Maria Demétrio on the deep inequalities underpinning contemporary global mobility.
We live in a world where the idea of freedom is increasingly idealized by many groups, gaining both symbolic significance and practical consequences, such as freedom of movement. Considering the ongoing reshaping of global relationships between people and places, it is clear that mobility has emerged as a marker of liberation as well as a source of opportunity for individuals in modern society.
Yet a stark reality lies beneath the aspirations of many to achieve the aesthetics of a travel and remote work lifestyle: such freedom remains a privilege distributed unevenly along lines of nationality, class and legal recognition. While some people cross borders easily, others are completely immobilised by legal barriers and political exclusion.
Digital nomads, who are lauded for embodying a new, borderless world, thus stand in uneasy contrast to stateless people who exist in a legal void. This juxtaposition reveals the deep inequalities underpinning contemporary global mobility and the remote work economy.
Although considered by many to be a triumph of technology and individual freedom, the rise of digital nomads is actively incentivised and marketed, leading to remote work infrastructures, cheap travelling and favourable visa policies in the Global South (which can be leveraged while maintaining incomes in the currencies of the Global North) as well as the promotion of a lifestyle brand, celebrating so-called “productivity”, “cultural curiosity” and “self-actualisation”.
Being dependent on passports that guarantee visa-free access, professions that transcend territorial labor markets, and a socioeconomic status that enables a transnational lifestyle, is a curated and conditional form of “freedom”—one that challenges borders less directly, instead finding ways around them and creating a special kind of mobility for those who are already mobile. Underneath its seemingly-unblemished surface lies a system of oppression that replicates certain colonial patterns—such as the easy circulation of individuals from wealthier nations through regions that historically suffered under their “empires”—regions now rebranded as “affordable destinations”.
On the other end of the mobility spectrum are the stateless individuals. Lack of formal recognition from any nation renders them legally invisible. The United Nations estimates around 10 million such people, many of whom have lived their entire lives without even a birth certificate, a passport, or any kind of legal identity. This has meant exclusion from education, employment, healthcare, property ownership and, most significantly, freedom of movement.
Stateless individuals are not only denied the right to move freely, but also the right to move at all. For many, moving internally is risky, and leaving their country of birth might result in detention, deportation or bureaucratic suspension. In some border zones, stateless people wait years for decisions that will define their futures. Their lives are not shaped by freedom, but by perpetual uncertainty.
The huge disparity found between digital nomads and stateless people becomes even more unsettling in shared spaces. The city of Lisbon is a great example: digital nomads have access to many expanding ecosystems and coworking spaces as well as visa-friendly policies and relatively low costs of living, while migrants from former Portuguese colonies face restrictive immigration laws, house precarity and a prolonged legal limbo.
This division is not merely policy-based but ideological. When mobility is treated as a marketable commodity rather than a universal human right, those who can pay (whether through remote work, investments or even heritage tourism) are allowed to move, while those who cannot are subjected to suspicion, surveillance and structural immobility. The language surrounding migration is also a problem: while one group “relocates” or “settles”, the other brings “flows”, “influxes” or even “crises”. While one group is seen as autonomous, desirable and productive, the other is seen as threatening, passive and burdensome.
Geopolitical inequalities are exposed through various regimes, especially in light of the contemporary global migration crisis, which affects both economic dynamics and moral boundaries. This situation raises questions such as, “Who deserves to cross a border, and why?” The answers often depend less on humanitarian need than on perceived economic value. While refugees bear the need to prove persecution, recount trauma, and navigate opaque asylum procedures, digital nomads, by contrast, are seldom asked why they move and their motivations are assumed to be legitimate by default. The asymmetric patterns reflect a broader trend in which states increasingly condition legal mobility on utility rather than rights.
Western liberal discourse tends to conflate mobility with freedom in a way that is uncritical of both ideology and policy, rendering freedom neither a neutral nor a universal condition. This creates a hierarchy of passport privileges, along with racialized border control and economic filtration. The same countries that build walls to keep migrants away simultaneously open their doors to remote workers, retirees and investors that come from the “right countries” and bring the “right currencies”.
Ethically rethinking mobility is essential to demystify the idea that some lives are more valuable and movable than others. It is important to ask how we arrived at a system where movement is a consumer product for some and a humanitarian plea for others. And, more importantly, this discussion enables us to dismantle the illusion that borders are neutral, or that freedom is unbiased—when it is denied to many on the basis of paperwork, poverty or place of birth.
Until then, the question “Where do you think you’re going?” will remain a loaded one—less a query and more a judgement passed unevenly across a divided and moving world.
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