“Expat is a racist as hell term” — this is the take of Misan Harriman on the popular internet show SubwayTakes. The reasoning goes that the term expat, short for expatriate, is racist because it is applied to migrants unevenly. Along this line, Mawuna Remarque Koutonin writes in Silicon Africa: “Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races.’”
The argument goes that “expat” is designated for white Europeans and westerners and carries a certain kind of prestige and privilege that is made inaccessible to other peoples who are labelled “immigrants.” Similar sentiments can be found surrounding the recent controversy of a Bali-based, Dutch-run run club’s alleged discrimination against locals. As one Instagram comment on an Al Jazeera post reads, “They are not expatriate[s]. They are immigrants. Please don't label people of color as immigrants and call white people as an expatriate.” Or, as Fred Wissenk remarks closer to home in Vietcetera (though he appears to suggest we call all foreigners expats), “If you’re white, people automatically label you as an expat. I disagree with that.”
The Bali run club that allegedly discriminated against locals. Photo via The Guardian.
Yet, to accuse the term expat of racism is much too reductive and obscures nuance, for the simple reason that there exist plenty of non-white expats who are labelled or identify as such. Thus, the assumption that expats are white may itself constitute a kind of whitewashing, not just of the present but also of the past, overlooking, for instance, the history of South Asian expatriates in East Africa whom the British brought for colonial civil service positions. More broadly, it is also worth questioning whether words can ever be inherently racist, for the meaning and significance of words inevitably vary with context. This is to say, of course the term expat can be racist when wielded in racist ways — for instance, when one calls a white person an expat and an Arab person an immigrant, even when they occupy similar class positions and professions — but cannot be seen as an inherently racist term for the fact that “expat” denotes no single stable type of migrant, its use, meaning, and scope dependent on context and geography.
Defining the expat
Indeed, the expat is a notoriously slippery term, not only because there exist discrepancies between formal definitions of the term and everyday usage, but also between those who identify as versus those who are labelled as expats. So, what even is an expat? How should we understand the category in Vietnam? And what distinguishes an expat from an immigrant or a migrant? The Cambridge Dictionary offers the following definitions.
- Expatriate: “someone who does not live in their own country”
- Immigrant: “a person who has come to a different country in order to live there permanently”
- Migrant: “a person that travels to a different country or place, often in order to find work”
Firstly, what differentiates the expatriate from the migrant is that expats move across countries, while the movement of migrants may be either inter- or intra-national. “Migrant” is thus treated as the broadest migration category, hence why academic literature will describe the expatriate as a type of migrant. Yet, in practice, expatriates are often considered not as a subset of migrants, but rather a category separate from migrants, as is made evident when a Việt Nam News columnist follows up his use of the word “migrants” with the parenthetical comment, “sorry, ‘expats,’ this is you.”
On the other hand, the primary differentiating factor between expats and immigrants is presented as the intention of the duration of stay. An immigrant intends permanent residence, while duration of stay is undetermined and unspecified for expats. Yet, common and practical usage of the term, both within general publics and in academia, deviates substantially from such definitions — most often, what is meant by expats are none other than “rich, educated, developed elites,” whereas all other migrants are seen as immigrants. Still, even this definition appears to be imperfect, for as Sarah Kunz explains in her book Expatriate: Following a Migration Category — which has been indispensable in writing this article — those who are labelled and/or identify as expats often vary significantly in socioeconomic class, whose professions range from “diplomats and CEOs, to English teachers, humanitarian volunteers, yoga teachers and unpaid interns further down the socio-economic ladder.” Kunz describes of the expats she met during her fieldwork in Nairobi: “some lived luxurious lives while others barely made ends meet, and yet others relied on support from families ‘back home.’”
A foreign teacher in Hanoi. Photo via Tuổi Trẻ.
