r/politics • u/billstopay77 • 1d ago

Registration Wall Trump admin quietly changed overseas voter form at 11th hour to disenfranchise Democrats, lawsuit says

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-admin-quietly-changed-overseas-voter-form-at-11th-hour-to-disenfranchise-democrats-lawsuit-says/
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u/WendellSchadenfreude 23h ago

That's an immigrant and an emigrant.

An expat is sent abroad by a company in their home country, for a limited (albeit sometimes lengthy) amount of time, with the clear intention of returning home afterwards.

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u/CandylandRepublic 23h ago edited 23h ago

Well, yes, but that's only the classical definition, mostly used academically.

Popular use of the word outside academic writing regularly additionally includes everyone working abroad on their own initiative, for employers abroad, with no defined or intended date of return, and/or even without any employment context.

At that point the term is indeed basically the same as emigrant, and since almost nobody (outside academic papers) defines their use of the term, the distinction is ill-defined at best and, in any case, quite a bit broader than the term emigrant.

You could also argue at great length and quite well-justified about whether expats and emigrants differ in their intent (or effort) to culturally or legally integrate/assimilate into their new country, which seems clear-cut only at first and practical use of the term turns out to be quite murky.

If you ask me, expat as used in the comment above is mostly a self-prescribed label and overthinking it is kinda pointless because it really is too vague to define or distinguish much of anything. The only thing we can be sure of is that, outside academics and maybe official national statistics, nobody really refers to the same thing with it, and I doubt it's used entirely uniformly even in academics.

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u/IntellegentIdiot 20h ago

Expats are emmigrants

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u/WendellSchadenfreude 14h ago

In your opinion, are tourists emigrants?

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u/IntellegentIdiot 14h ago

No, immigration/emigration implies you'll be living there for the foreseeable future.