Too Cheap to Meter, Too High to Measure
Programming Note: As a reminder, every Sunday, I write pieces that are predominantly based on personal experiences which may or may not be loosely connected with investing. If you are reading MBI Deep Dives everyday, I think it would be rather useful for my readers to understand my personal lens a bit better since that presumably affects (at least in some capacity) the way I analyze businesses as well.
I moved to the US in 2017 to pursue my MBA. Following a long and arduous process, I have recently become a permanent resident in the US. Since I boarded my flight from Dhaka to New York back in 2017, I have lived in Ithaca (NY), NYC, Madison (WI), Ottawa (ON, Canada), and finally Sacramento (CA). When you move from one city to another every couple of years, the very idea of “Home” starts to feel quite elusive. As a self-employed “vagabond,” the only place that has felt closest to home over the last decade is the internet.
The life of a first-generation immigrant is inherently fraught with a lingering sense of what you left behind. However, I suspect it may not be widely appreciated that the true cost of immigration (from immigrants’ perspective) has gone down materially over the last few decades, especially since the advent of the mobile internet.
Back in the 1990s (or even the 2000s), when someone from Bangladesh moved to anywhere in the Western hemisphere, the true cost for such immigrants was quite staggering in retrospect. A mere five-minute phone call home would cost almost an arm and a leg. In fact, the phone call used to be a bit of an occasion for the family and extended family to get together. Everyone would gather around the household that happened to have a telephone and listen intently for a precious few minutes to the voice of loved ones thousands of miles away.
If you immigrated back in those days from Bangladesh, it certainly made economic sense. But it is excruciatingly challenging to determine the true cost these immigrants had to endure to make that economic leap. There was hardly any witness to their life of toil abroad, and there was hardly anyone who could grasp the context of their lives pre- and post-immigration. More often than not, they were out of sight, out of mind.
Technology enriched the lives of these immigrants in a way that is almost impossible to appreciate for people who didn’t experience both of these worlds firsthand. No economic numbers can truly encapsulate how technology has positively influenced the lives of these members of society. Facebook, out of their self-interest, went above and beyond to ensure everyone in this world is connected. Even though my son is 15 months old, his paternal grandparents are yet to see him in real life, since they live ten thousand miles away. But they are watching him grow through Facebook Messenger almost every day, at a cost that is too cheap to meter but at a value that is too high to measure.
I sometimes meet Bangladeshis in Sacramento who came here in the 1970s or 1980s. They tell me there were only a handful of Bangladeshis back in those days. This was perhaps the case in almost every city in the US. As someone who has lived in multiple cities in North America over the last decade, I can tell you how my own experience today is markedly different from that of anyone who immigrated in those years.
When I was interviewing for full-time roles during my second year at Cornell, I often came across a recurring question from interviewers, especially when I interviewed for roles in cities not named San Francisco or NYC: why do you want to move here? For a first-generation immigrant, that was often slightly confusing because the answer seemed too obvious: “It’s all the same to me. Be it Alaska, Louisiana, or Wisconsin… they’re all the same to a person who just immigrated from ten thousand miles away.” It took me a while to appreciate why this was such a recurring question. But let me provide a bit more context.
Two things were simultaneously happening in the US starting in the 2000s. The utter dominance of US big tech was gradually unfolding, and these companies wanted to hire the best talent from anywhere in the world. These are also the same companies that were speed-running to diminish the “true” cost of immigration. As Apple launched the iPhone, Google released Android, and Facebook connected everyone, immigrants stopped becoming vanishing memories for their loved ones after crossing the borders. At the same time, much of the rest of the world hasn’t quite kept up in providing opportunities for their homegrown talent. My wife went to the best engineering school in Bangladesh, and her first post-college job paid her only ~$150/month. She doesn’t work in a tech company, but we both have plenty of friends who do. Many of these peers essentially came for higher studies in the US and got jobs at some of these big tech companies that paid $150 per working hour! When the visible economic returns skyrocketed for such skilled immigrants in the US, the invisible costs were also rapidly declining, thanks to these very tech companies.
Given such twin forces, skilled immigration from Bangladesh has only gained momentum over the last couple of decades. It is hard to find these data, but I suspect the majority of the graduates from my wife’s engineering college ended up moving abroad after graduating. This has also created a counterintuitive reality for many skilled immigrants. I can go to pretty much any random city in any part of the Western hemisphere and find a ready Bangladeshi community without much effort. Of course, being Bangladeshi doesn’t mean we will be good friends or that we will have everything in common. But first-generation immigrants (especially if you’re from the same college) have so much shared context of each other’s lives that connecting becomes significantly easier, even if our politics, religion, or opinions diverge. There is just so much that a fellow first-generation immigrant can grasp without ever needing to elaborate, which is why such relationships can move on a fast track minutes after you meet for the first time, often followed by connecting via a WhatsApp group or a DM on Messenger. There is so much overlap in what worries you, what you are looking forward to, and what life was like pre- and post-immigration that you can bond over them in no time.
