This is coming, if not already here in many places on the globe. It is very easy these days to be a temporary resident of a different country. We call this 'travel', but it is more than that. It is blending, it is immersion, it is other countries being hospitable and accommodating (while capturing tourist dollars). Travel can also have a sort of takeover or invasive quality to it, like when a plane lands in an isolated country or when a massive cruise ship docks.
With only a credit card, a passport, (and maybe) a cell phone you can travel to many places around the world and if you have enough money you can virtually live there, that is, stay for long amounts of time, which I did for awhile.
Doing this extensive traveling showed me that I'm not the only one doing it. There are many others out there and there are numerous websites devoted to living the 'expat' lifestyle. It wasn't always this way, though.
Think back to olden times. Hundreds of years ago, people couldn't go ANYWHERE. There were lousy roads, transportation was slow, danger lurked outside of one's town, and if you were from somewhere else chances were you were NOT welcome, as the town you came across and sought refuge or resettlement in had a limited supply of resources. It wasn't so much that you didn't fit in, which you didn't, it was more about threatening the townspeople's survivability. While still true even now, survivability issues have been greatly lessened. It is more the threat to one's CULTURE that is being presented when you cross the boundary line into some other tribe's turf now. You are a threat to the local thought system.
Francesca Tirino- Unsplash.com
Well, if anybody gets exposed to the internet- which is a lot of people in a lot of different countries right now- that tremendously lessens the impact of one culture meeting another but even so, what I saw in my travels is that a lot of people are still quite ignorant of each other's way of doing things because there's only so much you (or they) can learn from staring at a computer screen. Long term immersion in a country accomplishes further melding in two ways. It acts as an on-the-ground, 360 degree, total sensory learning experience for you while you act as a diluting agent on the prevailing thought system. Eventually, enough people end up doing this and we'll all be non-natives, vagabonds, and drifters.
But I suppose there will always be nationalistic pride, as you have to be from SOMEWHERE. People tend to associate themselves with the same qualites that their long ago homeland has just because they were born bearing those genetics. I don't know if any of that stuff REALLY transfers but I do know this- if the experiment called America is any indication, you'll still retain nationalistic identity ("I'm Irish!", for example) even though it was your great, great grandparents who were actually FROM Ireland.
Not enough people are traveling yet to make border crossings, as they are in Europe, virtually meaningless, but eventually the travel industry, ever-driven to open new markets, will have regular service to each and every country on earth, even to the countries that are presently politically troubled, I think. Seem farfetched? I always look to see what the wealthy are doing to predict future trends. The wealthy have houses scattered all over the world. The only flag that they are (presumably) allied with is the one on their passports.