The Relocators
Defining a new transnational class beyond expats and migrants
Recently I wrote something about being an expat. I was told, firmly, that I am not one: that my marriage to a local and my legal status as a permanent resident make me something else.
I was also asked, by someone from East Asia, why I wasn’t just a migrant like they would be if they moved to my country. What’s the difference?
Not expats, not migrants
We’re freighted with terms that don’t work.
An expat is, most of the time, someone from the Global North who’s on a time-bound stay abroad, often in a position of privilege or power: a diplomatic posting, a journalist attached to a broadcaster, a McKinsey consultant on a two-year stint in Shanghai.
And a migrant is typically someone from the Global South who’s living outside their home country, usually for reasons of economic or political need, often in a situation that’s precarious. Migrants may be refugees or guest workers or people who have entered their current country illegally, and they often face significant challenges in returning home or moving elsewhere.
And an immigrant is someone who’s come to stay, often with a goal of citizenship.
There are other terms, too. Traveler, for someone going from place to place for a while. Global nomad, a kind of trendy term for people who set up shop briefly here and there.
I’m none of these. Lots of us aren’t. In my own case, I’m a permanent resident in Korea, with a good job and married to a local and raising a stepdaughter with her. People like me aren’t short-termers, we’re certainly not part of the global migratory precariat—to claim that identity feels obscene, frankly—and we’re not quite immigrants either, even if we don’t have any plan to go home. We could, is the point. Or we could skip town for a third country. Our passports and our finances would let us, even if our hearts wouldn’t.
Relocators
Because we lack the language to talk about this way of living, we remain invisible. We’re not expats, we’re not migrants, and we’re not living in the colonial world of a century ago. What are we?
Let’s say that we’re relocators.
It’s a new term, maybe a little corporate, but it gets at something none of the other words do. It implies agency—we make our own decisions about where we live—and it frees us from some of the complicated political baggage that attaches to both expat and migrant.
A relocator, as I’m defining it, is someone who:
Lives long-term outside of their country of origin or home country. This open-endedness is different from the expat experience of time-bound stints in other countries. There may be a plan to go home at the end or not, but it’s not a posting with a defined end date.
Lives abroad by choice. Relocators aren’t refugees, political or economic.
Has the ability to move on. Relocators have viable legal status and the financial wherewithal to go home or somewhere else, and that home is a reasonably safe place to return to.
Can be from the Global North or the Global South. As we’ve seen, expats are almost always from the Global North, migrants from the Global South. Relocators—relos for short—can be either.
Breaking the North-South dichotomy
I came from the US to work at Samsung Korea. So did my Indian colleagues. By this definition, we’re all relocators. So were my Indian colleagues working at Google in New York. The experience of these relocators from India is not at all the journey of the poor and disempowered to the colonial metropole that marked so much twentieth century migration.
A good example is Hua Hsu’s family, as described in his memoir, Stay True. His parents came to America from Taiwan, broke but in a broke-student way. They integrated meaningfully into American society and later moved back to Taiwan when there were good economic prospects there. They’re classic relos, if you can call something classic for a term that I just made up.
What’s next for us?
I’ve defined this new term, relocators, because I want to be able to talk meaningfully about an experience that’s underdiscussed.
What is asked of us ethically when our employers ask us to help them embed our home country’s corporate culture into their society?
What does it mean to retire, and face decline and death, in a country not one’s own?
Does this new lens help us to see the past more clearly, reframing people like Marguerite Duras and Paul Gauguin and even Rudyard Kipling—the Indian-born child of a university professor, not a colonial officer—away from simplistic dichotomies and toward a more nuanced, more honest understanding?
Does the idea of the relocator help us understand the immigrant experience better from Global South to Global North, rather than flattening diverse lives, from 19th-century Chinese railroad workers to Sicilian and Jewish migrants to New York to Silicon Valley tech workers to itinerant farm workers from Latin America?
By introducing this new term, relocators, I believe that we can start to see experiences, lives, that lie hidden under the inadequate labels of expat and migrant, traveler and global nomad.
We might begin to see ourselves.
So what do you think? Are you a relocator? And what does it mean to you?