Immigrant is the English word that denotes someone moving permanently to a new country. Emigrant means someone going to another country permanently. That is to say, moving to Canada from the US one would be considered an immigrant in Canada and an emigrant in the US. An EXPATRIATE(expat for short) is someone working or living in a country not of their origin, and still consider themselves to be whatever nationality they are from. Typically used in the UK or anywhere else that speaks English. Not necessarily meant to be exclusionary of other nationalities.
That may be technically correct, but that is unfortunately not the common usage. Regardless of how long you intend to stay in a country, people from the non white countries are almost always called immigrants. I've almost never heard an H1B worker called an expat instead of an immigrant.
I don't know anything about H1Bs, but I've worked with a number of foreign (non-US) multi-nationals, and their executives that are sent on a tour to run their US subs are indeed called (by USians and by the home office) "expats" (or "expatriates").
It might be an executive thing?
(This would include companies like Sony, Nomura, Toshiba, Honda, BMW or even Saudi Aramco - all having US subs)
Most H1s are expats — however, in almost any H1 forum or being around H1s for any amount of time, inevitably they talk about getting their green card and citizenship. Countless stories, even on HN about how unfair the green card process is for H1s. You almost never have Germans in Shanghai discussing strategies for gaining Chinese citizenship. Many, many H1s are in the US because they specifically want to permanently settle here — that makes them (attempted) immigrants.
When I was in China, the Indians working tech there were referred to as expats just like the Germans and British — because they didn’t have any intent to permantly relocate to China.
Not everything is a racist conspiracy. Intent of the foreigner is the key factor in their expat vs. immigrant status. Generally people immigrate from poor to rich countries, because they would prefer to live permenantly in a nicer place. Immigration the other way around is quite rare. Not a lot of British are clamoring to immigrate to Bangladesh: a Brit working there would rarely be called an immigrant because they aren’t. They’re an expat. They have no intent to make Bangladesh their home. A Bangladeshi on an H1 visa almost always has a green card and eventually citizenship as their goal: thus they would be immigrants.
This might get me some flak, but IMHO it's an unconscious double standard for many people and it's also not exclusive to the English language.
Germans do something similar, a German who moves to another country, even if it's Thailand for retirement or because life in Germany supposedly doesn't work for them, is called an "Auswanderer" and usually has a rather positive connotation of being "worldly" and well traveled.
Guess how many people call immigrants "Einwanderer" with a positive connotation? Pretty much nobody.
Some might argue there's an economic dimension to this, like German pensioners bringing their money to the other country, but that also doesn't always apply: There are plenty of Germans who are migrating because they have economic troubles in Germany and think they could work it better elsewhere.
As unbelievable as that might sound to most people outside of Germany, there are so many of them that VOX Germany has a whole Docu-Soap about Germans migrating to other countries, and it's been running for nearly 12 years with great success [0].
Man, rolling nationality + expat/immigrant around is exposing some interesting biases.
For some nationalities, expat sounds more natural, for some immigrant.
The British and French get to be expats even if they live in the US, the Germans only if they live outside the US. Canadians don't get to be expats or immigrants, they're just Canadians.
I wonder how broad or narrow these biases are; are these something I picked up from widespread American culture, or just personal linguistic biases?
I don't think it matters what they are called. The connotations are attached to the people, not the word. Change the words and it becomes a euphemism treadmill.
> The connotations are attached to the people, not the word.
Language is a living thing.
If you reserve usage of certain terminology to specific people, then negative connotations can easily attach themselves to both of them in combination, thus fundamentally changing how positive/negative certain terminology is perceived by the general population.
We've been witnessing this live, in reality, for these past years: If you talk about "immigrant crime" often enough many people will see most, if not all, crime in the context of supposedly increasing immigration.
Completely ignoring any other contributing factors to crime, completely ignoring actual crime statistics and trends. [0]
In my experience, people have come to use expat to describe someone who is temporarily or provisionally living elsewhere (e.g. Gone to London to work for a few years). Immigrant is often used for people who have moved with a permanent intention.
An expat is someone "on assignment", who has and expects strong ties with their home country. People who fit this description tend to frequently seek help from their own consulates, for example. It's particularly relevant for Americans because we tax ourselves even when overseas.
An emigrant (as seen from the source country) or immigrant (as seen from the destination country) is someone who has (usually permanently) moved and now expects primary services and sovereignty from their new home country.
I highly doubt that the distinction is strictly an anglophone concept, although perhaps it's related that they sound similar and have similar roots.
That's the difference, and it is inevitably an international one (e.g. we happily adopted the English term "expat" here in Germany) because it only exists across borders. But the difference gets muddied a lot because one is associated with much higher status than the other and everybody will naturally try for the higher status label if there is the remote chance of getting away with it.
Higher status? "People who hang out with diplomats", try beating that. If you routinely dine at your embassy you'd sure be considered "expat" even if you are from Afghanistan. Of course only a tiny fraction of expats would actually do this, but it illustrates the idea. A more practical line of distinction: would they seems their children to regular local schools? If they insist on private "international schools", then it's "expat", otherwise only if a return date is known.
I've usually seen "expat" used when it's more relevant where the person came from than where they emmigrated to. "Immigrant" being used for the reverse.
E.g. If you were born in Madagascar and moved to Belgium: You're a Madagascan expat because we're talking about Madagascar, but you might be referred to as an immigrant to Belgium if we're talking about Belgium.
