Vækstvejen (arkiv)

Det havde gjort åh så godt et indtryk, såfremt bloggen var på dansk eller engelsk, i stedet for at være på et hjemløst kaudervælsk.

Upassende ? Klag over indlæg

If you’re not an expat, then don’t worry about it. You don’t need the resources, help or activities.

Expat, by the way, is an abbreviation for ‘expatriate’. Its definition (at least in the above context?) A person who has taken up residence in a foreign country.

Though, if you want to go outside of the conventional, dictionary definition and utilise a more cultural one: An Expat is someone from a richer Western or richer Eastern country who moves to a new country to reside. People from poorer countries just get called ‘immigrants,’ even though both groups move for the same reasons (work opportunities, study, love, fed up with life in their native country.)

Expat is just a nicer way of saying ‘immigrant’ in this day and age and it’s reserved for folks from wealthy nations (example: An American who moves to Denmark will be called an expat, whereas a Guatemalan who does the same will be referred to as an immigrant.)

I do hate to break it to you, but we expats aren’t magically better at integrating wherever we move. You’re just as apt to find some from “our community” who’ve lived 20-odd years somewhere and can’t speak the language as you will from the ‘immigrant’ category. Some of us are religious fanatics, thumping whichever ‘holy’ book we believe in as hard as ‘immigrants’ do theirs. Some of us are criminals, racists, homophobes, etc. Some of us wind up on the public dole in our new ‘home’ and don’t bother getting off it. Some of us spend very little in our new ‘home,’ preferring to buy most of our things off the internet from our ‘old home’… Very few of us give up our native language, customs or culture. We like to make exclusionary clubs that are just for us or just for certain types of us and join them. Some of us even send our kids back to our ‘old homes’ so they can attend schools, learn our language (but we typically raise them to be bilingual anyway, so..) and our culture. And we complain about all the things we miss from home and do not like about our current one.

But not all of us are like that. Some of us care and try to integrate…

The only things which typically set us apart from the ‘immigrants’ are our income levels, country of origin, and skin colour (but that’s not always the case.) Oh yes, and the perception of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ that the natives have..

Upassende ? Klag over indlæg