makes ya think don't it?

  • MagisterSinister [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I can only speak for Germany, but my impression (as a white person who was born here, so take it with a grain of salt) is that whether people use the expat label is about which job you come for. If you work in finance or software development or some other white collar job, you'll probably get labeled as an expat. If the work you do is harvesting asparagus or meatpacking or construction or some other manual labor, you'll get referred to as a Saisonarbeiter ("seasonal worker") or something similar instead, like Gastarbeiter ("guest worker") for people who came in the 50s-70s to mostly work in factory jobs. Expat is a much newer term, and it's exclusively used as the loan word. There is no German synonym for it, and no desire to find one. On the contrary, using the English loan word underlines that the people referred to as expats are seen as highly educated cosmopolitans.

    I don't get the impression that these terms are delineated along where you come from - a Romanian or Ukrainian working at a fintech startup would also be known as an expat, same for people coming from outside of Europe.

    So at first glance, it seems as if it's exclusively about class issues. But that's assuming a context where people are already aware what you do for a living. In many cases, people don't know and will just make assumptions instead - that you're a refugee if you look middle eastern and have an Arabian accent, that you're an expat if you look "Chinese" to them and so on. These are the assumptions normal people make, chuds will just go with whatever fearmongering narrative they picked up last, which usually means that nonwhite will flat-out be equated with illegal alien living off welfare.