1512: 'Expat' vs 'Immigrant' Feb 1, 2019

The terms 'expat' and 'immigrant' hold a huge amount of extralinguistic connotations, but looking at how academics use those terms could help to diffuse some of those problems perhaps. There is a popular belief that "expat is only for white (or generally privileged) people", but this isn't quite true. In technical senses, an expat is any person who lives in another country for economic reasons but holds citizenship to another with no intention of giving it up; usually this will be someone moved by his or her company. An immigrant refers to anyone who has moved to another country, usually in search of another job and or citizenship to that foreign country. Often these terms can overlap, and especially get confused due to migration agreements in places like the European Union, but, in an academic sense, these are not simply based off of class; in popular usage this might have extra connotations however.
Make sure to check out the Patreon.com/wordfacts, and there will be a video up on the Youtube channel this sunday about cross-disciplinary work.