Unpacking the terms expat, immigrant, and migrant

Published December 12, 2024

I admit it: I liked calling myself an expat. Something about the word sounded cool, even though no Mexican has ever called me, or any other foreigner I know, an “expatriada.” They refer to us as either extranjeros or gringos.

I thought of this recently when two Mexico News Daily readers commented that my use of the word ‘expat’ in an article I wrote was offensive and elitist. I pointed out, defensively, that the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of expat is pretty innocuous: “a person who lives outside their native country.”

What’s not to like? But while the word ‘expat’ may seem neutral at first, its implications are not. As you probably remember from high school English class, there’s denotation, the literal, textbook meaning of a word, as opposed to connotation, the subjective idea or sense — positive or negative, but rarely neutral — associated with that word. And it turns out, the connotation of the word “expat” is very charged.

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