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Comment by returningfory2 | Hacker News Reader

Would you call South Asian laborers who are temporarily working in construction in Dubai expats? Seems to fit your definition exactly.

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Yes, they're most definitely expats. Their engineer colleagues from South Asia call themselves expats.

Interesting, so why don’t we ever see the word expats associated with the millions of laborers from poorer nations working in the Middle East with no path to citizenship ever referred to as expats ? Let’s be honest here, it’s exclusively only ever used when it’s someone who’s predominately white and from the west (and either rich themselves or come from a rich country)

You answered the question yourself: they're laborers, brought in by a third party for a specific purpose like construction, living their lives entirely controlled by the company (housing and food provided, etc) and kicked out as soon as they become unneeded.

Expats have a great deal more agency about their lives: where they live, where they work, when to return, etc.

To be clear, I don't particularly like this distinction, but it absolutely is a thing in the Middle East down to separate immigration lines at airports, and if anything glossing it over by calling the Bangladeshi construction worker living in a container in the brutal heat and sharing a latrine with 50 other guys an "expat" does nobody any favors. Or was the American South powered by African "expat" labor too?

Huh? The term expat is absolutely used for those workers. Have you even been to the middle east?

No one calls then immigrants either. They are temporary workers.

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