4 ms·

I think it depends on your reference. With reference to your home country, you are an expat. Referring to your new home, you are an immigrant.

• keerthiko 10y ago
  I don't think that's the usage here at all. The author is talking the entire time from within China and the perspective of culture within China, and refers to himself and his fellow foreigners as expats. By your description he should be using the term immigrant, since he isn't writing the article from the perspective of American/European soil.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• madaxe_again 10y ago
  No, you're an emigrant with reference to your "home country". But I suppose that sounds too much like immigrant, which has become an epithet.
  • jacobolus 10y ago
    Expatriate is a synonym for emigrant. The word expatriate emphasizes the current status living outside the native country, while the word emigrant emphasizes the traveling process.
    • madaxe_again 10y ago
      It's a synonym for immigrant, exclusively for white people. Emigrant is what an immigrant is relative to their home country. The verb is "emigration", which mirrors "immigration". Don't take my word for it, refer to a dictionary, or this article. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
      • mnglkhn2 10y ago
        You're immigrant to the host country and an emigrant to your country of origin. Exit/Emigrate from country A and In/Immigrate to country B. Expat somehow has the connotation that you will return, which is the equivalent of migrant worker. Immigrant assumes one wants to make the new host country a permanent one.
      • jacobolus 10y ago
        We’re speaking the English language here, and the usual context where this word comes up is conversations among English people, or Americans, or more generally English-speaking Europeans ... England has a long colonial history, wherein they sent colonists, soldiers, merchants, engineers, diplomats, bureaucrats, etc. to far flung parts of their world, inside and outside their empire. Some of these folks moved around from country to country, or migrated seasonally back to their homeland, while a few settled down in their adopted countries. Some of these folks are unquestionably emigrants, while others are transients, but their minority enclave communities can be easily summed up by calling them expatriates. A description like expatriate community is more informative than emigrant enclave or whatever. The word expatriate emphasizes that these folks are (in general) not intending to assimilate, and see themselves as foreigners in the countries where they are living. The same word could equally be applied to “non-white” migrants to “white” countries, if you wanted. I have heard such usage before, and it was not controversial or confusing in context. But of course any words related to migration have racial/class overtones. We’re talking about humans here. Pretty much everything people do involves some amount of social posturing.
      • randyrand 10y ago
        *rich people being white has nothing to do with it. Its wealth.