Across the Seas

A weird habit that I have is that I like listening to countries’ national anthems. I’m generally quite curious about other countries, and anthems often give a fun first look into countries’ histories and the values they care about. Recently, I was listening to Australia’s anthem and a particular set of lines caught my attention:

For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share

These lines are there because Australia, like its Anglophone sisters Canada and the US, was founded as a distant British colony on the other side of the world. In exchange for uprooting themselves and moving across the seas to these distant lands, immigrants would have the promise of a new life in a new land. These lines resonated with me because they speak the story of generations of immigrants, including me and generations of my own family.

For most people, the search for opportunity isn’t worth the risk of starting from scratch in a foreign land. Less than 4% of the world population today is made up of migrants, but because I’ve been part of this small slice of humanity since my childhood, I simply took it for granted that everyone immigrated.

Funnily enough, it was after coming to America – the nation of immigrants – that I realised that moving across the seas isn’t something that everyone just did. We left India when I was six, and from then until college I lived in Singapore and Dubai, two cities with a very high proportion of foreign-born migrants – 43.1% and 88.1% respectively. Because of this, everyone I knew came from somewhere else. In contrast, when I came to the US I observed that many of the new friends I made in college had never left the country and a few hadn’t ever left California. It seemed to me (and still seems) that the US is a world unto itself – a colossal continental-sized wealthy country, blissfully insulated from the rest of the world by two vast oceans. If I were born here, I would also barely think about moving anywhere else.

Moving to the US also made me feel the actual burden of packing up and moving to a different country. Previously, I had moved with my family but this time I had catapulted myself alone to the other side of the world. When I was a child, I just had to focus on doing well at school and making new friends whenever we moved – it was the immigrant lite experience. Now I have the full experience – juggling school with all those pesky adult obligations like work, health, and not getting deported by scrupulously observing all of Uncle Sam’s rules. Add to that other challenges like creating a network of friends from scratch, and you get a sense of what it’s like to start over in a new country. I was very fortunate to not face financial or language difficulties but for those who aren’t as lucky, these challenges become orders of magnitude tougher.

So I was wrong. Moving across the seas isn’t something that just happens. In fact, I now realise that it’s actually very hard to build a life in another country. Now that I’ve had a few years of the full immigrant experience to reflect on, I do wonder why someone would take the considerable risk of uprooting their lives and hurling themselves to a different corner of the world. I think there are two fundamental reasons that motivate us four percenters.

The first reason is the search for economic opportunity, fueled by a particular ambition or deep belief. This is what both my dad and I did. My dad was born into a poor family in Calcutta, in the east of India. He majored in accounting and although he was not a particularly good student, he had a tenacity and a drive to make something of himself. This is what made him move alone from Calcutta to Delhi, where he worked his way up to working for one of the biggest banks in India. Not resting on his laurels, he accepted postings first in Singapore and later in Dubai, uprooting himself each time in the search for opportunity. Since then, dad has had an eclectic career which has ranged from growing corn in Indonesia to building renewable power plants all across Asia and North Africa. Throughout all this, his guiding principle has been that his child should have a better life than he did, which is a principle that I’ve inherited from him also. My dad moved across the ocean in search of a better future for his son, and I moved across the world with the same hope for my kids. In my experience, it usually takes some deep seated belief like this to make economic opportunity worth the substantial risk of uprooting yourself. Without a deep belief animating you, there’s little incentive to pay the huge price of going across the seas to hunt for opportunity.

The second reason is to flee persecution. There is no belief or conviction required for motivation because it’s simply a matter of survival. This is what happened to my grandfather, who used to live in Myanmar when it was part of British India. Over the years the British had brought many Indians into Myanmar and they became an integral part of the economy. After living through the Japanese occupation of Myanmar during WWII, my grandfather’s family chose to stay rather than leave for newly independent India because their entire life was still rooted there. In 1962, a socialist dictatorship took over and implemented the “Burmese Way to Socialism” – a ruinous set of policies that turned one of Asia’s most prosperous countries into one of its poorest. As part of this, the dictator of Burma General Ne Win ordered the expulsion of Burmese Indians. My grandfather and his family were among the 300,000 forcibly removed to India. He found his way to Calcutta, where he became a modest truck driver to make ends meet and give his children a chance at doing something with their lives.

There may be other reasons, but I think these make up the main motivation for us four percenters willing to move in search for a better future. Sometimes we are fortunate and it is a voluntary search for opportunity driven by ambition, as it was for me and my dad. Other times, it is a matter of survival driven by necessity, as it was for my grandfather. In all cases, it’s very hard to make a new life in a new country. It takes a certain fortitude to move across the seas for a better future. Anyone willing to take a chance and bet on themselves like this has nothing but my full respect.