There’s a question that surfaces more often than people admit, usually somewhere between year two and year five of living abroad:
“What do you call yourself?”
Expat. Immigrant. Migrant.
Sometimes it’s external — a form, a dinner party introduction, a conversation that moves faster than you expected.
Sometimes it’s internal, quiet, surfacing when you notice which word you reach for first and what that choice says about where you think you belong.
Early on, the answer often feels obvious. Later, it rarely does.
Expat tends to arrive first. It’s practical, neutral, and implies a kind of deliberate impermanence — someone who moved for work, for a relationship, for an experience. The word holds space for return, even if return never actually comes.
Immigrant often comes later, if it comes at all. It carries more weight. More history. A sense of arrival that isn’t just geographic, but existential — paperwork, permanence, a longer relationship with the place you now call home. For some people, reaching for that word feels like an honest reckoning. For others, it feels like a door closing.
Migrant is the broadest term, and often the least personally claimed. It speaks more to movement than to identity. For some, it feels accurate. For others, it arrives from the outside — assigned rather than chosen.
What makes these labels (expat, immigrant, and migrant) complicated is what they imply about belonging, choice, and who gets to be considered legitimate.
Because the same person can move through all three — sometimes in the same year, sometimes in the same conversation, depending entirely on who’s asking.
Expat. Immigrant. Migrant.
You might say expat in a professional context because it reads as mobile and intentional. Immigrant on legal documents because that’s what the system recognizes. Migrant when you zoom out and see your own life as part of something much larger than your individual choices.
None of those shifts are wrong. They’re information.
There’s also the part that’s harder to name: these labels aren’t neutral, and they never have been.
The same movement — same passport, same flight, same apartment search — can be framed as cosmopolitan adventure or economic desperation depending on where you’re from, what you look like, what language you speak first.
Some people get to choose their label lightly. Others don’t get to choose at all.
That awareness alone can create a particular kind of dissonance, especially if your lived experience doesn’t fit neatly inside the word you’ve been handed.
I grew up watching this happen from a specific angle — as a TCK who was othered in her country of origin, and then again in the country she moved to. As a daughter of immigrants who now finds herself, depending on the room, being read as an expat.