So, what are British people called when they go to live in another country? If you have been to Spain and its islands, you will have seen many of them, living out their dotage in warmer climes or running bars and fish and chip shops to cater for British holidaymakers whose reason for going abroad is to do exactly the same thing as they do at home. They are migrants. But that is not what the media calls them and that is not what the actual migrants call themselves. Instead, they are expats.
An expat is short for expatriate, someone who lives outside their native country, but for some reason it only seems to apply to Brits. When we were on holiday in Portugal a few years ago, I was chatting to a bloke in a bar who was very plainly British. He had lived there for many years, doing “a bit of this and that” and referred to himself as an expat. “A migrant, then?” I suggested. “No, no, no,” he replied. “An expat. A British expat”. I left it at that but it was clear that the term migrant had connotations that didn’t apply to him. An expat was a fine thing to be. A migrant less so.
It occurred to me that I had never come across Pakistani, Somali and Syrian expats, or Polish expats who, before Brexit, came here to work, because, well, they were migrants. At least they were migrants if they weren’t asylum seekers and refugees. Migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, bad? Expats good? My guess is that many people feel that way.
Given that my make-up is overwhelmingly foreign – only 17% of me is English in terms of DNA, and three-quarters of my bloodline is courtesy of Johnny Foreigner – my recent ancestors could not have claimed to be expat Norwegians and Dutch expats. They were fully blown foreigners. The way things are going, their ashes may have to repatriated, if the authorities can find them. Unfortunately, they will have a bit of a job on with my late mum who was cremated some 25 years ago and it didn’t occur to me to retain her ashes, perhaps on the grounds that she was dead and I didn’t have much use for them. Someone at the Bristol South crematorium may have knowledge, so if the nicotine-stained man frog Nigel Farage comes to power at the next election, intent on returning her ashes to Rotterdam, that’s where I’d refer him. Maybe he wouldn’t hate foreigners quite so much if they were called expats?
The expat/migrant division is simply down to the fact that over the last 50/60 years we in Britain have been told by right wing politicians and much of Fleet Street that foreigners are all bad people and come to the country to scrounge from our generous benefits system and be handed luxury housing, especially if they aren’t white. Complete nonsense, of course, but tell a lie often enough the lie can become mainstream and with migration that’s what has happened. And of course it’s easy and convenient to blame someone else when successive governments fail to deal the housing crisis that began in earnest when Margaret Thatcher flogged off vast swaths of social housing and didn’t replace it with anything.
Let’s call migrants what they are, which is migrants, and then recognise that we are all humans. Not only that, we are all Africans. Forget all this nonsense about expats. Normalise the term migrants and that expats are actually migrants, too. It’s not better, it’s not worse, but it is exactly the same thing.
