Tuesday, January 4th, 2000. Shreveport, Louisiana.
I stepped off the plane into a country I'd never visited but somehow already knew. I'd grown up on Rocky and Back to the Future, Nirvana on my Discman, believing I understood America. The land of the free, home of the brave. I came for an education and twenty-six-years-later, I'm still learning.
This isn't a rags-to-riches story. I'm not a world-class talent imported to perform on the biggest stages. This is the story most of us live but rarely tell: the one where you leave home disappointed and frustrated, where you take out student loans and pay them back to the last cent, where you work hard and get lucky and meet generous people who open doors they didn't have to open.
This country gave me everything I was willing to work for. My own country continues to find ways to remind me of its continued failure.
But here's what they don't tell you about immigration: you never fully arrive. You build a life—work, friends, family, routines, a place that's yours. You're present. You're making it work. You might even joke with your American-born spouse that you're "more American" because you chose this. (You don't actually believe there's such a thing as "more American," but it still makes you chuckle to this day.)
Yet your mind is often elsewhere.
Look around your office, your neighborhood. That co-worker from Venezuela who seems perfectly engaged in the morning meeting? Part of them is 2,000 miles south. Your neighbor from Ukraine at the block party? They're here, laughing at someone's joke, but also not here at all.
For 26 years, I've lived in this in-between space. We came in awe and stayed because of the promise: not what was given, but what was possible. A structure with freedom inside it. You can rent a space, buy it, remodel it. You do you. We wanted to work hard, do the right thing, help our community, add our flavor and soul to things. We wore a thousand different hats, code-switching between worlds.
We existed in quantum states—here and there, simultaneously.
I thought this was just the immigrant condition. Something unique to those of us who'd physically crossed borders.
Then the internet happened. Then social media. Then AI.
And suddenly, the fragmented existence I'd been living became visible to everyone. The digital age revealed a truth about identity that immigrants already knew: it can exist in multiple places at once.
Your professional self on LinkedIn, your personal one on Instagram, your anonymous self elsewhere—all you, all real, all requiring code-switching between contexts. Maintaining connections across territories. Being present in physical space while your attention is on a digital clone roaming in sub-reality.
Now we're watching non-human identities emerge. AI entities that exist purely in distributed form, with no physical anchor, no "home country," no singular location. They don't experience immigration, but they embody something immigrants understand intimately: identity untethered.
And I wonder if my quarter of a century between worlds gave me a different lens for this moment. Living between worlds taught me that identity isn't diminished by being distributed—it's enriched by it. That you don't lose yourself by existing in multiple contexts; you become more of yourself. That the tension between here and there isn't something to resolve, but something to inhabit.
We're now building systems and living in ways that embody that same principle—identity that's distributed, contextual, simultaneous. Immigrants were just early adopters.
The question now is what happens when all identity—human and artificial, physical and digital—becomes something we construct and reconstruct across contexts?
You can be here and there.
You can be both.
You can be many.
And maybe that's not a crisis—maybe it's what we've been moving toward all along.
