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I recently listened to my first podcast ever (I’m a little behind the times). I listened to the first episode of Unstandardized English (Twitter: @UnstandardizedE). The episode is called ‘Expats’ and, if I link this correctly, can be found here: https://lnns.co/_JbkYar7BdL.
‘Expats’ revolved around the terms immigrant and expat, and how they are used. I have some anecdotes and thoughts about how I personally have used the language, so I’m sharing them here to add to the conversation.
I considered myself an expat when we lived in Germany, and decidedly not an immigrant. Why is that? Some considerations:
PERMANENCE
If you’d asked me why I was an expat versus an immigrant, my initial response might have been, Because I wasn’t staying. That is, I wasn’t immigrant because I didn’t plan to live in Germany permanently.
But as I gave it more thought, I realized that it’s not that simple. I have American-born friends who live overseas and have since become citizens of their new countries; I consider them to be expats. I met Americans and a Kiwi who were living permanently in Germany; I considered them expats, as well.
I have friends who are an American-German couple (he’s American, she’s German); and when we were living in Germany, we were friends with another American-German couple (she’s American, he’s German). In both cases, I considered the Americans to be expats. It would seem that neither permanence in country nor permanence through marriage came into play.
So I don’t think permanence is a great explanation for my underlying interpretation of the two words.
RACE
I considered race, seeing as most people I consider to be expats are white–but those friends I mentioned? The He’s-American-She’s-German couple? The American is a Black male, and I consider him 100% to be an expat. I can think back on at least three Black American males I considered to be expats, and zero that I considered to be immigrants. So it probably isn’t based on race–at least, not solely.
NATIONALITY
I reflected upon nationality. It would appear that when I lived in Germany, I considered all Americans to be expats. I also seemed to consider Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis to be expats, as well as a Frenchman. I remember considering Bosnians, an Afghani, a Polish woman, a Romanian woman, a Nepalese woman, and other Eastern European and Middle Eastern folks to be immigrants. So perhaps Americanness or Westernness came into play.
CLASSISM
But then, I thought: If I knew the Afghani woman to be wealthy, would I feel the same? I don’t think so. I believe I’d consider her to be an expat.
That’s when I considered classism.
Did I consider upper classes to be expats and lower classes to be immigrants? I don’t know–maybe I did. If I listed the folks in Germany that I considered to be expat/immigrant, I could draw a class divide as easily as a nationality divide.
Meanwhile, in the States, I’m thinking I have been making a distinction between higher-class-turns-lower-class = immigrant, and higher-class-stays-higher-class = expat.
I can think of a specific woman: her family came from the Upper Class in her Central American home country, but the family had to flee the country for political reasons. When they came to the States, the family was poor and they all lived in a one-bedroom apartment. This woman has always been an immigrant in my mind. Would she still be an immigrant if she had come over and remained Upper-Class? I don’t know.
Perhaps classism applies, and further ranked by nationality?
CHOICE/INTENT
In the podcast, they discussed choice: Does ‘expat’ give the connotation that a person is in the country by choice? As they said, there’s a bit of a “let’s try this for a while” connotation to expat-ness.
To what degree does choice really matter with regard to these terms?
Someone who studies abroad and stays to work overseas: the quintessential example of choice, and an obvious ‘expat’ in my mind. But those seeking better opportunity, I’d probably label immigrants.
Regarding lack of choice, I consider refugees to be immigrants, never expats. In most cases, I’d stick to the term refugee, but in the US, if someone were to become a citizen, I’d consider them an immigrant. In my mind, that woman I mentioned whose family went from Upper to Lower Class was originally a refugee and is now an immigrant.
Then I realized: In my mind you can go from Refugee > Immigrant, but you can never go from Immigrant > Expat. You either start out as Expat, or you don’t. Expat appears to carry an eliteness.
In my own family, I consider the parents of my grandfather to have been immigrants. They came from Italy to America seeking opportunity, not to try America out for a while. So now we’re looking at both intent and permanence: they came for opportunity, and they were here to stay.
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Just before listening to this podcast episode, I had written a blog post; I recalled using the word ‘immigrant’, so I went back to see the context:
Sequoia was the only American student in her school, but there were other non-German children from immigrant families…
Immigrant families. Of which we were not one. Was that because of whiteness, Americanness, permanence, intent, or what? In my mind, my daughter, sitting alongside the other foreigners in her classroom, was an expat–and they were immigrants.
Furthermore, I considered myself different from the women in my German as a Second Language class. The class was titled something like German for Housewives. I can recall my distaste for the word ‘housewife’; I consciously distanced myself from that word. But I didn’t realize, at the time, that I was also distancing myself from the other women in expat/immigrant terminology. I would say that I was taking the class with immigrant housewives, implying that I was not an immigrant. I was an expat. I was different.
Here’s the only conclusion I’m coming to at the moment: the fact that I considered myself to be an expat and I distanced myself from the notion of being an immigrant means that something is going on there–something prejudicial and exclusionary. I don’t know why. For now, all I can do is do better.
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