In April 2020, I watched something that had been theoretical become real in a matter of days. Borders that had been open for decades closed overnight. Flights disappeared from departure boards. Students, retirees, executives, families — people who had built their lives across multiple countries with the assumption of continuous movement — were suddenly repatriated to whichever passport they happened to be holding. In some cases, to countries they had not meaningfully lived in for years.

What struck me, watching this unfold from the vantage point of someone who had spent more than a decade advising internationally mobile individuals and families, was not the disruption itself. It was how unevenly it landed. Some of my clients navigated it with relative equanimity — they had positions in multiple jurisdictions, options that remained open when others closed, flexibility built into their structure before it was needed. Others found themselves entirely dependent on a single passport, a single system, a single government’s decisions — and they had no architecture to fall back on.

The pandemic did not create fragility in those cases. It revealed it.

A book worth reading slowly

Dr. Parag Khanna’s MOVE, published in 2021, is one of the more serious attempts to map where the world is heading in terms of human migration — not the migration of desperation, but the large-scale, voluntary movement of people toward livability, opportunity, and stability. His central argument is that connectivity and mobility are not in tension; they are complementary forces, and together they are reshaping which places matter, which systems hold, and which populations grow.

One line in particular has stayed with me: the observation that the most meaningful shift in social introduction is from “Where are you from?” to “Where are you going?” That move — from origin to trajectory — captures something real about how the most internationally minded individuals and families already think about their position in the world.

Khanna’s broader thesis is that geography, for most of human history treated as destiny, is increasingly treated as a variable. Climate change is making some regions uninhabitable. Aging demographics are making others hungry for talent and capital. Political volatility is altering the calculation of where a system can be trusted over a long horizon. The map is not static. It is being redrawn by forces that do not wait for permission.

I would add one thing to Khanna’s framework, from the particular vantage point of this practice: the question for the internationally minded individual is not only whether the map is shifting — it is whether their position on it is designed or inherited by default.

Moving by design versus moving by default

Most people hold the citizenship they were born with and the residency they happen to occupy. This is not a criticism — it is simply how most lives begin. The question is whether, at some point, a serious person examines those inherited positions and asks whether they are still the right architecture for the life being built.

What I observe in practice is that the families who navigate disruption with the most composure are rarely those with the most wealth in absolute terms. They are those who at some earlier point — often years before any particular disruption arose — made deliberate choices about where to hold legal positions, where to be banked, where their children would have access, and what they would do if conditions in their primary jurisdiction changed in ways they could not control.

They were not building an escape plan. They were building redundancy into a system — the same logic that governs any serious long-term architecture. The engineer who designs only for ideal conditions is not designing for reality.

Khanna writes about the emergence of what he calls the highly mobile — individuals who treat geography not as a constraint but as a tool, and who build lives that are genuinely distributed across jurisdictions. I recognise this description. It fits a significant portion of the clients who come to this practice, and it increasingly describes the generation entering professional life now — people for whom the assumption of building an entire life in one country feels less like a natural default and more like an unnecessary limitation.

What optionality actually means

There is a version of this conversation that reduces to a crude proposition: hold multiple passports so you can leave when things go wrong. I understand why this framing exists, but it is too narrow to be useful.

The more accurate description is this. A jurisdictional position — a residency, a citizenship, a banking relationship in a stable system — is a form of optionality. It expands what is possible. It gives you access to healthcare systems in countries other than your own. It allows your children to study and work in places they would otherwise need separate permissions to enter. It aligns your formal legal position with the geography where your enterprise actually operates.

The option does not have to be exercised to have value. Its value lies in remaining available.

What changes when you think about it this way is the timing. Most people consider these questions when something has already shifted — when a political situation has deteriorated, when a healthcare system has revealed its limits, when a business has already expanded into jurisdictions where they have no standing. By that point, the most favorable windows may have closed. Programs change. Investment thresholds rise. Due diligence environments tighten. The European Union has put significant pressure on member states running citizenship by investment programs. Several have been restructured or suspended.

The families who move by design are those who consider the architecture before the urgency arrives.

The question underneath the question

Khanna ends MOVE with an observation that I find genuinely useful: the real constraint on human mobility is not political or physical. It is psychological. People do not move — or do not plan to move — because movement feels like rupture. It feels like a statement about where they are leaving, rather than a statement about what they are building.

In practice, the clients who approach this work with the most clarity are those who have already made that mental shift. They do not experience a second residency as an act of abandonment. They experience it as an act of architecture — a deliberate choice about the structure of a life that will, in all likelihood, span more than one country, more than one generation, and more than one chapter.

The map is shifting. Whether your position on it is designed or inherited by default is, increasingly, a choice you are making one way or the other — whether you make it consciously or not.