I might have been traumatized by US visa process, but in my mind "immigrant" has a very specific meaning: moving to a country with the intent of settling there permanently. And the US is very strict on that meaning: when I went to the US my work visa was explicitly non-immigrant, and calling myself an immigrant at the US embassy when applying for the visa, or while crossing the US border would have resulted in the denial of my visa, or the denial of my entry in the US. At least that's what the attorney drilled into my head...
Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant. Sometimes expat is used in a stricter sense (also called "true expat") to refer to people sent abroad by their employer on usually very very favorable packages (the "expat packages"): everything paid (rent in prime neighborhoods, private schools for kids, plane tickets to visit home, etc.), on top of an indemnity for living abroad, on top of the regular salary paid home.
In my case I was an expat in the United States (only went there to work, no intention to stay), but then I immigrated to Japan (now a permanent resident, no intention to leave). It would have been wrong to call me an immigrant in the US, but I am both an expat and an immigrant in Japan.
> Expat literally means "living outside of your homeland". So by definition an immigrant is an expat, but an expat is not necessarily an immigrant.
In practice, though, "expat" is used by people who want to define themselves in terms of where they're from, and not admit (to themselves any more than to anyone else) that they are where they are and are probably going to stay there for the foreseeable future: "I don't belong to the riffraff here in the country where I live, I'm an expat, which is something far fancier."
And possibly by a few naïve fuckers who don't actually mean it that way, and don't realise that that's how they're coming off because of all the stuck-up arseholes who do.
> when I went to the US my work visa was explicitly non-immigrant, and calling myself an immigrant at the US embassy when applying for the visa, or while crossing the US border would have resulted in the denial of my visa, or the denial of my entry in the US. At least that's what the attorney drilled into my head...
H1B is dual-intent. You are allowed to have an immigrant intent when applying for H1B, so no, nobody would refuse it on that ground.
It was an E-2 visa (as "essential manager", not investor...), so not H1B. But again, that's what the attorney told me, maybe he just wanted to be super extra careful. But notice the nonimmigrant wording on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website [1]: "The E-2 nonimmigrant classification allows a national of a treaty country...". My employer did propose to sponsor a green card application, so I had a path to permanent residency. I wasn't interested: I had the firm intention of going back to Japan.
Anyway: my point is that "immigrant" and "expat" are not synonyms: "immigrant" has a much narrower meaning, which has absolutely nothing to do with coming from a poor country or a rich country.
They were probably on a treaty visa, Like E2 (which i have, it's not just for business owners/investors, employees can get this too) or T2 (The NAFTA equivalent). These visas allow you to live and work in the US for a very long time (extendable indefinitely for 2 years a pop in my case), but they have no dual-intent attached to them. They are a dead-end and if you want to stay in the US you need to start from square one with an H1B/Marriage or convince your employer to start a standalone green card sponsorship, which costs like $50k and 2+ years of processing, where the only benefit to the employer is that you can now get a different job.
It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.
H1B is as much of a dead-end as E2/T2 is. There is no way to convert them to a green card. You can do an AOS from any visa.
This is the reason why I would not even consider moving to the US on a non-immigrant visa. It's either green card or I'm happy in the EU.
> It's actually kind of a problem, there's a lot of people on these visas who've lived and worked here for 20+ years with no viable route to permanent residency.
That's because the INA was written in the 50s and has barely changed since, and is unlikely to change because that would require bipartisanship.
IDK, I would use "immigrant" when someone moves to another country with the intent to stay there, and "expat" when someone moves to another country for work or study (so, longer than just tourism) but while they might choose to stay/immigrate, for now that's just temporary, say, for a year or two.
My wife and I were ex-pats when we lived and worked in Belgium for almost eight years. Her employer was originally a subsidiary of JP Morgan, and she was paid as an American living in Brussels. I was brought along as her spouse (although we were actually only engaged at that point), and I was able to find work locally (at Belgacom Skynet, the ISP arm of the former PTT for the country). My wife got a very rare "unlimited stay" work permit.
Come almost eight years later and we were eligible to apply for Belgian citizenship. Her employer had been spun off into a Belgian company, and they were not willing to continue to pay her as an ex-pat. So, it didn't make financial sense for us to remain in the country. So, we moved back to the US.
We never had any plans to permanently move to Belgium, so we weren't immigrants.
Leave Country A for Country B = expat
Move to Country B from Country A = immigrant
The words mean exactly the same. It's just which perspective you want to highlight. Whether you left a place or moved to a place.