There’s a peculiar fact about global inequality that doesn’t get discussed enough: the most powerful barrier to human mobility and economic opportunity isn’t skill, education, or even wealth. It’s the accident of where you were born.
First world countries have constructed something that medieval kingdoms could only dream of: a perfectly legal, internationally recognized system that concentrates opportunity within their borders while making it nearly impossible for outsiders to access it. This isn’t conspiracy or malice. It’s simply the natural result of favorable geography combined with the modern institution of citizenship, creating a competitive moat as effective as any in business.
Consider the core mechanism. A person born in Switzerland, through no merit of their own, inherits access to high wages, strong institutions, quality infrastructure, and robust social safety nets. They can travel to most countries without a visa. They can work in dozens of wealthy nations. Their passport is a golden ticket. Meanwhile, someone born in Bangladesh with identical talents faces years-long visa processes, denial rates approaching 100% for many destinations, and wages that might be 1/20th of what they’d earn doing identical work across a border they cannot cross.
This isn’t just inequality. It’s a self-reinforcing system of competitive advantage that makes most business moats look flimsy by comparison.The geographic component is both historical and ongoing. First world countries largely occupy temperate zones with navigable rivers, natural harbors, and agricultural advantages that enabled early development. This head start compounded over centuries. But modern geography matters differently. These nations have used their early advantages to build dense networks of infrastructure, institutions, and human capital that create increasing returns to scale. A talented engineer in Germany has access to capital, markets, collaborators, and infrastructure that multiplies her productivity. The same engineer in Nigeria faces friction at every turn, not because of lesser ability but because the surrounding ecosystem provides less leverage.
Then citizenship acts as the enforcement mechanism. It’s a brilliant system, really. By making legal residence and work authorization contingent on citizenship or special permission, wealthy countries ensure that the benefits of their geography and institutions largely stay with their existing populations. A company can outsource manufacturing to Vietnam, but a Vietnamese worker cannot simply move to capture more of the value chain. The factory might cross borders with ease. The human cannot.
The genius of this moat is its legitimacy. Unlike historical systems of privilege based on nobility or caste, citizenship feels fair because it applies to everyone within a jurisdiction equally. An American CEO and an American janitor have the same passport. This internal equality obscures the external exclusion. We focus on inequality within countries while treating the vastly larger inequality between countries as natural, even though it’s maintained by deliberate policy choices about who can cross borders.The competitive dynamics become clear when you consider what would happen without this moat. If borders opened tomorrow, billions of people would gain access to more productive economies. Their wages would rise dramatically. The immigrants would benefit enormously, but the global poor who stayed behind would also see wages rise as labor became scarcer in their home countries. Meanwhile, workers in wealthy nations would face new competition. Capital owners would benefit from access to more labor and larger markets.
This scenario terrifies wealthy countries, and understandably so. Their moat would erode. The concentration of opportunity that makes their citizenship valuable would dissipate. So the borders stay closed, the visa processes remain Byzantine, and the moat holds firm.
There’s also a feedback loop that strengthens this system. Wealthy countries can afford to invest more in their own human capital, infrastructure, and institutions, making them even more productive. This generates more wealth, which funds more investment. The moat doesn’t just persist; it deepens. A graduate from MIT has opportunities that a graduate from a university in Myanmar cannot match, not because of different education quality necessarily, but because of the credential’s geography and the citizenship it implies.The COVID-19 pandemic threw this into sharp relief. While wealthy nations secured vaccines and could afford to shut down economically, poorer countries faced impossible choices. When remote work became normalized, some predicted it would help level the playing field by allowing talent anywhere to access global opportunities. Instead, we saw wealthy countries tighten visa rules while enabling their own citizens to work from anywhere, capturing global opportunities while keeping the moat intact.
What makes this particularly powerful as a competitive advantage is its invisibility to beneficiaries. Someone born in Norway doesn’t experience their citizenship as an unfair advantage; it’s just the normal state of affairs. The moat is most visible to those on the wrong side of it, and they lack the power to change it. This asymmetry in perception helps maintain the system’s stability.None of this is to suggest that wealthy countries achieved their status through geography and border control alone. Innovation, institutions, rule of law, and countless other factors matter enormously. But those advantages, once established, are now protected and amplified by geography and citizenship in ways that make them nearly impossible for other countries to replicate through merit alone.
The uncomfortable truth is that the most significant determinant of your economic opportunities isn’t your talent, work ethic, or education. It’s whether you had the good fortune to be born on the right side of these geographic and legal barriers. First world countries have built a moat that medieval lords would envy: perfectly legal, internationally recognized, and nearly impossible to cross. And unlike most competitive advantages, this one isn’t under threat from disruption. It’s enforced by sovereign nations with militaries, border patrols, and international law on their side.The moat isn’t going anywhere.
