Is an expat cooler than an immigrant?
Recently, I wrote an article for a local newspaper for which I interviewed people who identified as expats; they are Bay Area residents, originally from places like England, Australia and South Africa. While idling in my post-byline glory a few weeks ago, I said to my husband, “I’m going to start calling myself an expat… it sounds so cool. Immigrant sounds so gareeb in comparison.”
We laughed. But beneath the jest, there were questions. Why was I wondering whether I could “get away with” calling myself an expat? Why did it feel like I was over-reaching? Does immigrant sound unattractive because we’re so used to seeing the word prefixed with “illegal” in the news these days?
We got into a heated discussion about the difference between the two words but couldn’t pin down their exact definitions. Of course, we Googled it, but there seemed to be more to it than Merriam-Webster and Cambridge could handle. According to some dictionaries, the difference came down to the duration of one’s stay — if you’re an expat, which is short for expatriate, your stay in a foreign country is finite, unlike the intended permanence of an immigrant.
But there’s room for confusion on two fronts. Firstly, the people I mentioned earlier, who moved here from England and Australia, call themselves expats even after having spent 40 years in America. Secondly, Indians who are here on temporary work visas call themselves immigrants. One might argue that most of the latter kind are in queue for a green card, which is a gateway to permanent residency in the United States. By that logic, H1B visa holders who are not interested in staying here beyond the call of official duty should be called expats, but they’re not.
A touchy topic
So, to settle the matter, I wrote about it on social media, inviting people to opine. That unsettled things even more because now I was parsing opinions not just from India, where I’m from, and America, where I live, but from countries like Greece, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Colombia and Switzerland. Passionate arguments ensued between strangers. The question had clearly touched a nerve. If the elephant in the room is race, the hippopotamus in the room is wealth.
Many more animals inhabit this semantic jungle. One of the people who responded said it comes down to “passport power” — if you’re moving from a high-ranking country to a low-ranking one, then you might be an expat. And if it’s the other way around, you’re probably an immigrant. The ranking system has less to do with GDP and currency value than it has with basic barriers to entry. If you need to look up the visa application process before checking the popular site-seeing spots when planning for that long-awaited international vacation, then you’re probably in the immigrant category in general.
Must one suffer to be an ‘immigrant’?
Another school of thought that emerged from the discussion examines not the duration of one’s stay but the intent to assimilate. Expats inhabit insular, high-brow bubbles that float above the locals, but immigrants want to belong with the locals, goes the theory. In the gray areas of this argument are things like ease of assimilation, both political and social.
If someone holds on to their original citizenship even after moving to and living in a new country for decades, they could probably successfully dodge the immigrant tag and all its unfavorable connotations. Maybe the self-declared expats I referenced at the start of this essay fall into this category. But the luxury to self-identify, in this context, is skin-deep.
And socially speaking, if one doesn’t have to worry about things like learning a new language, shortening one’s name, modifying one’s accent, or adapting to the local cuisine, then perhaps the process of making a life in a new country does not qualify as assimilation? To rephrase, if it’s not traumatic, then is it assimilation at all?
To truly qualify as an immigrant, must one suffer?
In places like Japan and several countries in West Asia, official integration is more a matter of lineage and descent than anything else. But the “jus soli” (right of soil) versus “jus sanguinis” (right of blood) issue is a tributary that might take us too far from the linguistic river we’re navigating here.
As a language enthusiast pointed out in response to my social media post, both immigrant and expat are historically loaded words. A colonist was, after all, a type of expat.
As writer Suketu Mehta argues in his brilliant book “This Land Is My Land,” immigration, from the developing to the developed world, is a kind of reparation for colonialism.
What then are the best definitions for these two words that are semantically indebted to one other?
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