A comparison is often drawn between migrants who look for a better life in the United States, and Americans flooding into countries such as Mexico to live as digital nomads, searching for greater economic freedom or an enriched life experience.
This is a false equivalence because digital nomads are essentially making a lifestyle choice, whereas most migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are displaced from their homelands through extreme poverty, violence, corruption, famine and other natural causes.
Where a comparison can be found is in the response to migration, especially when it’s perceived as unchecked and unregulated. We have become accustomed to many Americans, often fueled by ambitious politicians, raging at the way they feel their culture is being appropriated by migrants, often using arguments such as the “loss of our identity” to mask their underlying xenophobia toward people with a darker skin color and a different first language.
In many countries, including Mexico, the influx of “western” foreign nomads who take advantage of the lower cost of living and thus gentrify neighborhoods by their presence, also increasingly elicits an angry response.
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