Moments of Permanence - On language use

From: sovay Date: April 15th, 2018 06:31 am (UTC) (Link)

- not necessarily permanently relocating, generally not citizens of the country in which they live

That seems to be the major part of my internal definition of the difference. Immigration is intended to be permanent. You can be a long-term resident as an expat, but if you are not actively seeking to become a citizen of the country in which you live—or would seek citizenship if the option were open to you, since I recognize that for quite a lot of people it's not—then you're not an immigrant. I don't think of it as Commonwealth-only, because I think you can be an expatriate American in, say, France just fine. But nothing about "African expat" sounds wrong to me.

[edit] Whatever this says about my ideas of immigration, I seem to think at once that being an expat means you could always go back. So I guess I classify it differently from exile or statelessness as well.

Edited 2018-04-15 06:34 am (UTC)

(Reply) (Thread)

From: fred_mouse Date: April 15th, 2018 11:20 pm (UTC) (Link)

I would add to your definition that not only does expat mean that you *could* always go back, but that you intend to at some point. Whether that point is retirement, your family getting older, something else, is individual.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: sami Date: April 16th, 2018 04:22 am (UTC) (Link)

Via other comments here, I've realised that part of what I think is inherent in the distinction is whether you want to be a part of your new country, or whether you seek to maintain your previous national identity and spend all your time with other people who do the same.

Like, if you're living in another country, but your social circles revolve entirely around people who also come from your home country? (And if your HOME country is not the one you live in?) You're an expat.

My family are immigrants. Australia is home, and our social circles feature people who are either from here, or who are also immigrants (but from different countries).

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: fred_mouse Date: April 23rd, 2018 11:13 am (UTC) (Link)

That makes a lot of sense. The willingness to engage in the culture, and talk to the people.

(Reply) (Parent)

From: copracat Date: April 15th, 2018 11:01 am (UTC) (Link)

Interesting discussion. I've always thought, by contextual use when I was one, that expats were people who'd moved somewhere temporarily, had a status other than tourist, but always intended to return to their country of citizenship, and immigrants were moving permanently, with no intention (or I guess possibility) of return.

(Reply) (Thread)

From: sami Date: April 16th, 2018 04:20 am (UTC) (Link)

That's more-or-less where we ended up, with the odd quirk we share a sense of the nuances including a shade of Commonwealthness.

Thinking about it, it might be slightly influenced by the city we live in, which has a significant number of South African, well, expats.

Come to think of it, I've just put words to the sense I have of the assimilation part: expats seek out and primarily associate with other expats from the same country.

Because the difference between what I'd think of as South African expats and what I'd think of as South African immigrants is the extent to which they mingle with the locals, or whether they limit themselves socially to other South Africans.

My family are immigrants, but we sometimes buy things from a shop that's very popular with expats, that kind of thing.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: fred_mouse Date: April 23rd, 2018 11:15 am (UTC) (Link)

The white South Africans who came over in the 1980s and failed to socialise with anyone other than white South Africans were a very particular mob.

Mind you, I knew some who assimilated well -- one now elderly gentleman who would exclaim in a thick Africaaner (sp?) accent in a somewhat affronted manner that 'We are Australian now".

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: sami Date: April 23rd, 2018 12:02 pm (UTC) (Link)

Hello, I am a white South African who came here in 1982!

... we didn't really associate with those people past the first few months here.

Afrikaaner, btw. My father would tell you that too and he does have an accent, but I'm not sure how strong (it's hard to tell with one's own parents) and he would be deeply offended if you called his an Afrikaaner accent.

His is a Durban accent. (And his Afrikaans is terrible.) Usually what people call an Afrikaaner accent is more of a Johannesburg accent. Durban accents are the ones that are quite mild and not at all unpleasant, Johannesburg is a quite common one that people from Durban seem to have a tendency to consider an abomination, and Cape Town is a whole other thing.

Interesting thing, when Leverage was new, I saw someone panning it because they thought Sophie's South African accent in the pilot was terrible.

I had to jump in with, no, seriously, that accent is a flawless Cape Town accent, she sounds just like my aunt from Cape Town - this is like saying someone's "American" accent is terrible because they have a Boston accent.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: fred_mouse Date: April 23rd, 2018 12:20 pm (UTC) (Link)

I'm not surprised you didn't socialise with those mob :}

I have no understanding of the subtleties of South African accents - I was going off vague memory. I don't particularly remember where that family came from. The parents had quite different accents, which I think were explained to me that one of them had grown up English speaking and the other not (I feel like I was told Dutch, but I don't know if that makes sense?)

But I'll take note, and attempt to avoid conflating Afrikaaner & non-english/white South African.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: sami Date: April 24th, 2018 01:29 am (UTC) (Link)

oh, that's a *serious* thing.

My father's background actually *is* Afrikaaner, but... it's complicated.

There is some SERIOUS hate between Afrikaaners and English people, with real history behind it.

My mother's parents were actually British. Her father was from England, but was doing a travel-the-world-working-for-a-bit-in-different-countries thing when World War II broke out, and he joined the army in South Africa, where he was at the time; my grandmother was Scottish, and signed up as an auxiliary. They met in Egypt when my grandfather was recuperating from shrapnel wounds, and then settled in RSA after the war.

