> Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant. In practice

> Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant. In practice, though, "expat" is used by people who want to define themselves in terms of where they're from, and not admit (to themselves any more than to anyone else) that they are where they are and are probably going to stay there for the foreseeable future: "I don't belong to the riffraff here in the country where I live, I'm an expat, which is something far fancier." And possibly by a few naïve fuckers who don't actually mean it that way, and don't realise that that's how they're coming off because of all the stuck-up arseholes who do. HTH!