Am I an Expat or an Immigrant?
Published in
7 min readFeb 16, 2022
In Tokyo, where I live, almost none of the foreign friends I have refer to themselves as “immigrants.” The term immigrant has connotations of people from poorer countries, who had to come here under desperate circumstances.
And even though I have friends from places usually associated with the term, they would only call themself an “immigrant” with a sense of ironic commentary on the race and class biases that…