2024: The year the American Dream goes global.

There’s an all-too-common mindset that to maximize the opportunities life offers, you must uproot your life, often to concrete jungles or tech hubs. And in many ways, you can understand why this has been the case. Where you were born is the most significant determinant of how much you earn in life. According to the World Economic Forum, 97% of people live in the country they were born in, and where you live determines two-thirds of all income differences. Oxford economists agree, stating, “What matters most for your living conditions is not who you are, but where you are.”

Changing location is how the American Dream came about—more than 15 million people came to America between 1900 and 1915 for a more prosperous life. They left behind their friends and other family members to be closer to work and social opportunities in the States. You could even say that, up until recently, this ideology has remained true. Communities formed around work and office life; talent hubs popped up close to clusters of companies to create a whole wealth ecosystem based on location.

But looking toward 2024, what it takes to achieve that tell-tale dream has evolved, with technologies offering everyone, regardless of geographic borders, the opportunity to succeed. If the underlying foundation of the American Dream was about one’s location determining opportunity, the new, more global “American Dream” is about one’s qualifications determining success, absent geography.

My co-founder Shuo Wang and I had that vision when we started Deel four and a half years ago. We were two foreigners finishing grad school in the US, seeing very talented international friends go home to jobs that paid much less than the tech jobs our other friends had secured in Silicon Valley. Prime job opportunities, it seemed, were only within reach of those living close to a company’s headquarters or available to those with the means to move and the nerve to leave loved ones behind.

“What’s stopping companies from hiring more internationally?” we asked ourselves. The technical answer lay in the sheer number of barriers to hiring across borders: entity setup, compliance issues, tax complexity, payroll administration, immigration hurdles, and many more. The implication was that these barriers made hiring half of your company halfway around the world culturally unconventional.?

A few factors have normalized distributed work. First, Covid showed that people could still get work done from anywhere. Second, the prolific availability of workplace productivity tools like Slack, Zoom and other cloud services have made it easier for anyone with a laptop and an internet connection to work across time zones and borders. Clients can be miles away and still get amazing service; team members can still collaborate effectively.

Ben Horowitz often talks about how the internet, by design, goes against the concept of country borders - one of its most significant yet often unspoken truths is the ability to reach labor markets anywhere in the world. What’s happened to cross-border e-commerce is now just starting to tip for HR tech. New online platforms like Deel’s have removed hiring barriers, acting as an Employer of Record (EOR) so smaller businesses can employ top talent and navigate country-specific compliance hurdles without owning entities themselves. For larger companies wanting to expand their global footprint, innovative global payroll systems and HRIS functions help unify country-specific payroll vendors under one view. Even immigration support is scaling because of new digital services.?

This new world of work promises that people don't have to, for instance, move to Silicon Valley to be an engineer. They can stay right where they are. Brain drain - the emigration of talented people from a country - might become a thing of the past. The result is greater demand for specific job skills in local countries, helping to increase wages and positively impact economic growth. Last year, we saw from our data that average starting salaries rose in countries like Brazil, India, and the Philippines. Multiply this phenomenon worldwide, and you start to grasp the impact.?

As we head into the new year, I want companies of all sizes and industries to embrace the prospect of hiring someone halfway around the world. Hiring that person should be as easy as hiring the one in the cubicle next to them. Qualifications, not location, should—and will—determine job opportunities. Everyone should have the same shot at their dream job, no matter where they reside. It's no longer just the American Dream, but the world’s.