It's how the Americans in Prague in the 1990s referred to themselves. I suspect the Americans picked it up from the British, but it's a good phrase to use. It's also an example as to why synonyms are squirrelly and very rare in actual practice. (People act like we're dripping actual synonyms in English. We're not. Lots of words have meanings that greatly overlap, but they're only near synonyms.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate is a start.
I'd refer to myself as one were I in Mexico, for example, esp. if I was there on business or unboundedly temporarily. It's less "migrant worker" and more "H1-B visa", but direction of motion matters. I would refer to immigrants to the US as immigrants because of direction. I'm here, home country, from my perspective they're immigrants. The assumption is that they're outsiders wanting to become insiders. If I'm in Mexico, I'm out of my home country, I'm the outsider, but if I don't want to be an insider in Mexico I'd refer myself as an ex-pat. If I wanted to settle in and become Mexican, I'd be an immigrant. Legal status here doesn't matter; what matters is how I view myself.
When referring to British, I think of them as immigrants if they're permanently here, as ex-pats if they're here temporarily but that's largely indirect speech on my part, but still it's a bit because they don't *want* to be American. either way, I use the phrase they use. For retirees, they're here permanently but still make explicit their origins not their destination, their loose attachment to the US, and, well, they'll die soon anyway so "loose attachment" is all they're going to achieve. Their patria is still their country of origin, they're here for convenience or some purpose other than "life". They have no intent to assimilate, either transitively or intransitively. They might want things like a British pub with darts and soccer, but nothing bigger than that. The phrase also sort of has a whiff of "not a large number, overall, but hanging together for certain events or in certain social situations." But I can't imagine an "ex-pat neighborhood". I can imagine a politician trying to serve an ex-pat community, but that wouldn't be the same as the "immigrant" community. Again, the thing about ex-pats is that they're still connected to their homeland, and have not so much in common with people with other homelands.
That precisely summed up the americti hosi v Praze that all the Czechs complained were driving up rents, behaving badly in public, and distorting neighborhoods by having things like an English-language bookstore or an English-language laundromat.
When in Prague, Czechs assumed I was an American ex-pat, and I had to say 'no'. I was there on an exchange program. It had a clear terminus ad quem and that disqualified me, to my mind and theirs, from being an ex-pat.
I also suspect that you have to be English speaking with a large vocabulary to not settle into a kind of English koine. Immigrants have a restricted code, if only because they acquire English later and don't pick up all the near-synonyms an educated native speaker would. Most Brits that moved here were long more educated than the average American and were native speakers.
Most Americans haven't seen the word in actual use, so for them it's just a true synonym for "immigrant". And the entire "ex patria" thing makes no sense to them otherwise.
[/img]
[/img]
= new reply since forum marked as read