"Expat" has colonial overtones: if one was sent to the colonies they were an expat; if one moved from the colonies to the ruling country, they were an immigrant. That's become fuzzier with time, but labeling of "expats" almost always implies being from a rich country, and not integrating into the foreign society.
From an administrative perspective in the US an immigrant is someone who moves to the US with the intent of staying. Work and other temporary visas are called non-immigrant visas, and for example when I applied for my E-2 visa I had to clearly state that I had no intent to immigrate in the US (though I was applying to work in the US, I'm not an investor despite what the visa is called). As I fully intend to leave, I didn't have to lie about it.
Even in a more casual context, I know a lot of Japanese expats in US, and have never heard of any of them being called an immigrant: most come from one of the big Japanese banks (Mitsui Sumitomo, UFJ, etc.) and stay in NYC for two to five years, before heading back either to Japan. Cultural quirk: Japanese people are usually sent abroad right after purchasing a house in Japan, the management line of thought being that with the associated mortgage they won't quit even if they don't want to go abroad.
English speakers are often reluctant to refer to themselves as immigrants, due to pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric in most English speaking countries.
The funniest manifestation of this is letters to the Daily Mail where the writer moans on about all the immigrants in England before revealing that they’re an ‘expat’ living in Spain.
Edit: incidentally, it’s not universal in English speaking countries. Irish media, for instance, will rarely refer to an Irish person living abroad, temporarily or permanently, as an expat; they’re an emigrant. And immigrants from other English speaking countries would normally be referred to as immigrants, not expats.
It depends if you plan to stay (immigrant) or not (expat). Since most long term visas in the US terminate in a green card, we use immigrant more often than not to describe those who come to the US on an H1 or as PRs.
Also immigration primarily occurs from poorer developing countries to richer developed countries, so the label immigrant is used to describe long term foreigners since it is likely that they actually are. In contrast, in primarily emigrant countries (like say China), the immigrant label will almost never be true, so something else is used instead.
The definition of expatriate (noun) is any person who lives outside their native country. It's a synonym of migrant. An immigrant is "someone from a foreign land", so the only difference appears to be the "settling" part (an expat/migrant has settled somewhere else, an immigrant is simply _from_ another country.)
This is based on the 1.5 minutes I just spent looking these up and is only based on definition (not usage).
Migrant suggest some sort of ongoing movement. "Migrant labour" is people who move back and forth chasing work, often inside a single country. An expatriate is someone living in a semi-permanent state outside their home country.
I'd describe someone moving from one part of the US to another on a seasonal basis, someone chasing farm work, as a migrant. I'd call a canadian working for a period of year at a US firm an expatriate. The former is under a continual state of movement that the later is not.
Yet, the SE Asian workers in the Gulf aren't given that title. If you are an American, European, or Australian you are an expat. If you are Indian you are just a migrant worker.
Even in the Gulf countries, in many contexts, expat is used as a synonym for "white people", or at least people from rich countries. I used to live in Kuwait. In other countries it refers to any foreigners.
This is a hot topic among expat communities. As someone that was an expat for 12 of the past 20 years, I have some strong feelings about it. Expat implies (and literally means) someone outside of their home country. The key element here is “home.” An immigrant is someone who leaves their “home” for a new home country permanently.
For example, I was an American expat in France for the past 4 years (and in Mexico and Asia before that,) only just recently having returned to the US. I had no intent on permentantly settling in France. There are plenty of long term German, French and Dutch, Japanese expats in China (not anglophone obviously,) but they are almost entirely never intending (or able to,) become citizens of China. They are expats. They work a job for 2+ years, but they never intend to become Chinese. Nor are they floating around city to city each year picking up seasonal jobs as is the case for migrants.
An H1B worker from India in California is also an expat, up until the point where they are intending to become a citizen and stay permenantly — in which they become immigrants. An Indian H1 who is after a green card though, becomes an immigrant because of their intent to permantly change home countries.
“Migrant” worker versus expat is another nuance and it is because historically, migrant workers, by definition, migrate temporarily based on the availability of seasonal work. Migrant workers, by definition don’t stay in one place very long — they would typically work a farming season and then move to the next place where a harvest is coming.. like migratory birds going south for the winter. A migrant worker doesn’t stay in one place very long: they migrate depending on where the work is and ideally, return home between temporary jobs. America used to have a robust guest worker program in the 1950s-1960s and people from Mexico would cross the border to work the harvests, then go back home when the season was finished.
In short: an expat is someone living for some longer length of time in a country outside their own with the intent to eventually go back home. Expat is a “temporary” status characterized by long stints in one place away from home. An immigrant is someone that leaves their origin country permenantly. A migrant is someone that follows the harvest (i.e. seasonal jobs) and returns home regularly.
Some people have attached racial or class distinctions to those terms which is unfortunate because such distinctions aren’t accurate — they are the invention of (mostly white) people that seem to find offense in everything. This topic has lit expat Facebook groups and forums up with white expats attempting to put virtue Signal everyone else while ignoring the actual nuances involved. It’s much easier to engage in pseudo-intellectual outrage in order to assuage their own feeling of expat “privilege.” It was exhausting being around those sorts of people. Some white woman who is the wife of a British business executive on a full expat package in Shanghai trying to convince others that she is an immigrant is ridiculous when she’s talking about retiring one day to her country house in Yorkshire.
The TLDR is that one’s status of expat, migrant or immigrant is one of intent, not class or national origin.
