Friday’s Question

Here’s today’s question: What's an expat? No, not Vince Wolfork, who signed yesterday with the Houston Texans after being cut by New England. He’s an ex-Patriot. The other kind, the expatriates who live abroad.

I ask because I read two columns this week that raised the question – one in the edgily leftist SiliconAfrica.com and reprinted in The Guardian; the other in the somewhat stodgier Wall Street Journal. Both came to the same conclusion: “Expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad,” writes Mawuna Remarque Koutonin in SiliconAfrica, echoing Christopher DeWolf in the WSJ, “Anyone with roots in a Western country is considered an expat.”

I suspect I’m not alone in admitting I’d never thought of this distinction before. The Oxford Dictionary defines an expat as, simply, “a person who lives in a foreign country;” Wikipedia as “a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of their citizenship.” Yet, for all the words we use in America – “immigrant,” “migrant,” "refugee," “illegal alien” (the old term for southeastern Pennsylvania’s mushroom workers) – I’ve never heard “expat.” It’s hard to imagine the 4 million Irish who disembarked on our shores in the 19^th century or the Africans who arrived in the holds of ships or today's Latinos being called expats.

Yet, the Journal has a section called “Expat”, a “hub for expatriates and global nomads – spanning the globe in expat hotspots like London, Paris, Hong Kong, Beijing, Sydney and many more."