Refugee vs Migrant vs Immigrant vs Expatriate
Who you are – and where you are – can impact your ability to achieve financial security.
Hello, Talking About Money Community, how are you doing today? Well, I hope. 🙏
Today I want to reflect of the different words we assign to people who live outside their communities of origin, as I believe that where you live impacts how financially secure you might become. And language matters, because in English we tend to assign different meanings to similar words, and those words carry with them connotations that make us believe that the people they describe have either more or less agency or access to resources.
Do you work with people who were born outside your community but are living near you now? Do you work in your home community, or are you a relative newcomer yourself? How do you think that these descriptive words impact the people you serve, or the way that you provide your financial counseling, coaching, or education?
To help guide us in defining the following words, I turned to an article on Druide, a Quebec-based company that specializes in developing and marketing writing assistance software. They had just the information that I was looking for.
Let’s take a look.
Refugee
A refugee is someone forced to flee their country of origin, especially because they were being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, membership of a particular social group, etc.
When you hear the word refugee you may think of a person who had not initially wanted to leave their home, but for whom external circumstances forced them to leave their homeland, either for years or for a lifetime. How does being a refugee impact a person’s ability to create financial security in their adopted homeland? As with many important questions, the answer is, “it depends.”
As some of you may know, I started my career working at first Jewish Vocational Service and then at the International Institute of Boston (now the International Institute of New England). There I witnessed different trajectories for different clients. Some of my clients had been professionals in their home countries, like the former Soviet Union, and were are to reconstruct a career here, though oftentimes further down the organizational chart than where they started, due to the high bar of becoming credentialed in the United States.
Others faced more of an uphill climb. Many of my clients from the Democratic Republic of the Condo had been professors or journalists in their home country before they fled. They landed in Boston hoping to reestablish their careers, then hit up against institutional racism, limiting their options. Some drove cabs during the day while serving as leaders in their community on nights and weekends.
Still other left others left the climb up the economic ladder to their young adult children. I worked with Afghan families consisting of a single mother and young adult daughters, the husbands and sons having been killed by the Taliban, forcing them to flee. These women had given all their physical, mental, and emotional strength to getting their families to the United States. Once they got here their daughters took over, working during the day and going to community college at night, planning on a day when financial security would be theirs.
Migrant
A migrant is any person living outside of their country of origin, but especially a non-skilled worker moving for economic reasons. This word frequently has a negative connotation.
If a refugee was forced to flee their homeland under threat of persecution, in the American vernacular a migrant voluntarily chooses to leave their home to make money. Furthermore, this person leaves without any marketable skills to trade for a stable income, leaving them at the whims of employers who can take advantage of them. While the word “migrant” is often associated with farm labor, people who need to flee for economic reasons may do any number of unskilled jobs.
I wonder, could living in a constant state of poverty be a form of persecution, especially if it is at the hands of a negligent government? If migrants had an opportunity to make a stable income in their home communities, would they have left in the first place?
Immigrant
An immigrant is someone (of any origin) pursuing long-term residence or citizenship in another country.
While one can argue that the word “immigrant” also has a negative connotation, it does seem to be slightly less negative than the word “migrant.” Immigrants are frequently described as landing on American shores with little money in their pockets, but with big dreams of their future success.
Truth be told, their “deservedness” to be here is frequently based on a combination of their education level and their skin tone. You have a master’s degree, and you are from Denmark? Come right in! You have a second-grade education, and you are from Guatemala? Not so fast.
And for those of you who work with immigrants, you know that what they pay into the tax system frequently outweighs what they qualify for in public benefits. This makes all the steeper their climb towards financial security.
Expatriate
An expatriate is someone staying abroad temporarily or of an undetermined period, especially a white-collar professional or someone from a wealthy or English-speaking country. This term is also commonly used for long-term guest workers in Asian countries that naturalize few foreign citizens.
Finally, we come to the word with the most cache: expatriate. Seemingly, expatriates travel freely across borders. They are assumed to have a high level of education and a in-demand skill set. And let’s be frank, they are assumed to be white. I know people who are extraordinarily successful and who could crush me intellectually, but due to their skin tone they get stopped and detained at every border crossing. So much for the American meritocracy where everyone reaps rewards consummate with their effort.
I think about my own family when I consider these semantics. If memory serves me correctly, my father had three majors in college: economics, biology, and English. And I don’t mean that he was wishy-washy and changed his major three times – he literally graduated having taken classes to fulfill three majors.
My dad grew up in south-central Kentucky in a county that currently has a college-graduate population of just under 15%. You may wonder, what is one to do coming out of school with three majors and heading home to a community where the predominant occupations are farming and factory work? Like it or not, you move to a place with more opportunities to apply your knowledge and skills.
Eventually that meant that my sister and I were raised in suburban Rhode Island in a county that currently has a population of college graduates of 33%, right around the national average. Now I live in Boston, where 46% of residents have a college degree, allowing me even more professional opportunities than my dad had in Rhode Island (and my sister’s neighboring county boasts an even higher college-graduate population of 54%).
What does that make my family? We moved to a vastly different culture from that of Appalachian-adjacent south-central Kentucky. Are we internal migrants? But my dad had a college degree and aspirations for a career where he used his brain. Are we immigrants? Not really, as we changed cultures for sure, but didn’t need to apply for new passports. Are we ex-pats in our own country? That implies that we freely go back and forth to Kentucky, but that’s not the case either. I’ve yet to figure this out.