So she fit a little differently into the whole thing.

But, like, my dad has stories of how when he was in the army his Afrikaaner sergeant went out of his way to make his Anglo corporal's life a *living hell*.

But the thing is, you're not going to get a realistic sense of things if you read up on it, because most historical stuff, especially in English, is not written by Afrikaaners. Most Australians think that we were on the right and just side in the Boer War, for example, and we really weren't, and I've read historical stuff that blames Afrikaaners for South African government policy in, like, 1916.

Afrikaaners were not, at that time, in charge. The English were - that whole "that's like a decade after what the British Empire called the Boer War and the Afrikaaners called the Second War of Independence, which they lost, because the British invented concentration camps and put my ancestors in them" thing - and remained in charge, being pretty awful, until a secret society called The Brotherhood orchestrated a takeover in something like the sixties there is a lot of history in quite a small country.

Seriously, being from South Africa and the product of what, at the time it happened, qualified as a Mixed Marriage leaves you deeply suspicious of the "official" histories to begin with, and when you factor in that I am the child of an anti-apartheid activist but I nonetheless had family members who were targets of ANC assassination attempts and other family members who just narrowly escaped being killed by random ANC bombings because the ANC were a terrorist group...

I'm very "literally every version of history people claim about that country is wrong".

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: fred_mouse Date: May 12th, 2018 12:33 pm (UTC) (Link)

<3

I have no brain to engage with this, but it was very interesting reading and has given me a better idea of what I don't know.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: sami Date: May 13th, 2018 02:01 am (UTC) (Link)

<3

Suffice to say perhaps that I get angrily disapproving when anyone who isn't South African tries to act like they know anything about South African racial politics. Anyone who is South African is likely to have significant bias, it's hard to avoid, but at least they're more likely to be valid from a perspective.

(Reply) (Parent)

From: issenllo Date: April 15th, 2018 03:30 pm (UTC) (Link)

A bit different from what I'd define: "American expat" absolutely works; an "expat" is not meant to be a permanent status, and often unintentional. I often see it being used to refer to people who'd been relocated by their (multinational) companies, often with cushy pay packages, so-called hardship allowances (for living in a developing country, for example) and other perks like housing and children's education allowances.

For a long while people understood this to mean only white people, but later it was also understood that "expat" could include non-white people so long as they were provided for by their companies, and the expression also includes "Japanese expats", and recently "Chinese expats".

(Reply) (Thread)

From: sami Date: April 16th, 2018 04:15 am (UTC) (Link)

It's one of the weird dialectal quirks he and I were noting that for us, American expat doesn't really work. An American in another country is an American.

Although the idea that someone very specifically working a job in another country after which they'll return being an expat is super-weird to me. That's like saying a soldier on deployment is an expat. No, they're just deployed.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: issenllo Date: April 16th, 2018 04:04 pm (UTC) (Link)

I did specify that it was their multinational company which excludes the military, but oh, well, if it's a dialect! That's different then.

(Reply) (Parent)

From: sqbr Date: April 16th, 2018 01:14 am (UTC) (Link)

Hmm. I am possibly the person you saw post the expat=white thing, and after reading this post and doing some googling I am persuaded that I was wrong about it being that simple, but I also don't think your definition is the one being primarily used either.

For example, if you search for "American expat" there are heaps of results. Being from a commonwealth country might increase the odds of being called an expat but it's definitely not a major requirement.

Your second point is pretty close, as described in the wikipedia definition. Something like "someone who moves to another country temporarily for a well paid job, or is otherwise 'passing through' in some way".

But while this is the meaning in theory, in practice it's used in a racialised way. Because (a) it's white people who more often have those kinds of jobs (b) white people are more likely to see themselves as separate/above to the cultures of countries they move to, even if it's a permanent move

Thus English immigrants are more likely to see themselves as, and been seen as, "expats", even if they have moved somewhere permanently. It's that "never really one of us" thing you were referring to.

(Reply) (Thread)

From: sami Date: April 16th, 2018 04:13 am (UTC) (Link)

I'm not in any way saying this is a universal definition; I specified dialect for a reason. (He and I don't have exactly the same dialect, of course, but there's a lot of crossover.)

I find the "moved temporarily" for a job definition weird. That's just someone temporarily working somewhere. Like, someone who goes to teach English in Japan for a year is not an expat, to me, at all.

I think part of where there's a disagreement here is that you are saying that it "is used in a racialised way", which means something rather different from "some people use it in a racialised way".

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: sqbr Date: April 17th, 2018 04:43 am (UTC) (Link)

I think part of where there's a disagreement here is that you are saying that it "is used in a racialised way", which means something rather different from "some people use it in a racialised way".

Yeah, that's fair! The latter is more accurate.

(Reply) (Parent)

From: sami Date: April 16th, 2018 04:24 am (UTC) (Link)

I realised replying to someone else another part of it that I think is important to the distinction:

expats don't integrate.

Mostly, I think it's actually based on: if the country you live in is not your country of origin, but it's your home, you're an immigrant. If home is somewhere else, you're an expat.

(Reply) (Parent)