I was reading an article the other day and wondering whether I was an expat, a labourer, a migrant worker or a guest.
The reason I was confused was because I always thought of myself as an expat, that is short for expatriate. A website on expatriate and cross-cultural coaching explains that expatriate is a verb or an adjective and means someone “living in a foreign land”.
However, in many countries around the globe, you are not an expat if you are an Asian, a South-Asian, an African or an Arab.
The first time I landed a job as a journalist in the Gulf region, I was given a work visa that marked my profession as ‘labourer’. I was unaware of this for a very long time since my Arabic was non-existent and I travelled to many international conferences on this visa stamped on my passport.
Surprisingly, no passport official questioned me at any of the Arab countries I had travelled to perhaps because there was no provision for a visa for an English-language “journalist” at that time and that everyone in the media was lumped under ‘labourer’.
My British and American colleagues in the newspaper were known as ‘khwaja’ (high-ranking respectable gentleman) in local parlance and I was termed a friend (‘rafiq’). But when I called my boss ‘rafiq’, just to get a bit friendly, he looked at me strangely.
A translator later explained to me a bit apologetically that I had made a boo-boo and that though I was a ‘rafiq’, a friend, it was a polite term for ‘miskeen’ (the poor guy), an economic migrant from the sub-continent.
I then decided to use the term ‘miskeen’ to my advantage, especially when dealing with stubborn bureaucrats and traffic policemen.
“Please help me I am a poor guy,” I would mumble in my broken Arabic while making a contrite, remorseful and apologetic face like the guy who accosts you occasionally at the parking lot, saying he has run out of petrol money to get back home.
The person behind the counter window would then look at me and take back the file. But it never worked with the police as apparently there were too many poor people driving with expired driving licences.
Christopher DeWolf, a Canadian writer and photographer living in Hong Kong for years, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it was strange to hear some people described as expats and not others. “Anyone with roots in a western country is considered an expat ... Filipino domestic helps are just guests, even if they’ve been here for decades,” he wrote.
He described Hong Kong, “a city between worlds” as a portal of immigrants and emigrants. While the Chinese head to America to work on Wall Street, Americans seek business opportunities in China, DeWolf wrote.
Why some arrivals at Hong Kong are described as expats and others as immigrants, depends on social class, country of origin and economic status, he says.
Ritwik Deo, writing an article in the Guardian under the title, ‘The British Abroad: Expats not immigrants, says that the term expatriate is a stamp of superiority and is reserved for those who have the right passport — and look the part. I, sadly, will never fit that mould.”
He had come to Britain to study on a bursary and had classmates who held multiple passports whose parents were expats in Dubai, Zurich, Tokyo and New York. While they zipped about around the world with ease, he was always arguing with passport control officials, he said.
Many workers in this region try to become more privileged and try to change their status by emigrating to a third country, hoping that when they return they would finally be looked upon as ‘expats’.
But that unfortunately, does not happen.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@mahmood_saberi
