I think of expats as people living or working in a foreign country that have the intention of returning. Therefore I consider myself an immigrant. No right or wrong though really.
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Agreed Chris - I think the thing that drives my thoughts about the two words is the tendency for those who ‘prefer’ to call themselves expats, to look down on immigrants as lower beings. Maybe that’s just my warped perception though…
e.g. I suspect there are UK ‘expats’ living in France who voted for Brexit because of perceived immigration issues in the UK (amongst other things!). But then again I could be completely barking mad or over-sensitive :-
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No, you are not mad and I agree with you.
To me it’s a type of person who calls themselves ‘an expat’ and feels different from us EU Citizen/Immigrants. A sense of ‘difference from other citizens’ of the country they reside in.
Martin
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Yep Martin - spot on! A smattering of colonialism with just a pinch of superiority 
Mind you, I had a Grandmother who was never quite the same after we pulled out of India!
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My grandmother was born there to Irish parents. She moved to England in her 60s hated it and went back to India for another 20 years.
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David,
Your Grandmother might of invented a new version of ‘Expat’ = ‘The Anti-Expat’…?
Martin
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I’d always thought of her as my Irish grandmother but as she was born in India that has scuppered my chance of getting an Irish passport.
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I considerer myself to be a British EU citizen exercising my right to live in France.
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Well you have obviously done better than me.
According to l’INSEE and their census information… I am an immigrant from a country within the European Union. 
seems fair enough to me.
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Gendarmes are just people - obviously there are good ones and bad ones. I’m sure people have polar opposite experiences with police in the UK and any other country too.
I agree with you Jane, we’re currently EU Citizens and have freedom of movement rights, not immigrants, who have much more restrictive conditions if they want to move here. If brexit happens, future movers both from Britain to the EU and from the EU to Britain will soon appreciate the difference. Hopefully an agreement will be ratified and we (British already in the EU and EU expatriates already in Britain) will retain most of our current special status.
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Me too, David. My Irish grandmother was born in Singapore. My mum can get the Irish passport and I would have been able to had she done that before I was born.
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And I started wondering where all the ‘immigrants’ in the UK came from - so I looked it up!
Migrants in the UK - Published Feb 2017
Now then - you’ll see that 8 of the Top 10 ‘sender’ citizen countries are in the EU (accounting for nearly 50% of all UK migrants) - with a massively important 15.7% share going to the Polish.
So my question is - when folks in the UK refer to immigrants, are they including the EU migrants or not? Are they just exercising their rights of free movement and therefore not real immigrants? Or - were they just all lumped in together to feed Brexit fever?
Proud to be an immigrant in France - Yeah!
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I very much suspect that ‘immigrant’ conjures up a semi-subconscious image of someone brown or black or yellow who doesn’t necessarily speak good English or live somewhere nice or do nice job if any job and that mr and mrs average pinkish British person wot talk English proper don’t want to be considered the way they more or less overtly consider someone who corresponds to that description. And it probably conjures up that sort of image and reaction all over Europe, not just in GB.
It is a bit like straight men being twitchy around gay men because they think the gay men may have the attitude towards them that they (the straight men) have towards women.
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Vero - brilliantly put!! :-
Despite being British my father’s side of my family right down to my children have been a bit transient in their nature. As I mentioned before my paternal grandmother was born to Irish parents who owned farms in India. She met and married my Scottish grandfather in India where my father and his three sisters were also born. My father went to school in England where he met and married my Welsh mother. They had plans to emigrate to New Zealand but gave up on that idea when they both got jobs in Cornwall. My sisters and I were born there. My children were born in Germany and one of them is in New Zealand at the moment and another has worked in both Singapore and Brisbane although currently she is working for an international company based in London. I moved from Germany to France. Immigrant, expat or whatever I don’t find it hard to understand people who are the tumbleweeds of the human world, those who move around without setting down solid roots. We are living in an age where moving to new places and new jobs is straightforward and that suits some people, it’s a shame those people who may be considered to be a bit different need to be labelled at all.
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How do I contact Dignitas?
It might be cheaper to just unsubscribe, David 
Wonderful sweeping statement which is obviously based on your experience of being in the company of many gay and straight men. I think you are woefully mistaken and l for one have never found myself ‘twitching’ or uncomfortable in any way in gay (male or female) company.
Your broad brush homilies about your view of how Mr & Mrs “Average” pinkish people think is, in my view, is at the best extraordinarily pretentious and at the worse insulting; I might frequently drop my 'Aitches and speak with a East London accent - It doesn’t make me stupid.
Hi Dan
I notice you haven’t been posting for some months… nice to see you back with us.
However, I think you are being a little harsh on @vero
I chuckled at her comment and I can’t see why you didn’t…
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