Expats, please don’t call yourselves immigrants
There is a trend for expats to begin calling themselves immigrants, usually from liberals, usually framed as a way to show solidarity with other usually poorer immigrants.
I think this trend, like many other attempts to fix societal problem one word at a time, does more to soothe the guilt of white liberals than it does solving the actual problems. If anything, it’s doing more harm than good by being a form of political recuperation. It’s giving first class passengers telling their servants “Hey, we’re on the same boat here.”
Immigrants should have been and still is at least according to its definition an umbrella term for all who are living in a country different from where one was born. But its colloquial meaning in the West, which includes all the major colonial powers and their peripheries, has long been limited to describe those who are moving from a poorer nation to that of a richer one. But the term economic migrant sounds too patronizing and refugee sounds too strong and unsavory, and so the public has co-opted the word “immigrant” to specifically describe immigrants with a lower class background, and because of the legacy of colonialism and ongoing geopolitical circumstances, these types of immigrants are usually not white, thus the increasing sense of the term being racially charged, as in “if you’re brown you’re an immigrant but if you’re white you’re an expat,” thus the pushback from well-meaning liberals.
Here lies another example of white liberals missing the forest for the trees because of an inherent avoidance to confront class struggle, and instead prefer to define these problems using the aesthetics of anti-racism and identity politics. It’s yucky to call someone an immigrant just because they’re brown and someone an expat just because they’re white, so let’s call everyone an immigrant. But the problem isn’t that brown people are called a different name because they’re poor. And the problem isn’t even that brown people are poor. The problem is that some people are poor and without rights and some people are rich and are financially secure and free and just so happen to share the same space as these other brown people in this particular situation.
The use of the term immigrant to show solidarity with the underclass did not start with the expats though. It isn’t even the most common way the word is misused. The most common way it is misused is this:
America is founded by immigrants.
No. Not in the sense of what the word means today.
America was founded by settlers. It was colonized and it is still a colony today.
If you look at Hong Kong. It was a colony, then the Brits left. It’s no longer a colony.
Europeans came to America, then declared independence from their European overlords. America is still a colony, because from the perspective of the locals, of those who were “colonized,” nothing changed except a change of managers.
Being an expat is not as bad as being a colonizer or a settler. I’m not trying to draw an equivalence here, okay, maybe a parallelism. Neo-colonialism isn’t as sinister as old-school colonialism, but as we now look back at the barbarism of our ancestors and swear never again, our ways to cope and rationalize our own acts of injustice have also evolved, such that our offspring will also look at us the same way as we did our ancestors.
Oh, we just didn’t know better, because we had gotten so good at fooling ourselves that what we were doing were okay although we knew they weren’t okay deep down. We had gotten better at recuperating and externalizing, so the same injustice and inequality that existed for centuries could be more tolerable to our enlightened and sensitive palate.
I do sympathize a lot with the white expats who want to call themselves immigrants. A lot of them are digital nomad and not necessarily a member of the owning class. The international bankers and venture capitalists couldn’t care less about these conversations. These digital nomads, most of them white millennials, were offered an opportunity to realize the dream that they never thought was possible when they were younger, to achieve financial freedom, to live somewhere with affordable housing and healthcare, at least relative to what they could afford back home, and with exotic and exciting food and culture and perhaps even much better urban infrastructure compared to back home if they were coming from the US/Canada.
I sympathize with them because they realized they were being seen as gentrifiers, or at least they see themselves as gentrifiers, even when the locals don’t always see them that way. The locals may actually welcome them for their deeper spending pockets, or simply prefer them over the poorer type of immigrants because of their own colonialized mentality, e.g. someone from Hong Kong who is very friendly towards a white expat may act very differently toward a brown immigrant, or as they are called here, domestic helpers.
The invisible hand of global capitalism is difficult to resist and it is unfair to demand liberal minded millennials to forgo the opportunities delivered to them by this invisible hand. But I think, to want to have this “gentrification” cake and eat the “I’m also just an immigrant” cake too, may lead to neoliberal diabetes.
But wait, what was that I said about Hong Kong?
More about that another time.
