[mc32]

immigrants are people who tend to stay and don’t have plans to return to their home countries. Expats are temporary immigrants typically paid by their company to move and intend to move back to their home countries once the assignment is over.

[anal_reactor]

Ain't nobody calling seasonal minimum-wage workers "expats".

[mc32]

True, but I'm talking about native English speakers. Those people likely have their own terminology in their own language to describe themselves.

Also an ex-patriate is typically in the professional class. So those "English" teachers who teach in Japan, etc., may think of themselves as ex-pats or try to frequent "ex-pat" hangouts but they aren't necessarily because of two things: one, they have not been working at their home office and then transferred and typically they do not hold prelesional degrees -though they may hold "certificates" or whatever. They are in effect temporary workers on a limited stay visa, often needing annual renewal by hopping to a third country to have it renewed themselves. For ex-pats all this or arranged by their employers.

[anal_reactor]

"expat" is rich, "immigrant" is poor. People use the word "expat" to signal they're rich, or at least they want to be.

Here, your theory goes out of the window.

[mc32]

Someone from the US who moves to France for good is not an expat.

[freehorse]

Looking at online dictionaries there is no hint of temporariness [0], [1]. Wikipedia refers to it as "a person who resides outside their native country" and often referring to "a professional, skilled worker or artist from a wealthy country" [2], which matches exactly the way I see it used. Similar to other commenters here, I also mostly encounter it being used by skilled, first world professionals to separate themselves "from the plebs" of poorer immigrants.

PS I do not disagree that some use cases could include temporariness (wikipedia mentions academic discourse and something about some british civil workers a few decades ago) but this is by far neither the unique nor the most common way it is used nowadays, nor how historically it has often been used long before.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/expat...

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expatriate

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate

[varjag]

Expat is an Anglo work migrant, they insist on the distinction as it's in their titular language.

[mmarq]

“Expat” is how white well-off immigrants expect to be addressed to differentiate themselves from other immigrants.