Do you call me a migrant?

It’s time to acknowledge the hypocrisy of the immigration conversation

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What do you call a Briton who lives in another country?

It’s not a trick question – though it feels like one when you consider the options.

I’m teetotal, don’t watch football and am not a fan of pubs, union jacks or Brexit, so I definitely don’t relate to the term Brit abroad. Not to mention the fact I’m Scottish – a jock abroad? Jocks away?

Clearly, I’m not an émigré either – they wear head-to-toe ecru linen but never crease or spill. So what am I?

Expatriate is probably closest to the mark, meaning, quite literally, ‘a person who lives outside their native country’. But the word expat doesn’t feel quite right either, conjuring as it does (for me, at least) images of brittle, wealthy people who look like Nicole Kidman and leave their kids at home with the maid while they spend their weekends in tennis whites somewhere they refer to simply as ‘the club’.

So no, I don’t feel like any of those terms. Yet their unsuitability pales compared with the word ‘migrant’, a word that definitely, categorically is not meant for me. The question is, why not?

It’s hard to place when the word ‘migrant’ came to be such a part of the daily vernacular of life in Britain, or indeed, who it actually refers to, given nobody likes to say that bit out loud.

Migrant, in recent years, has crept into the conversation as a sort of Daily Mail shorthand for ‘people who don’t belong here’ – the racism insinuated but never openly expressed. It’s a word now routinely used to describe people who, factually, should be referred to as refugees or asylum seekers, a grammatical means of removing any degree of sympathy from the stories of those who’ve fled to the UK in search of a better life. These refugees, branded with the term ‘migrant’ the moment they arrive by boat, are the poster children of the horrific Rwanda policy which this week heralded the (voluntary) removal of one – ONE! – person from the UK.

These immigrants, we’re told, have arrived ‘illegally’ and need to be dealt with accordingly, despite no one being clear these days on what a safe and legal route into the UK would actually look like for those fleeing war or persecution.

Alongside, and in increasing use recently, is the phrase ‘economic migrant’, the terminology now used to describe many – but crucially not all – people who come to the UK to work. Economic migrants are the bogeyman of Tory Britain’s scarcity scare stories. They come, we are told, to steal our jobs and leach from our public services, conveniently ignoring the fact that those very same public services – the NHS, social care, schools - would collapse immediately were these ‘economic migrants’ to remove themselves from the workforce.

Take, for example, the head of a London-based school group who appeared on this brilliant-but-devastating podcast this week and explained he was going to Jamaica to recruit staff, such was the difficulty of finding qualified teachers willing to work in central London on a teacher’s salary. Without these hires, he said, his schools would close. I wonder if the teachers at the other end of the process know they will be referred to so disparagingly when they come to Britain to edcucate our kids. I wonder, too, why I have not encountered the same treatment when moving abroad to work – though let’s be honest, I probably only need to look in the mirror for the answer to that.

As a white Brit with a degree and a profession, I’ve never once been referred to by anyone as a ‘migrant’, economic or otherwise, though that is exactly what I am. At its most simplistic, my husband and I’s decision to move abroad came because we couldn’t make enough money in our careers to live the life we wanted AND save for the future in 2020s, post-pandemic Britain.

Two decades on from leaving full-time education, I know we are among the luckier millennials in that we’d managed to get on the UK property ladder. Yet despite having a nice home and paying a reasonable mortgage instead of exorbitant rent, I was a freelancer with a start-up and no pension. We couldn’t afford to save, let alone give our child the opportunities we wanted to, and private healthcare was an expense we couldn’t consider – despite it increasingly feeling like the only way to secure adequate healthcare for Rich’s type one diabetes. And so when the chance arose, we moved. If that isn’t the definition of an economic migrant, I don’t know what is. So, why am I an expat instead?

“At its most basic, the term expatriate describes someone who does not live in their own country, and could therefore be used to describe migrants, asylum seekers, guest workers and other groups,” explained the University of Westminster’s Ross Bennett-Cook in a 2022 essay examining the terminology of migration. “Some definitions add that ‘an intention to return home’ is what separates expats from other migrant groups.

“I would argue that Polish workers in the UK too have plans to return ‘home’, and Jamaican migrants to the UK may plan to spend their retirement in the sunshine of the Caribbean. Yet we would rarely use the term expat to describe them.”

So, to ask the quiet question out loud, is it simply because we’re white that we’re expats instead of economic migrants? Sort of, but not exactly.

It’s hard to fathom now at a time when Britain’s schools and universities are crying out for funding, but our education systems retain an envied reputation across the world. Add to that the convenience of English as a first language and Brits have long been seen as desirable in the global employment market. For that reason, and others, people like me benefit from expat status where others have not.

Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels is a Senior Lecturer in Migration and Politics at the University of Kent who researches attitudes towards foreign workers. She’s found that the country of a worker’s birth largely determines how they are viewed in the labour market and wider society.

“A Turkish kebab store owner in Berlin or a Ghanaian cardiac surgeon at a London hospital will be called migrants,” she writes. “A Canadian banker in London, on the other hand, is more likely to be called an expat, as is an American in Paris, teaching English by the hour.

“When applying this label, income and skill level are less relevant than the power relationship between the two countries. People are often considered expatriates, a term which is perceived by most as connoting a higher social status, if they come from a country that is ‘equal’ or ‘higher’ in terms of GDP or international reputation, than if they come from one that has a ‘lesser’ status.”

In short, she says, those from the ‘global north’ and OECD countries like Australia are expats, everyone else is a migrant. It’s a reminder, in case any of us needed it, that our opportunities in life are still, so often, dictated by something entirely outwith our control – the location in which we were born.

It’s the same here in the UAE, of course. In fact, in pretty much any country I choose to visit, my passport will afford me privileges that others just like me, those travelling to seek opportunities from Nepal instead of Nuneaton or from Bangladesh instead of Birmingham, will be denied.

It’s an imbalance I’ve been preoccupied with again this week, as the genocide in Gaza continued to rage, as more deaths occurred in the channel, as the UK government crowed about finally getting its Rwanda policy off the ground. I don’t look at my British passport with pride, yet I know it is the only reason I am able to travel freely with my child in search of a better life. I feel guilty for my luck – and simultaneously lucky for my lot.

I wonder, too, as I read about how Britain is seeking to sell Rwanda to those who have risked everything to find themselves in its detention centres, am I in the wrong for leaving when so many others would literally die to take my place in the UK? Am I ungrateful?  

“You’re not betraying anyone by trying to live a better life,” Nicole Kidman’s Margaret Woo intones over the trailer for Expats.

No, I’m not. No-one is. It’s a neat way to summarise the truth at the very heart of Britain’s “immigration crisis”. But in a world where even the language is unequally applied, let’s not pretend it’s a rule that applies to everyone.