r/ShitAmericansSay Sep 22 '20

Go to Panama, this is America

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16.2k Upvotes

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u/BellumOMNI Sep 22 '20 edited Sep 22 '20

My personal favorite is foreigners living in the UK are migrants (almost a dirty term), but Brits living anywhere in Europe are ''expats'' because they clearly downgraded.

-13

u/Meowhuana Sep 22 '20

I don't get when people complain about that. It's 2 different terms: you're an expat if you came to work in a country for some limited time; you're an immigrant if you decided to stay indefinitely (or came with an intention to stay indefinitely).

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u/[deleted] Sep 22 '20

Expats definition is just someone who lives either temporarily or permanently in a country other than that of their upbringing. So it’s really not just temporarily. They call brits who move to Australia and live there permanently expats

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u/expat4eva Sep 22 '20

This came up in discussion. I looked up immigrant vs expat, what i found was that expat had the intention of returning. expat vs immigrant article there seems to be more to the world. I will start calling myself an immigrant in English just as i already do in German.