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Comment by dontlaugh | Hacker News Reader

Immigrants come from poor countries, expats from rich ones.

This is the right answer.

People who continue to say “expat” will justify it by saying “oh, they don’t plan to stay in the country long term”. But you can’t possibly know what a persons long term plans are just by looking at them. You can’t even tell with certainty if they came from a poor country or a rich one. All you can see is their skin colour. That’s what people base the “expat” tag on.

Sincerely, an immigrant.

There are many cases where “expat" are sent to a different country by their company. They are there for a couple of years depending on the projects. I don't see how they can be called immigrant, and they certainly don't see themselves as such.

Brown and black people sent temporarily by their companies are considered immigrants.

White people living in retirement communities in Thailand call themselves and are called expats.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/10/immigr...

"Immigrants" is still a humane term. H1Bs are called as "temporary alien workers".

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/laws-and-regulations/laws/i...

Maybe that's a cultural thing in your country but here we have Indian and Chinese expat, either working for large multinational companies or international organization. Nobody here is going to call an Asian or African working for WHO, or UN agencies on temporary basis an immigrant. Immigrant are people looking for permanent residency, and we btw do have a lot of British and American immigrants.

Where is "here"?

that might be an american thing? as a brown person when i was living in the UAE i was definitely an expat, since i had no intention of settling there (or indeed any particularly good option to).

Exactly, I think a lot of people just like to virtue signal and get angry at the term. I'm pretty neutral on it myself. Expats are people who leave their country but still consider themselves as wholy citizens of that country, immmigrants leave their country and want to build a new life in the new country and often keep their culture, but also adopt that of the new country; expats don't really want to do that.

Not from the meaning of the words however - "expat" describes your relationship to your former country, and "immigrant" describes your relationship to the country you are currently living in. So if you live in another country than you were born in, you're actually always both at the same time - i.e. an American expat living in Germany is an immigrant to Germany.

And yet Americans in Germany are called expats, but Eastern Europeans or Africans or Middle Easterners in Germany are called immigrants.

Are they? I have a couple of Russian expat friends on Switzerland and Germany. This might be my bubble and I appreciate your calling out a bias in who we think of as "foreign" but I'm not sure it's this clean cut

This is basically it. Legally it’s all immigrants, but colloquially “immigrants” are people looking for a better (richer) life while “expats” are in a place because they like it, not because their life conditions would be poorer at home.

I grew up an immigrant to Switzerland, now I’m an expat in South East Asia.

There's no contradiction with the parent though. You want to immigrate because your new country is nicer and you want to stay. You're an expat because your old country is nicer and you want to go back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30966197

This comment perfectly sums it up. Thank you. The discrimination is so stark.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com