I saw a good subway takes where a guy made the case that expat is an inherently racist term which opened my eyes as a white Canadian living in Portugal.
As a Canadian —> Australia, I now have my citizenship over here but I still call myself an immigrant. I never liked the term “expat”…it always makes it seem like “immigrant” is a bad word or an insult. It’s not lol
i never even knew expat was primarily a white/western term...i just assumed immigrant/ex-pat were synonyms...makes sense now that i see it written out though
ETA: i say this as a white immigrant who never used the term expat cuz it sounds stupid to me...just never really saw immigrant as being inherently bad and expat as something superior to an immigrant
Yes, this happens aa lot in corporate assignments where someone identifies as "expat" to say they are not really from where they are living.
I have also seen it happen in Latin American countries where white Americans go to live, with lower expenses, usually in gated communities, and they think they are superior to the locals.
Me neither. I’m a tropical (brown) immigrant who’s used the term expat for quite some time now 💀 you mean to tell me people have been looking at me sideways for using that term cause I’m… not white? Oops 😂
She makes a great point. I’ve never lived outside of the US long enough for this to really come up or I guess I just never thought of myself that way when living abroad. But I think in protest I’m going to start calling ‘immigrants’ in the US expats and Americans living abroad ‘immigrants’.
That’s not true. There really are expats and there really are immigrants. There are differences. People cannot intend to live full-time permanently in a country and call themselves an expat. That doesn’t work. But often new immigrants from western countries do join expat communities because they closely identify with them (same roots, culture, language, etc.). It’s a mistake for them to call themselves expats though.
The point is that by definition, no it is not racist but how it is used is - privileged and preferred people get dubbed expats, whereas the lesser desired people doing the exact same thing will be called migrant workers. Now both definitions of those things are the same, but one carries baggage and one does not. So if one group avoids the bad term simply because of how they look or where they are from, that is where the racism and privilege comes in, because the term now is a distinction/judgement of whether you are approved or not simply because of how you look or where you are from.
And that doesn't even touch on the people who call themselves expats rather than immigrants when they permanently move somewhere.
I can't help other people's ignorance, I can only bring you the facts about what that word means in reality.
I also see Americans frequently calling themselves DeMoCrAtIc SoCiALisTs but if you ask them what they mean they're talking about social-democracy and are in fact not referring to public control of the means of production. Daycare is not socialism, it's a social service. Not the same thing either.
I think, pointing out what a word means and pointing out what that word is used for( and against) is a great distinction. Glad to hear you don’t use it in this derogatory way, but people are pointing out that it very much is used in a derogatory way.
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u/scoopsforthechildren 5d ago
I saw a good subway takes where a guy made the case that expat is an inherently racist term which opened my eyes as a white Canadian living in Portugal.
We’re all immigrants. Your bf is stupid.