To complicate things further, there is also the fact that the equivalent to the term “expatriate” often does not exist in other languages. For instance, an equivalent to the term “expat” does not really exist in Vietnamese. Arguably, the closest substitutes that exist are “người nước ngoài,” which simply means foreigner, or “người tây,” meaning westerner — though we should note that there also exists a term for migrants, “người di cư.” Neither does a translation for expat exist in Korean: expats residing in Korea are commonly referred to as “oekuk-saram,” which again simply means foreigner. While the French cognate expatrié or expatriée has similar connotations to English, the dominant meaning of the Spanish cognate expatriado or expatriada is one of exile, or those banished from their home country — which is in fact what “expatriate” denoted prior to the 20th century in English as well.
But even within the English language, the term does not travel the same across geographies. For instance, in the US, one notices that the term expat is rarely used, for which there may be two reasons: one, the country’s dominant narrative of itself as a “land of immigrants,” and two, the fact that the US is much harder to simply come into and stay in the way that many expats do in other countries. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are the Gulf states, where all foreign workers, ranging from the heavily exploited construction workers to high-ranking corporate managers, are called expats — arguably in order to restrict a sense of belonging for non-citizens who make up significant portions, or even a majority, of the population. As for Vietnam, it seems that distinctions between expats and immigrants are rarely made — though as we will see, this does not mean that the expat functions neutrally in Vietnam either.
Workers in Dubai. Photo via The New York Times.
Because of the term’s polysemy, to call “expat” inherently racist is rather reductive. Alternatively, a better way to understand the category is not as racist per se, but as racialized. To expand upon the notion of racialization, there is an important distinction to be made between describing a concept as racist versus racialized. An imperfect but useful example to think about is that of the concept of the human. Certainly, the human is a racialized concept. Here, we might think about how Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing, ‘Vitruvian Man’ — which depicts a white, male, able-bodied person — is often invoked as the “classical ideal” or “universal model” of “Man.” And it is, of course, furthermore true that the concept of human is deeply intertwined with racist histories of violence and subjugation in which various colonized peoples were, and continue to be, denied the label of human as rationalization for such violence. But does that mean the concept of the human is itself racist? Debatable, but I think that most people would argue no. It may be useful to think about the term expat along similar lines: not racist per se, but racialized, normatively white — as well as, we should add, classed (obviously) and gendered (as evident in the fact that an “expat wife” is often not herself referred to as simply an “expat”).
A brief history of the expat
The racialized nature of the expat is rooted in the history of empire and capital of the 20th century that have shaped the category. We may understand the historical development of the expat in the 20th century through three paradigms. To start, there was first the colonial expatriate, the likes of British colonial officers in India — or, as Anne-Meike Fetcher more vividly caricatures, “the British gentlemen who, after prolonged exposure to the tropical climates of South or South East Asia, suffer from world-weariness, alienation and alcoholism, as they are portrayed in the novels and short stories of Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham.”
Servants around a British general and his guests in Bangalore. Photo via The New Statesman.
But with the wave of successful anti-colonial movements that swept the formerly colonized worlds following the end of World War II, expats came to mean something different. With the fall of European colonial empires rose to power a new global empire, namely that of the US, which dominated and shaped the world through both military and economic dominance. And central to the ascent of the US empire was the rise of US multinational corporations (MNCs), which emerged as powerful actors in the international political economy through their control of the flow of foreign direct investments. The rapid growth of US MNCs increased demand for a “new breed” of expatriate workers that would soon replace their European colonial predecessors: that is, the intracompany assignee transferred abroad for temporary periods of time for purposes of overseas management of operations.
Following the shift from the colonial expatriate to the corporate expatriate, the emergence of the next new model of the expat came in the 1980s and 1990s with the advent of neoliberalism, characterized by, in big-picture terms, minimal government intervention domestically and globalization and free trade internationally — the defining outcomes of which have included worsened inequality, decimation of the public, cuts in welfare, deregulation of worker protections, and the atomization of individuals.
