then, land a secure job, court a suitable partner and rear children, who can reap the benefits of your hard work for future generations. The expectations placed upon first-generation immigrant kids can feel so universally experienced that for Marlon Rodrigues, it took a global economic shutdown to break free from the pressures of meeting them.

When work shifted online in 2020, Rodrigues, then a growth-focused marketer in tech, found himself carving out his new path by packing his bags for Costa Rica.

“I thought it was going to be a two-month thing. I took 30 pounds of stuff in my backpack, a yoga mat and flip-flops,” he says, laughing, over a WhatsApp call.

Four years later, he is still surprised by the string of decisions that have fundamentally rewired the trajectory of his life. After arriving in Costa Rica, he left for Bali, where he spent two years. Eventually, he wound up in his birth village of Anjuna, Goa. He thought he would visit for the Christmas holidays, but nearly a year later, he still hadn’t left.

Rodrigues’ decision to relocate is part of a generational continuum of migration stories within his family. After his father was born in Kenya, his grandparents returned to Anjuna. Decades later, when he was an infant, his own parents’ motivation for moving to Abu Dhabi was driven by economic ambition. “Goans move in the direction of greatest opportunity,” he says. “It was the best thing you could do at the time.” When Rodrigues was a child, his family received visas to Canada, where he would spend the next 30 years of his life.

While his family followed a familiar journey walked by countless 20th-century migrants who chose to leave global-majority countries in hopes of finding better opportunities in the West, Rodrigues’ own continent-spanning passage suggests something different. It is part of an updated paradigm that reflects a new age of globalized movement. The incentives for this generation to settle in new destinations, or avoid settling down altogether, derive from a multitude of considerations.

Like Rodrigues, many approach it as a form of self-re-invention that enables them to make sense of a homeland. Others are guided by a basic objective of evading cold Global North winters. They flock to cities like Buenos Aires, Medellín and Mexico City, extending the annual migratory routes and patterns of traditional snowbirds. Elsewhere, some gravitate to communities such as the Pan African Village in Asebu, Ghana, as a form of a cultural return. They yearn for a physical meeting place for the diaspora, which also promises an authentic celebration of ancestral heritage.

Still, economic factors remain the dominant motivator. Today, a new generation of entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers find themselves with the ability to relocate at will. For these digital nomads, the dynamics of migration and movement appear ever more fluid and borderless, fuelled by shifts in work culture and digital opportunities that transcend traditional geographic constraints. Unbound from the need to secure employment within local economies, many online workers are able to circumvent the cumbersome bureaucratic visa processes, navigating instead within the flexible frameworks of conventional tourism.

Despite a global trend of tightening border policies— the product of increasing numbers of climate refugees and exacerbated by a rise in far-right nationalism—these new migrants are able to work around increasingly anti-immigration policies. In fact, tech workers seem to occupy a special class status of highly skilled labourers that many countries see as a beneficial exception to stringent immigration processes. In their 2024 study published in the Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, Lingxu Zhou, Dimitrios Buhalis, Daisy X.F. Fan, Adele Ladkin and Xiao Lian identify a plethora of strategies cities might employ to attract digital nomads. Investing in a robust technological infrastructure and amplifying the distinct qualities of a particular place rank high on their list of key recommendations. “The optimisation of national policies and economic recovery globally, empower digital nomads to exercise greater freedom when selecting destinations,” they report.

“While the lifestyle is often glamorized, sometimes the challenges and realities of this lifestyle can be overlooked, such as managing work–leisure boundaries, the need for continuous self-branding and the potential for isolation. There is also a tension in the mainstream portrayal of the lifestyle of ‘digital nomads,’” says Zhou, an associate professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China. “The media is beginning to explore these realities behind balancing the romanticization of the ‘digital nomadic lifestyle’ as a utopian escape from traditional work structures, and critiquing it as a manifestation of neo-liberal values [where individuals can] struggle to maintain a sense of community while on the move.”

