China has been encouraging students to learn abroad in order to improve its education since the late 1970s. Chinese youths currently make up over a fifth of all international students in higher education in the OECD, with more than a quarter of them in America – making it likely that that there are more US-based Chinese PhD students than American. Meanwhile the number coming back has grown even faster; more than 350,000 Chinese returned from overseas study in 2013, up from just 20,000 ten years earlier.

The western population’s absorption of other cultures is not always reciprocal, however. During the 2013/14 academic year the US hosted 886,000 of the world’s 4.5m mobile higher education population – more than twice the UK, the next entry on the list – yet fewer than 10% of US college students travel abroad in their undergraduate years. If this imbalance remains, it could begin to create questions around the readiness of the US workforce to participate in a more globalized world.

From cleaners in Hong Kong to lawyers in London, migrants also send cash to their families, a huge impact in developing economies. The World Bank estimates that Nigerians abroad sent back some $21 billion in 2013, adding up to a quarter of their country’s earnings from oil exports. Many send money either through Facebook or via their mobile phone. Such has been the impact of technology on economic migration that global remittances are now worth more than twice as much as foreign aid, comprising 10% of the Philippines’ GDP and 42% of Tajikistan’s. Last year India received $70 billion —more than any other country.

For the majority of migrant workers the “hubs” of choice are New York, London and Singapore and it is there that the influence of that cultural blending is most obvious. Few would think it curious for an Indian woman to eat at a Japanese restaurant in London before enjoying an evening watching a Russian ballet but this internationalism, even for London, has been a transformation of the past three decades.

Not every migrant is privileged. Increasingly the less fortunate find themselves in unfamiliar places where there is little opportunity or hope for a better life. Obliged to leave all their possessions behind to start again, these displaced people may only have tradition and belief to give them a sense of self. Low-cost connectivity links the poor and the displaced to their past, enabling them to retain a sense of identity and belonging in the most taxing environments. What seems certain is that the next decade will see an increase in the number of people who feel, at least for some of the time, that they do not fully belong to a specific nation or country. As a result they are likely to fashion new forms of belonging, reflecting new types of social membership, a reaction to what they are experiencing or the transient results of increasingly fluid social networking, the automaticity of easy travel and instantaneous communication.

As the world becomes smaller through migration and mobility, both virtual and real, it may be that people and groups will express themselves more insistently through multiple identity lenses. Blended cultures may become the new norm. Key questions remain however. How will we protect and respect apparently contradictory and multiple identities? Will it be through multiple personas that we define others and ourselves or will it be from an integrated set of values? Given the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nature of nations, communities and individuals, the challenge to coexist peacefully is twofold: how to develop a set of values with due regard for diversity and individual rights to which all can agree, and how to find successful ways of promoting difference while also identifying and embedding a shared identity among community members.