Expatriate, migrant? The social life of migration categories and the polyvalent mobility of race

ABSTRACT

‘Expatriate’ is an unstable and contested term, as emphatically embraced by some, as rejected by others. The category ‘migrant’, on the other hand, can have all the veneer of a self-evident and technical category. Yet, their tense relationship suggests the usefulness of an examination of their co-production and combined effects. This article explores the everyday socio-cultural production of the category ‘migrant’ in its tense relationship with the category ‘expatriate’. More specifically, it draws on 8 months of ethnographic research in Nairobi and The Hague to examine how participants deploy the category ‘migrant’ in the context of conversations about ‘expatriates’ or ‘expatriate’ lives. The article argues that the category ‘migrant’ emerges as polysemic and malleable as it is constructed with and against the ‘expatriate’; both categories are joined by a constitutive but not straightforward relationship that is deeply politicised and specifically works to reproduce racialised power relations. The polysemy of these overlapping terms is thus reflective of and operative in racialised power relations in ways that demand more analytical attention. As such, the categories’ relationship reflects the ‘polyvalent mobility’ of race as it works through ostensibly neutral migration categories and ‘takes on the form of other things’.

KEYWORDS:

• Expatriate
• migrant
• categories
• race and racism
• polysemy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Tariq Jazeel, Claire Dwyer, Parvati Raghuram, Ben Page, Amir Tehrani and Maria Jose Oomen Liebers for their encouragement and helpful comments on various drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘Migrant’ and ‘immigrant’ can be treated as synonyms or as different categories with divergent conceptual histories. I provisionally and imperfectly conjoin and use them interchangeably here, because my respondents did not in any consistent way distinguish between them and neither does the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2002) in its official definition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500185/1].