The Netherlands, for example, has been marketing itself to the tech sector for decades. With low corporate tax rates, stable governance and a high quality of life, the nation sells Amsterdam as a European Union tech hub, with the Leiden International Centre describing it as “the digital gateway to Europe,” thus positioning it as a proverbial Web 3.0 Ellis Island. Estonia has taken this appeal a step further by creating an entirely digital society, referred to it as e-Estonia. As of 2014, non-residents of the country could begin registering themselves to join Estonia’s e-society, which offers none of the benefits of traditional citizenship, such as the ability to freely enter and reside within the country. Instead, registering allows applicants the ability to use the nation as a virtual mailing address for their businesses. For only €100 to €120 a year ($150 to $180 Canadian), e-residents can register a digital business under the jurisdiction of e-Estonia, thus circumventing their need to have a traditional geographic base and granting instantaneous access to the EU market.

Increasingly, countries in the Global South are seeing the benefits of this approach. According to Statista, India’s IT sector is on target to top 10 per cent of the total market share of India’s overall GDP by 2025, up from 5.8 per cent in 2009. That will account for a projected US$434 billion. With recent U.S. tech layoffs disproportionately affecting South Asians on H-1B visas (30 to 40 per cent of the nearly 200,000 laid off hail from India), that could mean a booming domestic tech sector for them to return home to. And it’s not just one sector. According to the International Monetary Fund, in 1980, India took up a meagre 1.65 per cent of the world’s GDP, and was ranked 15th globally. By 2024, that figure shot up to 3.6 per cent. The country’s economy is now ranked fifth in the world, and is steadily on the rise. By 2030, the most populous country in the world is projected to also become the third-largest economy on the planet.

Rodrigues is interested in seeing that change. He believes that technology is one of the key ingredients to levelling out the playing field for domestic Indian populations that have largely been excluded from the region’s economic opportunities. As India’s global stock rises, he speculates that the trend of its most highly skilled workers emigrating overseas will reverse.

“I can’t help but see a start-up here,” he says. “I can see that there are stakeholders that need to be matched by technology, and in many cases, the tools are free. They actually could have more than they ever dreamed they could have.”

However, this type of economic growth is not without its pitfalls. Just as Rodrigues sees opportunity in the North Goan region of Anjuna, so do Western corporations; KFC recently opened a location in the village. However, this type of investment does not necessarily benefit locals, as Rodrigues saw during his time in Bali, where the most prominent businesses were not owned by Balinese people.

Instead, business owners in the Indonesian province tend to be “capital owners, brand builders, business builders from abroad that have come to root there,” he says. Often, even when they attempt to operate ethically, they seek a set of skills that have not been cultivated in the local communities they’ve newly entered, which means the people benefiting from this growth are the landowners who either sell or co-develop their properties.

“The way I was taught to build technology is venture capital centred,” he says. “The model is super extractive. It creates weird misalignments and disincentives. When you think about who has brought Anjuna into prominence, it’s not Goans. It’s always been visitors who have come to Goa. If you go on Instagram right now and type in ‘Anjuna Beach,’ [it comes up as] a restaurant in France, right?”

There is also another angle to these modern migrants’ economic motivations: where these young professionals are going is as much a story of the places they’re leaving. When Rodrigues’ family first relocated to Canada in the ’90s, they were part of a wave of migrants who arrived during a narrow window, and were able to cash in on a depressed housing market. Following the burst of the housing bubble in 1989, a recession caught wind that saw average sale prices for properties drop by an average of 30 per cent in Toronto. For the Rodrigues family, and many families like theirs, this was a generational opportunity. Despite declining interest rates offered by the Bank of Canada, looming economic uncertainty nationwide kept the market down until the new millenniums. According to historic data from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, the average Toronto property sale in 1989 was valued at $273,698. By 1996, that figure dipped down to $197,760. It was not until 2003 that home values surpassed 1989 levels, reaching $293,067. Flash forward to 2022 and that average has skyrocketed to $1.19 million.

