Immigrant is the English word that denotes someone moving permanently to a new country. Emigrant means someone going to another country permanently. That is to say, moving to Canada from the US one would be considered an immigrant in Canada and an emigrant in the US. An EXPATRIATE(expat for short) is someone working or living in a country not of their origin, and still consider themselves to be whatever nationality they are from. Typically used in the UK or anywhere else that speaks English. Not necessarily meant to be exclusionary of other nationalities.

This might get me some flak, but IMHO it's an unconscious double standard for many people and it's also not exclusive to the English language.

Germans do something similar, a German who moves to another country, even if it's Thailand for retirement or because life in Germany supposedly doesn't work for them, is called an "Auswanderer" and usually has a rather positive connotation of being "worldly" and well traveled.

Guess how many people call immigrants "Einwanderer" with a positive connotation? Pretty much nobody.

Some might argue there's an economic dimension to this, like German pensioners bringing their money to the other country, but that also doesn't always apply: There are plenty of Germans who are migrating because they have economic troubles in Germany and think they could work it better elsewhere.

As unbelievable as that might sound to most people outside of Germany, there are so many of them that VOX Germany has a whole Docu-Soap about Germans migrating to other countries, and it's been running for nearly 12 years with great success [0].

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_Deutschland!_Die_Auswa...

In my experience, people have come to use expat to describe someone who is temporarily or provisionally living elsewhere (e.g. Gone to London to work for a few years). Immigrant is often used for people who have moved with a permanent intention.

I've usually seen "expat" used when it's more relevant where the person came from than where they emmigrated to. "Immigrant" being used for the reverse.

E.g. If you were born in Madagascar and moved to Belgium: You're a Madagascan expat because we're talking about Madagascar, but you might be referred to as an immigrant to Belgium if we're talking about Belgium.

"Expat" has colonial overtones: if one was sent to the colonies they were an expat; if one moved from the colonies to the ruling country, they were an immigrant. That's become fuzzier with time, but labeling of "expats" almost always implies being from a rich country, and not integrating into the foreign society.

From an administrative perspective in the US an immigrant is someone who moves to the US with the intent of staying. Work and other temporary visas are called non-immigrant visas, and for example when I applied for my E-2 visa I had to clearly state that I had no intent to immigrate in the US (though I was applying to work in the US, I'm not an investor despite what the visa is called). As I fully intend to leave, I didn't have to lie about it.

Even in a more casual context, I know a lot of Japanese expats in US, and have never heard of any of them being called an immigrant: most come from one of the big Japanese banks (Mitsui Sumitomo, UFJ, etc.) and stay in NYC for two to five years, before heading back either to Japan. Cultural quirk: Japanese people are usually sent abroad right after purchasing a house in Japan, the management line of thought being that with the associated mortgage they won't quit even if they don't want to go abroad.

English speakers are often reluctant to refer to themselves as immigrants, due to pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric in most English speaking countries.

The funniest manifestation of this is letters to the Daily Mail where the writer moans on about all the immigrants in England before revealing that they’re an ‘expat’ living in Spain.

Edit: incidentally, it’s not universal in English speaking countries. Irish media, for instance, will rarely refer to an Irish person living abroad, temporarily or permanently, as an expat; they’re an emigrant. And immigrants from other English speaking countries would normally be referred to as immigrants, not expats.

It depends if you plan to stay (immigrant) or not (expat). Since most long term visas in the US terminate in a green card, we use immigrant more often than not to describe those who come to the US on an H1 or as PRs.

Also immigration primarily occurs from poorer developing countries to richer developed countries, so the label immigrant is used to describe long term foreigners since it is likely that they actually are. In contrast, in primarily emigrant countries (like say China), the immigrant label will almost never be true, so something else is used instead.

The definition of expatriate (noun) is any person who lives outside their native country. It's a synonym of migrant. An immigrant is "someone from a foreign land", so the only difference appears to be the "settling" part (an expat/migrant has settled somewhere else, an immigrant is simply _from_ another country.)

This is based on the 1.5 minutes I just spent looking these up and is only based on definition (not usage).

Many gulf countries don’t grant permanent residency or citizenship even if one is born there to legal migrants. So they are expats

silly wording around the streets. you're an expat if you're rich. immigrant if poor.

class connotations. you'll see it applied to foreign, non-anglo elites as well.

expat = expatriate (someone living outside their home country)

from the latin expatriare meaning to leave one's own country

This is a hot topic among expat communities. As someone that was an expat for 12 of the past 20 years, I have some strong feelings about it. Expat implies (and literally means) someone outside of their home country. The key element here is “home.” An immigrant is someone who leaves their “home” for a new home country permanently.

For example, I was an American expat in France for the past 4 years (and in Mexico and Asia before that,) only just recently having returned to the US. I had no intent on permentantly settling in France. There are plenty of long term German, French and Dutch, Japanese expats in China (not anglophone obviously,) but they are almost entirely never intending (or able to,) become citizens of China. They are expats. They work a job for 2+ years, but they never intend to become Chinese. Nor are they floating around city to city each year picking up seasonal jobs as is the case for migrants.

An H1B worker from India in California is also an expat, up until the point where they are intending to become a citizen and stay permenantly — in which they become immigrants. An Indian H1 who is after a green card though, becomes an immigrant because of their intent to permantly change home countries.

“Migrant” worker versus expat is another nuance and it is because historically, migrant workers, by definition, migrate temporarily based on the availability of seasonal work. Migrant workers, by definition don’t stay in one place very long — they would typically work a farming season and then move to the next place where a harvest is coming.. like migratory birds going south for the winter. A migrant worker doesn’t stay in one place very long: they migrate depending on where the work is and ideally, return home between temporary jobs. America used to have a robust guest worker program in the 1950s-1960s and people from Mexico would cross the border to work the harvests, then go back home when the season was finished.

In short: an expat is someone living for some longer length of time in a country outside their own with the intent to eventually go back home. Expat is a “temporary” status characterized by long stints in one place away from home. An immigrant is someone that leaves their origin country permenantly. A migrant is someone that follows the harvest (i.e. seasonal jobs) and returns home regularly.

Some people have attached racial or class distinctions to those terms which is unfortunate because such distinctions aren’t accurate — they are the invention of (mostly white) people that seem to find offense in everything. This topic has lit expat Facebook groups and forums up with white expats attempting to put virtue Signal everyone else while ignoring the actual nuances involved. It’s much easier to engage in pseudo-intellectual outrage in order to assuage their own feeling of expat “privilege.” It was exhausting being around those sorts of people. Some white woman who is the wife of a British business executive on a full expat package in Shanghai trying to convince others that she is an immigrant is ridiculous when she’s talking about retiring one day to her country house in Yorkshire.

The TLDR is that one’s status of expat, migrant or immigrant is one of intent, not class or national origin.