h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't really understand all the fuss about immigrants. Isn't an immigrant just somebody who goes somewhere?

If I go from my town, to the one two towns over, am I an immigrant there? That town definitely has a different culture anyway.

Or do you need to cross a national border to be an immigrant? If I moved to Dover, would I be an immigrant? How about if I moved to Dublin? That's still my country, right?

Maybe it's one of those things where "you know it when you see it". At one time in my life, I most definitely was an immigrant - I felt like one, and I probably looked like one, walked like one and talked like one. But I must have missed out on that whole thing where they give you the free house and the well-paid job and the millions of dollars just for being an immigrant.

So what was it like? Well, I went to work, did my job, made friends, went to a gig or had a beer or two on my day off, and prayed to Christ that I wouldn't get sick because I couldn't afford to. Maybe I did get a bit clique-ish with the guys from back home, but that's purely because it's nice to have a common frame of reference, when you want to let your hair down and not have to explain things all the time, like how a Catholic and a Protestant from Ireland can both be friends .

KB the immigrant was an awful lot like KB the non-immigrant in his own country, really. Just a lot poorer, a bit lonlier, and a lot more homesick.

What are your experiences of being an immigrant? Did you get the big fancy house and the free sports car?

I've worked abroad. To be fair, in Luxembourg, a large percentage of workers were non-burghers. From memory it was 1/4 or 1/3 of all employed people. That was driven by the industry and jobs there - large European institutions and large banking operations both attract many foreign staff. There was a very active ex-pat scene, particularly among the Irish community, and the standard of living was high, for both natives and immigrants. There was an ongoing very slight tension about the sizeable Portugese community, who made up many of the builders and coffee shop working cadre, and I really disliked the term "Porgies" which was used to refer to them.

It's interesting, isn't it, the words we use? For example, what's the difference between an "emigrant" and an "ex-pat"?
And I know for certain that my experience would have been different if my hair was black and curly. I was "other", but not *too* "other".

(I was ethnically acceptable. )

an immigrant is surely someone who plans to stay whereas an expat will probably have some intention of going "home" someday?

No, I said emigrant v ex-pat.

If you're wealthy and white, you're an ex-pat. If you're less wealthy and white, you're an emigrant. If you're poor and white, you're a migrant worker*. If you're poor and black, you're a threat.

*I hate that term. Humans are not ants.

(Or have a suntan).

Well, Elektra and I used to be resident aliens.

Emigrant and immigrant are the same thing, just looking from a different direction. I'm an emigrant from the UK and an immigrant to the US. Ex-pat can mean lots of things - someone forcibly removed from the country of their birth; someone who voluntarily and permanently leaves the country of their birth, someone who renounces allegiance to the country of their birth; someone living abroad temporarily.

I consider myself all three - emigrant, immigrant and ex-pat.

And, of course, there were the 'remittance men'. Here's a short interview about them and their significance to the history of San Francisco and Vancouver:

http://archive.org/details/HarryHayOn19thCenturyRemittanceMen

I can't keep it any longer. It's expat not ex-pat. Expatriate not ex-patriate (or as I've seen it ex-patriot)

"ex-patriot".

Now there's a phrase that might be fun to play with.

My favorite aunt left England to go live in Michigan more than 100 years. It wasn't her choice: her whole family moved; she was just the oldest child. My grandfather left Canada to move to Massachusetts. he was two years old at the time. His father had just been lost at sea, and his mother had two other young children who needed to be supported. Central Massachusetts had a lot of mills, so she came there looking for work.

I've worked with immigrants from Ireland and England. I've also watched young American teenagers grow up and relocate to places like Germany. Come to think of it, they actually *were* Germany.

Sorry, in that first line it should have been "more than 100 years *ago*.