In Vietnam, the neoliberal turn took shape in the form of Đổi Mới, which opened the country up to foreigners. As a precursor to the third type of expat that would follow the corporate expat, it is illuminating to take a look at the example of the multinational oil company Shell and the corporate restructuring they pursued in the 1990s. As Kunz details, with the neoliberal turn, Shell expats “got increased ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ but also found themselves more precarious and unequal. Payment structures were increasingly tied to individualised performance, implying greater inequality among expatriates and an emphasis on competition instead of the harmony thus far nurtured and expected.” While since at least the 1950s Shell expats understood themselves as part of and embedded within a larger “Shell family,” in the 1990s, the “company man” was re-fashioned into “individualised and disembedded global ‘expatriates’” — or in other words, neoliberal subjects.
Travel writer Mark Hudson and his friends at the Majestic Hotel in 1992. Photo via Saigoneer.
The new individualized, global expat was to be an early harbinger of the rise of what academics call the “self-initiated expatriate” (SIE) — a globally mobile worker who moves abroad without necessarily being told to, often highly-skilled. This includes, of course, the “digital nomad”-type professional, as well as English-language teachers, travel influencers, freelancers, and more. To clarify, SIEs did not replace corporate expatriates per se, who of course still exist — rather, they displaced the corporate expatriate as the dominant model evoked by the term “expat.” In many ways, SIEs are fundamentally neoliberal subjects in their reproduction of neoliberal ideology, in that their espousal of an international lifestyle often masks and obscures the fact that the feasibility of such internationality is itself ordered in uneven ways globally — dependent on, say, the strength of one’s passport or the feasibility of navigating borders and immigration systems, in addition to access to capital. As Kunz poignantly writes, “The self-styled international person, who possibly even rejects the label expatriate, in their performance of a celebratory and ‘border-blind’ internationalism… arguably has the markers of a tragic figure that is possibly well-intentioned yet hubristic, invested in rereading structural privilege as individual achievement.”
A view of Thảo Điền, a hub for expats in Saigon. Photo via Vinhomes.
Despite the association of the SIE with internationality and thus diversity, the SIE arguably remains racialized as white. For Kunz, this seeming contradiction must be understood via neoliberal ideology. Specifically, she suggests that the category’s “conceptual multiplicity and malleability” — its inclusion of “contingent insiders” of other backgrounds — helps to mask its largely racialized nature and in maintaining “a guise of a borderless internationality” that is in reality asymmetrically structured by persisting colonial and neocolonial relations, as much as the project of neoliberal globalization would want to have us believe otherwise. It is for this reason that criticism of the term expat as designated for white people is so common, despite the fact that non-white expats exist. From this view, the logic of (select) inclusivity of the category of the expat functions in the same way that the neoliberal celebration of “multiculturalism” and “DEI” by corporations functions to mask and obscure the violently racial nature of racial capitalism on a global scale.
The expat in Vietnam
The broad picture of the historical development of the expat from colonial to corporate to self-initiated expats offers a compelling account of the historically racialized nature of the expat, at least globally. But in Vietnam, the expat cannot be seen as racialized straightforwardly as white, given the significant population of East Asian expats. In fact, in 2025, a majority of the country’s officially counted international workforce — which, granted, is not the same as the population of expats, but is nonetheless illuminating — were from either China, South Korea, or Japan. Very tellingly, a Vietcetera article titled “Expats’ View On Working In Vietnam” features six expats, at least five of whom are not white, whose professions range from managers to yoga and ESL instructors.
The opening ceremony of a Coca-Cola manufacturing plant in Hà Tây Province (now Hanoi) in August 1995. Coca-Cola is one of the earliest American MNCs to arrive in Vietnam following Đổi Mới. Photo by Hoàng Đình Nam via Instagram page @tonkin.jpg.