It only occurred to me recently that moving from one city to another for someone born in the US is a vastly different and arguably more psychologically challenging ordeal than it is for an immigrant like me. My son was born in California. It is hard to imagine he would be as indifferent to moving to Wisconsin as I was, if his entire family and friends remained in California. There will be plenty of Bangladeshis in Wisconsin, but it probably won’t mean much to my son. As a kid born in the US, he would likely be utterly oblivious to much of the shared context that made bonding so much easier for first-generation immigrants. His social life in a “foreign” city might be much more void than what I would face moving to a random city in the US. For my son, it would be a very legitimate question to ask, “Why do you want to move to this XYZ city?”
Contrary to popular belief, I have often wondered whether skilled immigrants to the US have been one of the largest beneficiaries of technology’s global adoption. This is hardly talked about in the mainstream narrative; anytime we do show up in the mainstream, it’s usually because of some rule or regulation change that may make life difficult for immigrants. Those aren’t false or less impactful narratives in our lives, but they can often mislead even the very immigrants who have benefited from the windfall riches technology has bestowed on us.
However, I also wonder whether this windfall is closer to its end for many skilled immigrants. Ultimately, these companies and countries weren’t doing charity. Both sides had something compelling to offer: the country had disproportionate economic returns that made digesting the non-economic costs more than bearable for the immigrants, whereas the skilled immigrants had, well, skills that were in demand. But is technology evolving from a friend to a foe for legal immigrants of the future, if intelligence itself becomes too plentiful to command high demand? As the great decoupling of capital and labor accelerates in the age of AI, it may not be surprising if legal immigration faces increasingly more social, political, and philosophical questions. These countries may still remain open to skilled immigration, but there may be a rapid evolution of which skills will be in high demand, and the number of such skilled immigrants may pale in comparison with what these countries have taken in over the last 50 years.
Of course, it’s not just skilled immigrants; almost any white-collar professional wonders about the relevance of their skillset for the coming decades. The anti-AI sentiment is broadly reflective of the tension many people feel about their potential irrelevance in how they contribute to society. These are very broad and likely too unwieldy questions to have any concrete answers. But I cannot help but wonder at times that we may be too prone to believing we live in the most consequential times in history. Life is always evolving, perhaps always faster than we would like to think in hindsight, but slower than we like to imagine looking forward. I will leave you with the excerpt below from Dwarkesh Patel and Ada Palmer’s recent conversation, which deepened my belief that while I cannot be certain my own current skillset will remain relevant in a decade or two, Homo sapiens overall has always moved ahead in step with the pace of technology itself!
Excerpt from the Dwarkesh Podcast:
Dwarkesh Patel: Maybe other eras also have this and I just haven’t read the books about them, but from your book, I thought, “Oh, history just seems to be happening really fast, and seems to have sped up, especially religious and political history.” Obviously, the things happening in Italy, but even aside from that, you have Martin Luther and the Reformation, and then just twenty years later England splits off from the Catholic Church, which is unprecedented in two millennia.
Ada Palmer: Then it has a bunch of tumults that flop, flop, flop so that every decade feels different. Here you are in 1506 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 1490. And you’re like, “That’s pretty fast.” Here we are in 2026 often feeling nostalgic for how things were in the year 2000.
Dwarkesh Patel: Is it fair to trace that back to the printing press or its offshoots, or is it just embedded?
Ada Palmer: It’s more that history has always moved fast. But when we teach it in high school, we’re trying to move over large chunks of time quickly, and so we pretend that it moved slowly. We have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation. But you can zoom in anywhere, and you’re going to find every decade feels different, and people in the 1320s are nostalgic for people in the 1300s.
It’s always felt like history was moving very quickly, and things rose and things fell. It’s the lies we tell ourselves in history books written in the 19th century that are trying to group all of these things together and make modernity special that confuse us about this.
I’m working on a paper right now about the video game Civ. Civ is the number one teacher of history in the world. It has shipped 70 million copies, and 65 percent of people on Earth who have technology play video games. Civ is the number one teacher of history, bar none, since 1991.
What does Civ tell you? Civ tells you that in antiquity, a turn is fifty years, and then in the Middle Ages, a turn is twenty-five years. Once you get into the Industrial Revolution, a turn is ten years, and then five years, and in modernity, a turn is just one year because in one year, as much happens now as happened in fifty years in antiquity. That lie is also what our textbooks tell us.
But it doesn’t matter where we zoom in. Any time I go to a talk where any historian is zooming in on any decade in any time and place, it always feels like it’s moving as fast as our present is moving.
Dwarkesh Patel: I guess the difference is that technologically, we know that they weren’t moving as fast.
Ada Palmer: Technologically, they were moving fast. We just don’t care about those technologies anymore.
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