On the semantics of class, race, and power in two innocent-sounding words
Two people leave their homelands and settle in foreign countries. Both live long-term abroad. Neither is returning anytime soon. One is called an expat. The other, a migrant.
The words are supposed to mean the same thing: someone living outside their country of origin. But in practice, expat and migrant carry vastly different connotations. And these connotations aren’t just semantic—they reveal deep seams of racial, cultural, and class prejudice embedded in how we talk, think, and perceive people on the move.
Expats are white. Migrants are not.
Let’s be honest: when you hear the word expat, chances are you’re imagining a middle-aged European sipping wine in southern Spain, or a young tech worker from Seattle typing away in a Chiang Mai café.
But when you hear migrant, the image shifts. You see someone darker-skinned, perhaps tired-eyed, crossing a border in search of work—someone doing what they must, not what they choose. A migrant is someone who comes from the wrong side of the global hierarchy.
The two terms map, almost perfectly, onto unspoken hierarchies of race, class, and historical power. Expats are imagined to be professionals, retirees, digital nomads, global citizens. Migrants are imagined to be laborers, nannies, refugees, the global underclass.
A Scene from Chiang Mai
March 2025. A fine late afternoon in Chiang Mai. The air thick with dry-season sun, the streets buzzing with scooters and white faces.
My dead friend from a nearby graveyard (see cover image) and I ducked into a small restaurant for a cold beer. It was still too early for dinner, so the place was quiet—just us and one other patron: an English gentleman, likely in his mid-70s. He wore a crumpled white shirt and sat hunched over a tiny, sad cup of coffee. In his hands: The Guardian.
There was something almost theatrical about it. A man reading a mainstream British newspaper in a Thai city, surrounded by tuk-tuks and temples. Talk about clinging to the trappings of class. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a certain contempt.
Thailand, after all, bears the residue of British colonialism. Here, traffic moves on the left. Steering wheels sit on the right. Britishness still whispers through the infrastructure. The man reading The Guardian wasn’t just sipping coffee; he was performing a ritual of cultural continuity.
And of course, he’s not a migrant. He’s an expat—even if he’s broke, even if he’s tired, even if his coffee is the cheapest thing on the menu.
The Other Side of the World
Now imagine the reverse. In the marble-floored lobby of a posh hotel in Boston or Los Angeles sits an Asian man—well-dressed, elegant, a blonde partner on his arm. Think of Chow Yun-fat with Wall Street flair.
What is he called? Not an expat. Not even a foreign investor. Chances are, the default label would be migrant, or just foreigner—and with it, all the vague undertones of suspicion and otherness.
This isn’t about wealth or status. The Asian man might be richer, more accomplished, and better dressed than the English retiree in Chiang Mai. But one is white, and the other isn’t. One benefits from the inherited prestige of empire, the other does not.
Words with Borders
The distinction between expat and migrant is not just linguistic. It reflects a worldview—one that is still shaped by colonial history, racial hierarchy, and unspoken assumptions about who belongs and who merely arrives.
Language is not neutral. It draws borders of legitimacy, familiarity, and class. And in this case, it draws them along old imperial lines.
When we call someone an expat, we give them the benefit of the doubt. We presume education, purpose, style. When we call someone a migrant, we burden them with the weight of necessity, suspicion, and low status.
There is nothing inherently wrong with either word. What matters is how we use them—and whom we apply them to.
Expats and migrants are the same in form: people living outside their country. But in meaning, they are worlds apart. One word flatters, the other stigmatizes.
We owe it to ourselves to look beyond these linguistic niceties, to ask why some get to be global citizens while others are seen as outsiders. It starts with language. It ends with how we see the world.
Yego’s Chronicles 