Yet, this does not mean that the expat in Vietnam is unracialized — it is more so that different types of expats are racialized differently. Here, it is useful to contrast the article cited above with another series of expat profiles, “Expats In Ho Chi Minh City.” While the former features majority Asian expats, the latter features overwhelmingly “western” expats. It is no coincidence that the article that features majority Asian expats focuses on the topic of work, while the profiles that feature majority western expats focus more broadly on the expat experience and lifestyle. This is because, in Vietnam, the two archetypes of “business” expats and “lifestyle” expats are “racialized” differently, as (East) Asian and Western respectively.
As one study of Korean expats in Saigon notes, interviewees often referred to their stay in Vietnam as “a long-term business trip” — which runs counter to what we might expect of “western” expats, by contrast. Thus, it is not exactly that race is irrelevant to the category of expat in Vietnam, but rather that the logic of race operates differently and unevenly, given the huge proportion of FDI from other Asian nations like Korea, Singapore, China, and thus the business-skewed orientation of Asian expats. The so-called “expat community” in Vietnam is thus in fact not singular — as Fred Wissink, the producer of the “Expats In Ho Chi Minh City” series writes of Korean expats, “they’re very closed off. It’s a 100,000-person strong community, but they’re all in District 7… They have their own group and don’t have to deviate outside of it to do business or live comfortably. Outside of the Korean community, there’s an estimated 50,000 expats in Saigon.” In line with our comments above, what we find here also is a kind of inter-expat stereotyping, for of course it is not true that “all” Korean expats live in District 7 nor live secluded from the rest of the city.
View of Phú Mỹ Hưng, often referred to as Saigon’s Koreatown. Photo via VnExpress.
While it may initially seem like, in Vietnam, the term expat is inclusive of all foreigners, two examples make clear that the expat by no means operates as an innocent category in Vietnam either. There are two instances that make this evidently clear.
Firstly, while it is true that the country has long been a country that has exported rather than imported “unskilled” labor, there still exists a notable population of manual laborers from abroad, specifically, from China. As anthropologist Nguyễn Văn Chính explains, while it is unclear what percentage of 33,000 Chinese contracted laborers in Vietnam are manual workers, it is commonplace for Chinese contractors in northern Vietnam to hire workers from China for several reasons, including ease of communication in Chinese and the relative ease of mobilizing workers from cities just across Vietnam’s northern border. Most of these laborers work illegally on short-term contracts, usually between three months to a year, though some stay up to ten years. Surely, according to dictionary definitions, most of these migrant workers should be considered not as immigrants but rather expats. Yet, at several moments in his study, Chính refers to them as “immigrants” — very telling moments of how “expat” remains a category both racialized and classed.
As much as 90% of thermal power plants in Vietnam are built by Chinese contractors. Photo via UNDP.
Our second example concerns the most prominently covered naturalization of a migrant in Vietnam in the media: specifically, the story of Kenneth Atkinson, a British entrepreneur, who, after three decades of living in Vietnam, finally naturalized to become a Vietnamese citizen in 2025. Interestingly, the media coverage of his naturalization on Tuổi Trẻ and VnExpress does not once mention words like “immigrant” or “immigration.” The former is in fact categorized under the “Expat Life” column and the latter article is tagged with various tags containing the word “expat.” With respect to both Kenneth Atkinson and Chinese manual laborers, the point isn’t that the former is an expat and the latter are immigrants, but to point out “edge” cases in which the terms are not in fact wielded neutrally.
Naturalized citizen Kenneth Atkinson at the launch of his memoir in September 2025. Photo via VnExpress.
At the end of the day, popular discourse around expats and racism tends to be reductive and obscures a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of “expats.” But even with a more nuanced understanding of the category, I think that there is a strong case to be made for the abandonment of the term altogether, given how confused and confusing the term remains. In opposition to abandoning the term, some may feel that the term “expat” may still be salvageable if used as a category to identify those who already possess a certain level of privilege. Yet, the problem with such a proposal is that what is intended as identification of privilege may in reality inadvertently constitute bestowal and/or reproduction of privilege and status, especially given that it is rarely possible to determine someone’s “level” of privilege in any straightforward way. Given this mess, it may be best that we abandon using the term altogether.
