Host country allegiances and the call of the local

 College reunions inspire more enthusiasm than graduate-school ones. Humans spend substantially more time reconvening with those who share their birth religion than their birth city. Women may reach out to women for certain help, and men to men, but there is less solidarity among, say, first-born children.

These varying levels of allegiance can often be explained, but they can also be quite arbitrary. Why do you feel more connected to and do more favours for people who attended your university, most of whom you don’t know, than people who, say, share the allergy that afflicts you daily?

Anuja and Rishi Jaitly, founders of a new organisation called Michigan Corps, asked this question about the different levels of loyalty to countries, on one hand, and to sub-national regions, on the other. Why, they asked, do émigrés from far-off countries tend to maintain loyalty and ties to their countries of origin, while relatively few people do the same with their regions of origin within their countries?

The Jaitlys, both of Indian origin, grew up in the US — Rishi in New York, Anuja in Michigan. In the 2000s, they decided to reverse their parents’ life journeys and move to India. There, he ran Google’s regional public-policy arm, and she ran housing projects and others for Ashoka, a global organisation that funds social entrepreneurs.

They were among thousands of people of Indian origin who made that journey, including this writer. And in this, India is hardly exceptional.

The idea of returning to or supporting faraway homelands has taken off. Organisations like Indicorps (India), Ethiocorps (Ethiopia) and the Armenian Volunteer Corps send members of the diaspora ‘home’ to do service and strengthen their loyalties. Jewish organisations send diaspora Jews to Israel. Haitians abroad — like dozens of other nationalities — remit money to compatriots back home. The Chinese economic boom was bolstered by investments of money and skills by overseas Chinese.

But there is little of this loyalty within affluent countries. How many French college graduates move back to their grandparents’ villages to improve the education? How many New Yorkers send money to build infrastructure in the Alabama towns where they grew up? There are vigorous flows of money from cities to the countryside in developing countries, but in wealthier lands roots seem more easily forgotten.

The Jaitlys left their jobs to found Michigan Corps earlier this summer. Its mission is to tap into that same blend of solidarity and nostalgia probed by foreign homelands to get people of Michigan origin — resident and non-resident alike — to give back to the state, which has suffered heavily from the evaporation of manufacturing, the unraveling of Detroit and a severe brain drain.

The Jaitlys have signed up Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, as well as well-known former Michigan residents like Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, who wrote in an e-mail that he believed in investing in a state with “the same scrappy attitude that brought my parents here 40 years ago.”

The corps functions as a social network and a venture philanthropy fund. It asks members to participate in the state’s revival in various ways, including by making donations, which are invested in NGOs that the corps believes will lift the Michigan economy and lead to self-sustaining, business-driven growth.

Boot camps

The group has already made two investments: in Northern Initiatives, which lends money to rural entrepreneurs in the state, and in Bizdom U, which operates ‘boot camps’ to groom aspiring entrepreneurs to start successful businesses around Detroit.

Schmidt suggested that Michigan Corps might reflect a new trend of identity-based giving in the digital age. “It’s the internet in particular that has ushered in this new era,” he said, “by empowering people everywhere to do good and by enabling individuals to simultaneously engage with disparate aspects of their identity.”

Rishi Jaitly said his goal is to help the Michigan identity compete with the many other identities vying for a person’s attention.

“My alma mater (Princeton) markets itself to me aggressively and creatively, which leads to Princeton becoming foundational to my identity, which leads to me giving back, which leads to me self-organising to try to make Princeton a better place, and on and on and on,” he said. “Countless universities have figured out the right mix of emotion, athletics and incentives to ensure that they become the anchoring, consistent identity.”

He wants to instill in Michiganders “a sense that, no matter where you go after school, after college, Michigan remains home, and a place to care for.”

Just a few years ago, Davos Man was the role model for the kind of donors that the Jaitlys are concentrating on: a perpetually expatriate, cosmopolitan, Singapore-today-London-tomorrow type who moved his money wherever the opportunity migrated, who bet on risky ‘emerging markets’ that he scarcely understood because that is where the returns were. Such a character might find it provincial to give to Michigan just because he is from Michigan.

But the cultural moment is changing. The call of the local, of the familiar, is everywhere around us, from the countries of Europe, with crackdowns on burqas and a reluctance to pay others’ bills, to the US, where the Tea Party is brewing strong, to Japan, where the Net right is hostile to Koreans and Chinese, to ‘locavore’ restaurants around the world, which inform us in which nearby forest the mushrooms were foraged.

In a moment when local is the new black, a new class of giver may be born — the inpatriate.