When starting my research project, I was unsure which term to use to address the French community living in NYC. Expatriate and immigrant are both loaded terms with connotations pertaining to socioeconomic class and race. In writings by Americans living in France, I most often saw that they used the term “expat” to refer to themselves. An expat usually describes an occidental, white, and at-least middle class person living in a foreign country. Meanwhile, an immigrant usually refers to lower class people of color escaping their poor country to make a better life in a different country. According to various definitions, expatriate and immigrant essentially mean the same thing: a person who lives abroad. However, in some definitions, expatriate can mean temporarily while immigrant is always permanently.
In my interviews, I raised the question of how they identify themselves, curious of their response. One interviewee, Angelique, mentioned that in French, expatriate is clearly defined as someone who works abroad temporarily under a branch of his/her company yet is still under French law. Therefore, she would not consider herself an expatriate at all. If she had to choose, she would call herself an immigrant to defy the xenophobic connotations of the term. However, during the interview, the term “foreigner” also came up, which is possibly due to the translation of the more neutral French term for people living abroad: étranger.
Another interviewee, Jessica, also refers to herself as a foreigner in general. However, sometimes she calls herself an immigrant when trying to make a point about the way foreigners are sometimes treated/regarded in America.
On the contrary, Ronan said that he only calls himself French and even if he lived here for the rest of his life, he would always consider himself French. That is the culture he grew up with and the culture he will always have within him. In regards to the terms expatriate and immigrant, those are clearly politically charged inequalities that have been built into society.
As for Lucile, an exchange student with a definite return date to France, she simply refers to herself as a study abroad student.
Whereas many of the Americans living in France describe themselves, in their memoirs, as expatriates without much, if any, discussion of the term, the people I have interviewed, who are under 30, tend to shy away from this term. Perhaps it is a generational difference. Perhaps a cultural one.
