As a white person who grew up in East Asia, the term immigrant was never one that was placed onto me. Instead, I was awarded the much more positive title of expat. With it came a wealth of ease and privilege, teaching me that in a world that is increasingly becoming hostile towards immigrants, there is power in language.

Language Reveals Power

Few commonly used words reveal global, racial, and economic hierarchies more than “expat” and “immigrant”. Both describe people who have left their home country, but only one carries connotations of wealth, privilege and ultimately whiteness.

In both public and political discourse, the division between immigrants and expats has been treated as neutral and descriptive. Whilst there are writers like Koutin¹ and scholars like Fechter² who have questioned these categories, the conversation remains limited in scope and largely confined to academic spaces rather than shifting how we actually use both terms on a day-to-day basis. It’s necessary to analyse how we’ve constructed these migrant categories, as they have powerful implications. Economically, socially, and politically, it determines your worth within your host country and community. Expats are, by and large, seen as beneficial additions to a country, while immigrants are often portrayed as a drain on the economy.³ Immigrants, on the other hand, face relentless vilification by being portrayed in media and political discourse as criminals who steal jobs and burden taxpayers – rhetoric that is used to justify increasingly restrictive immigration policies.

But the line that determines who fits into which category is blurry, and those divisions reveal global racial and class power relations.

The Social Construction of Race

Expats are defined as “a person who lives outside their native country”,⁴ whereas immigrants are defined as “a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country”.⁵ Aside from permanence^[1], both terms do not differ greatly. Why, then, is the term expat used to refer to white immigrants specifically?

To understand the nuance of migrant categorisations, we must first examine the social construction of race. Race as a fixed biological reality has been deeply discredited – it is largely understood as a racist tool with no scientific backing, weaponised by Western powers to categorise and assert dominance over those they deemed ‘Other’.⁶ Furthermore, how race is understood varies significantly depending on where one is, and at what point in history.⁷ In the late 19th and 20th centuries, for example, Irish and Italian people who migrated to the United States, were not considered white.⁸ Today, that is no longer the case. Racial categories are strategic constructions deployed by those in power to maintain hierarchies and uphold the privilege of a select few. This racial distinction became especially visible during the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis. Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said that Ukrainian refugees were ‘not the usual refugees we’re used to… these are Europeans, intelligent, educated people’.⁹ His surprise at white Europeans being refugees revealed the assumption that migration from poorer countries is suspicious, unless those migrants are white.

Just as race is socially constructed, so is the idea of the ‘expat’. Although Eastern European migrants are white, in the UK, they are viewed as immigrants instead of expats, unlike Canadians and Australians. In predominantly white societies, white migrants are racialised through class, as suggested by Blachnicka-Ciacek and Budginaite-Mackine.¹⁰ Eastern European migrants are stereotyped as manual labourers and portrayed as economic burdens or criminals, regardless of their actual professions.¹⁰ This reveals that even whiteness is hierarchical – only the ‘right kind’ of white, from wealthy nations, earns expat status.

However, the expat label is not exclusively reserved for white people; it is also for those with the right combination of wealth and national power. Wealthy Gulf Arabs in the UK, for instance, are typically called expats, not immigrants¹¹, revealing that the expat is shaped by geopolitical hierarchies: people from nations with economic and political power can claim expat status, while migrants from less powerful nations – regardless of their individual wealth or qualifications – are labelled immigrants.

The degree to which race and class interact is highly context-dependent. In the Global North, class plays a more significant role in who gets labelled an expat, as seen with Eastern Europeans in the UK. But in the Global South, whiteness alone is often sufficient for expat status, regardless of class. Part of this dynamic stems from the lingering influence of colonial and imperialist hierarchies, which elevated whiteness in many Global South societies. It is also shaped by historical migration patterns: white migrants to these regions have tended to arrive in higher-paid or internationally recruited roles, rather than through labour migration channels, reinforcing the association between whiteness and privileged mobility².

These hierarchies are the direct legacy of European colonialism. Colonial powers built systems that positioned whiteness, Western cultures, and languages as superior while extracting resources and labour from colonised peoples. This colonial logic persists in the expat/immigrant divide: white people from former coloniser countries move freely as ‘expats’ and are viewed as bringing expertise, while people from formerly colonised nations face suspicion as ‘immigrants’ who must prove their worth. In the Global South, especially, decades of colonial rule created hierarchies elevating whiteness – visible today in immigration policies easing access for Western passport holders.

Material Consequences

On the 13th of March 2015, The Guardian published an article called ‘Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants?’¹. Here, Koutonin argues that the term expat seems to only be used to describe white Western people, reinforcing a global racial superiority. This sentiment is also raised by expats themselves; a 2018 study¹¹ showed that some Western immigrants would not refer to themselves as expats as the term insinuates “stand[ing] above locals”, a connotation that isn’t relevant to immigrants.

This critique follows a wider conversation about assimilation. Where there is a large pressure for non-white immigrants to assimilate into their host country, this is not the case for white immigrants. A 2006 ethnographic study of a British immigrant in Dubai found that she did not feel the need to change her dress to fit local culture and instead “attempts to reinforce her identity as a (non-Muslim) British woman”.¹² Muslim women are not given the same liberty of self and religious expression when immigrating. The European debate about Middle Eastern people needing to assimilate into local customs is clear, with many European countries banning the burqa and niqab, even including fines for wearing these veils.¹³

This pressure to assimilate runs deeper than just policy. Instead, it reflects a colonial mindset that treats Western culture as the default and demands that everyone else change to fit in. Edward Said refers to this phenomenon as ‘Orientalism’¹⁴ – the way the West views the East as fundamentally different and more specifically, inferior. The lasting effects of Western imperialism and Orientalism have impacted post-colonial identities in ways such as feeling pressure to downplay one’s culture and/or language, change how one looks¹⁵, or adopt Western behaviour to be accepted. As this colonial legacy directly impacts how white people are viewed, this extends to white migrants, who never face these demands because they already represent what’s considered ‘normal’.

The distinction between expats and migrants is not only selective language; its use creates a moral ranking of movement, deepening the racial hierarchical divide. It informs us of whose presence is wanted versus whose is tolerated and debated. Especially as we’re seeing much tougher and backwards proposed migration policy globally, the protection of being an ‘expat’ excludes you from the anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Conclusion

The choice of identifying someone as an expat or immigrant is a powerful linguistic choice that shapes policies, attitudes and self-perception, and is steeped in a violent colonial and imperialist history. These terms allow a privileged few – often white people – to move freely across borders without being associated with the stigma of immigration, while people of colour are forced to justify their place and right to belong. Re-examining these social labels is therefore crucial, as their divide strengthens racial discrimination and sustains racist subtexts underpinning public discourse on mobility.

However, decolonising migration means more than academic critique; it requires that those of us who benefit from expat privilege actively reject the term and identify as what we are: immigrants. It means questioning why our movements are celebrated while others’ are criminalised, and advocating for policy changes that don’t privilege white Western mobility. Untangling the power hierarchies in our language regarding migrant categories is necessary in decolonising migration, both socially and politically.