“Land was cheap, and it has only appreciated,” Rodrigues says. “In most cases, the most valuable thing that each household owns is their house.” Newcomers who were able to access property ownership during that period experienced economic stability that has provided a stepping stone for their children. Homeowners could take out business loans, purchase cars or even fund their children’s education by borrowing against their homes.

The fact that the majority of available housing in Toronto is either single-family houses or newly built upscale condominiums is in large part a remnant of a 1912 ban on mid-size multi-tenant housing in residential areas that sought to curb the creation of mixed-income communities and the new immigrants they’d attract. This phenomena, often referred to as “missing middle housing,” has had a lasting impact on Toronto and many other North American cities, creating a housing crunch a century later. Looking back to the ’90s, it’s clear that period was a chilling last call for housing affordability. As Rodrigues describes, “that window of time, that was like winning the lottery.”

The reasons for moving countries, temporarily or permanently, can also be emotional. Eric Zaworski’s family home in Toronto was acquired during a similar window of housing opportunity, albeit two decades earlier. According to the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights, the ’70s were “the height of affordable housing in Canada,” as federal and provincial governments began implementing short-lived affordable housing policies and protections. At the outset of the decade, the Canadian government introduced a slew of policies, such as offering subsidized housing, financial assistance to renters and cash grants to homebuyers.

Zaworski, founder of start-up marketing agency EZ Media, understands his family home is a generational heirloom. “I keep telling them, ‘Don’t ever sell the house.’ It’s the same house that my dziadek [Polish for “grandfather”] had; my mom and dad still live there,” he says via video call from Krakow. Growing up around Toronto’s Roncesvalles neighbourhood, a historically Polish enclave, Zaworski has always felt close to both Europe and his native Poland. Despite this, his family rarely travelled and he didn’t actually visit Europe until he was 26. “I guess it’s part of [the] new Canadian mentality of ‘this is our home,’” he says. Like many Polish families, Zaworski’s fled Poland in the wake of World War II and began planting roots in Toronto.

When he finally made his way there, it was first as a concert photographer shooting music festivals in Croatia and Finland. He was floored. “It’s a really, really special place. It really made me understand a lot more about why my parents were the way they were, and why my grandparents were the way they were,” he says.

He now splits his time between Canada, Poland and Hong Kong, an arrangement that has changed his perspective on his family’s homeland. Returning to Poland has challenged outdated notions of the country that he learned in the diaspora. “People might have this image of Poland being a dingy, backwards, Eastern European, Post–Soviet Bloc country,” he says. “And that history can be true, while the country is also basically Europe’s greatest success story for economic growth.” Presently, Poland is the fastest-growing economy in Europe, and is projected to surpass the GDP of Japan by 2026. For Zaworski, who has a growing business, it’s not unreasonable to envision one of many home bases. In fact, he is thinking about buying the farm where his grandfather was born and raised, which is located in Wólka, Pelkinska, a hamlet about 30 minutes from the border between Poland and Ukraine.

“The idea of buying the farm is like holding on to family history,” he says, though he acknowledges that the option to return to, and legally possess, family land is only available to select members of diaspora communities. “It’s a privilege for me to have uncontested access to potentially buying family land if I wanted to tomorrow, especially in contrast with the atrocities that are going on today,” he goes on to say. “I just think it’s important to hold on to where you came from in some semblance.”

For Rodrigues, the future is an open book. But one thing is clear to him: he has something to offer his community. “In my case, I actually have some relevant experiences building businesses and brands. And so piece by piece, I’m trying to understand how to play the game here… We could do better. We can tell our own story. But the way forward is non-linear, and so far does not reflect my experiences in places like Canada and North America.”

While he finds this limitless potential exciting, his parents sometimes struggle to understand his decisions, especially since he had built a successful career in Canada. “They ask, ‘Where are you going?’ Because I think there’s a presumption that a place like Canada is near the peak. Where do you go from here?” he says.

But building a life and potentially a business in Goa, at home, makes sense to him. Ruminating on a question about what home means to him, he pauses before responding.

“Home is the place you don’t run away from,” he says.