UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
What makes them "British expats" and not regular old "immigrants"? Oh their wealth? Maybe their skin colour
Direction? To Britain they're expats, to Spain they're immigrants? (or whatever the Spanish word for Immigrants is, I suppose.)
To the UK they are emigrants.
Expat is a casual term referring to someone whose employer sent them overseas on a posting. Diplomats are the most obvious example, but companies will use the same employment structure.
Different jurisdictions have different official terminology for this type of migrant worker, but their legal status in the host country is typically different to that of other categories of migrant worker in the same country, they are usually paid & taxed in their home country, and employed under the regulations of their home country (though in some instances, a host country may extend protections or impose obligations over them).
The confusion arises because when the UK had an Empire, huge numbers were sent abroad to run it, whether for companies like the East India Company, or as civil servants or on military postings, and so the British now think of "people who live abroad" as "expats" because that's the word the older generations always heard, and then continued to use long after this ceased to be the predominant vehicle for of British to be living outside the UK.
The word is absolutely couched in a colonial past, but those using the term to describe other types of British people overseas are not generally doing so out of some sense of white supremacy or British exceptionalism, but plain old lack of awareness.
Big up yourself for a solid, informative answer!
People leaving are emigrants. People entering are immigrants. Expat is just a word to whitewash the immigrant label. I say this as an american emigrant who knows “expats” in my new home country.
Expat is a corporate term for employees working temporary on companies from one country working on another.
I don't how being an ex-patriot is a good thing for those of a nationalistic bent.
I can't tell if you're joking but it's an abbreviation of patriate not patriot > same root but patriot implies liking or serving the country and patriate - from patria - just means "from that country"
We can always pretend that isn't true so it isn't such a neutral term.
Yeah, while I think expat is a bit of a silly word, it's a lot more precise. Just saying "immigrant" could mean an immigrant living here or an immigrant to another country from here.
It's also way more concise and therefore headline-friendly: "Expats say XYZ" vs "British immigrants in ABC say XYZ" or "Overseas Brits say XYZ" (and that one introduces confusion about whether they are overseas as in on holiday/temporary work or overseas as in living there).