And being black or coloured doesn’t gain me the term “expat”. “I work for multinational organisations both in the private and public sectors. Top African professionals going to work in Europe are not considered expats. The reality is the same in Africa and Europe. Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese are rarely regarded as expats … It’s a double standard woven into official policy.” Anyone with roots in a western country is considered an expat … Filipino domestic helpers are just guests, even if they’ve been here for decades. It’s strange to hear some people in Hong Kong described as expats, but not others. It depends on social class, country of origin and economic status. Here are the main conclusions: “Some arrivals are described as expats others as immigrants and some simply as migrants. The Wall Street Journal, the leading financial information magazine in the world, has a blog dedicated to the life of expats and recently they featured a story ‘ Who is an expat, anyway?’. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’.ĭon’t take my word for it. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. But that is not the case in reality expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad.Īfricans are immigrants. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (‘out of’) and patria (‘country, fatherland’)”.ĭefined that way, you should expect that any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat, regardless of his skin colour or country. What is an expat? And who is an expat? According to Wikipedia, “an expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing.
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