GRINGO, EXPAT OR IMMIGRANT
Immigration is becoming a world phenomenon. Today, more than 250 million people live outside their country of birth. By 2050, that number is expected to jump to over 400 million. Some movements are voluntary, others are driven by war or environmental crisis. In the case of Mexico, it’s the gringos looking for that rainbow in their Golden Years.
As Europe, Mexico and the United States discuss whether and how much to welcome newcomers, many of their own citizens are also on the move—with over 9 million Americans, 15 million Mexicans and more than 5 million Britons living outside their country of origin. Part of this movement can be called: expatriate or “expat.”
But what defines an “expat”? Does it matter whether you are coming from a richer country, or how long you intend to stay? At what point are you an “immigrant”? The technical definition of an expat is someone who lives and works abroad for a temporary period of time but plans to return to their home country.” An immigrant moves to another country with the intent of staying permanently, being an expat is defined, in part, by a lack of permanence—whether an expat has lived abroad for 12 months or 12 years, he or she still has the intention of returning home.
In practice, the word means many different things to different people—much like the terms refugee, migrant, or immigrant. And the case of this one word illustrates how the language of migration is influenced as much by context and associations as by formal definition.
Expats weren’t always defined this way. If you think about the actual term expat from the word expatriate, that’s basically a non-optional migration—somebody who has been expatriated is somebody who has been sent abroad. It’s almost the polar opposite of how it’s used now. Now we use expat … as a self-describing term for people who feel they are wealthy or mobile, and we use forced migration or asylum seeker or refugee for somebody who has been forced to leave their country.”
The historical class associations with the term are reflected in how it’s used today. A stereotypical image of the expat-gringo is someone sipping a margarita and by the beach at sunset. Prior to the 1990s, it was much less common for Westerners to live and work abroad. Many of those who did were compensated with generous benefits packages that included high wages and housing. One of the reasons migrants did not identify with the term expat is because they saw themselves as having more ordinary lives than the luxurious lifestyles. They also feel they were not expats because they have more engagement with the local community.
The term expat is often used to describe high-status migrants as being highly paid, wealthy and sometimes highly educated, it is rarely applied to foreign workers who are not. Instead, those workers tend to be referred to as “economic migrants,” people who have left their home country for a place with better living and working conditions. They meet every condition of being an expatriate—all of them. These people are in every way expatriates in the same way white Westerners are. The fact that they are a different color or the fact that they come from a poor developing country is to a large extent irrelevant when we look at the boundary conditions.
In Mexico, most of the foreigners are called “expats” by their peers and gringos by the locals. But only a small percentage are full-time residents even though perhaps 50% own real estate. Over time as Mexico’s expats transition to full-time residents and the Gold Rush continues, the term migrants and expats will have to be redefined. And I’m sure the Mexicans will add their own connotations to these terms, perhaps adding a new word to Webster’s dictionary.