I'm Not an Expat — But I'm Not an Immigrant Either
Chris Lutkin's essay made the case for choosing one place and embedding fully. But there's something to be said about the in-between, even if that life that doesn't fit any of the existing labels.
A few days ago I read an essay by Chris Lutkin called “I Am an Immigrant, Not an Expat.” Chris and his partner moved from the United States to the Azores, and the piece is about why he calls himself an immigrant rather than an expat.
He’s embedding. Learning Portuguese. Steering away from the American crowd. Choosing, deliberately, to live inside someone else’s long story rather than build a smaller version of his old one with better weather.
It’s a thoughtful piece, and I’m grateful he wrote it… it’s been turning over in my head ever since. He’s chosen a shape that fits him and he’s named it honestly.
I want to offer another shape, because I’m doing something different and I think a lot of people are doing some version of it without quite having the language for it yet.
I’m not making the same choice Chris is. But I’m also not making the choice the word “expat” suggests. Before I get into what I’m doing, though, the words themselves deserve some honesty.
“Expat” almost exclusively gets used for people from wealthy Western countries living abroad. The same person moving in the opposite direction — from the Global South into Europe or North America — would not be called an expat. They’d be called an immigrant.
The two words are doing political work that goes well beyond personal identity, sorting people by passport strength, by where the money flows, by whose presence in a country is assumed to be temporary and whose is assumed to be a transfer.
I hold a Canadian passport, and that fact alone makes most of the choices I’m about to describe possible. It would be dishonest to write about this life without naming that.
So I’m wary of both words. “Expat” because of what it tries to launder. “Immigrant” because it doesn’t describe what I’m doing — and because borrowing it would be its own kind of laundering, claiming the harder word for the easier life.
I’m not sure “nomad” quite fits either. There’s a purist version of the word that means you live out of a suitcase, have no fixed address, and treat any kind of home base as a kind of cheating. I’m not that.
I have a home base north of Toronto. I pay Canadian taxes. I vote. I have a doctor, a dentist, long friendships, family. I am not in any way a former Canadian. I haven’t been pushed out by politics or pulled out by tax strategy or quietly checked out of the country that made me.
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But I’m also, right now, not in Canada. I’m writing this from somewhere else, and in three months I’ll be somewhere else again, and after that I’ll be home for a stretch and then probably gone again.
I have a country. I haven’t left it. I just don’t choose to live there twelve months of the year.
There isn’t a clean word for that.
Maybe that’s part of why so many people struggle to imagine lives like this in the first place. We’re handed a very binary story about movement: stay home where it’s safe and familiar, or leave permanently and become someone else entirely.
The news cycle doesn’t help. If your primary relationship to the world is mediated through headlines, it’s easy to start believing everywhere is unstable, dangerous, politically hostile, or one missed train away from collapse.
You stay or you go. You’re home or you’re abroad. You hover (expat) or you commit (immigrant) or you go fully untethered (nomad).
The big move — the one-way flight, the sold house, the new country adopted as your own — is the version of this life that gets sold, written about, made into brave Netflix shows. I gave it all up and moved to Italy. That story is real.
But the strange thing about actually spending time in other places is how quickly abstraction collapses into ordinary human life.
Chris is living his version of it. Some of my readers are, too.
But it’s not the only version.
There’s a whole spectrum between “I never leave the city I grew up in” and “I emigrated permanently.” Most of it doesn’t have a name.
People spend three months a year in Mexico and nine at home. People keep an apartment in Toronto and move through colivings in Europe in the summer. People split the year between two places and call neither one a relocation. People take six months off between contracts and stay in different places, or maybe just one.
People build a life that includes movement without it being the whole story.
None of that is hovering. None of it requires denouncing where you’re from. None of it requires becoming someone else.
You don’t have to close the door on one life to open another.
The change can be smaller than the binary suggests. A month somewhere. A season. A coliving stay. A trial run that doesn’t have to lead to anything.
The point isn’t to land in a new country and become a new person. The point is that you’re allowed to design something that doesn’t fit the existing words for it.
I think that’s what a lot of the people reading this kind of writing are actually after. Not the dramatic, burn-it-all-down version but the one where the life they already built stays mostly intact, and they add more movement to it.
Where they keep the country, the friendships, the doctor, the tax base… and also get the Lisbon winter, or the slow summer in Croatia, or the three weeks every spring somewhere they’ve never been. Where the world becomes less frightening and more human because you’re actually spending time in more of it.
That life doesn’t have a perfect word yet, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Labels are messy things. Maybe the answer isn’t to find the right one. Maybe it’s to stop waiting for the language to catch up to the life you actually want.
✌🏻 Miranda
