I watched a video of a politician. Maybe a diplomat. Maybe just someone trained to sound harmless. He was explaining the difference between expats and immigrants. He said it’s simple: it’s about intention. If you don’t intend to stay, you’re an expat. If you do, you’re an immigrant. Clean. Reasonable. Almost comforting.

For a few seconds, I believed him.

Because “intention” is one of those words that pretends to make the conversation fair. Until you remember who gets to interpret it.

I know smart young people from the Global South who had their study visas refused because a clerk on the other side of the planet decided they “did not intend to pursue and complete their studies.” That was the language: We highly doubt that you have the intention to pursue and complete your studies. Wait! What? How? By reading intention through a PDF?

So no: it’s not about intention. Or if it is, intention is a privilege, not a principle. But let’s test the theory with the most boring evidence possible: history.

By that logic, the foreign workers who rebuilt postwar Europe would have been called expats. Turkish, Moroccan, Italian, Yugoslav families arrived under programs designed around temporariness: earn, send money home, return. That was the deal on paper, and often the dream as well. Yet the word was never expat. It was Gastarbeiter, guest worker: welcome for the labor, not for the long term.

So here’s my proposal; rhetorical, yes, but at least honest.

Start using guest worker universally, including for Europeans who “temporarily” work abroad. Or stop calling that first generation guest workers and call them what this theory claims they were: expats.

Pick one.

But don’t sell us fairy tales about neutral definitions while the labels keep tracking skin, passport, and power. Because that’s what “expat” often is: a linguistic hierarchy. A polite differentiation among immigrants. I’m not like the ones from the South, I’m just better.

From the South working in the West, you are an immigrant at best and a guest worker by default, regardless of your plans. And anyone who thinks “guest worker” only refers to low-status labor misses the point. It’s not a comment on your profession. It’s a comment on your rank.

And here comes the collaborator: the migrant from the South who insists he’s an “expat.” Not because it’s accurate, but because it’s useful. Functionally, he is an alibi. The living footnote that lets the cruel speak out loud and still feel decent. How can this be ugly? Look; one of them agrees.

To end this provocation, I’ll tell you a true story. Told in different versions across Africa, but always with the same lesson.

There was a powerful king who signed a contract with foreigners from very far away. Every year, he would deliver a fixed number of slaves.

It worked beautifully.
Profitable, stable, “civilized.”

One year, the number wasn’t enough.
So they took the king too.
And his family.

That’s the ending collaborators never plan for: when the quota changes, the alibi becomes inventory.