The Strange Story of Those Who Left and Changed Their Name

The hierarchy of mobility: expats, migrants and the different meanings of crossing a border

Are you a migrant?

No, I'm an expat.

Oh. And what's the difference?

Well, I came here by choice.

And the other person?

What other person?

The one who came by choice too.

Perhaps we can start here. With a word. Or rather, with two.

Because sometimes all it takes is changing the name of something to change the way we look at it.

Leaving is leaving, you might say. You pack a suitcase, cross a border and arrive in another country. Some people leave with an employment contract, some with a scholarship, some because they cannot find a job that allows them to make a living, some because they want to try a different life. Some leave already knowing where they will sleep. Others do not even know where they will sleep tomorrow.

But then comes the name.

And not everyone is given the same one.

The word with the elegant passport

Expat.

A short, international, apparently neutral word.

We use it to describe people who live outside their own country, often for work, study or personal choice. But the term is not simply a geographical description. Research on privileged migration has long shown that expatriate is also a social category, connected to status, class, nationality, racialisation and professional position.

Margherita Di Salvo, studying the use of the word expat among Italian communities abroad, has shown how different definitions — emigrant, expatriate, migrant, brain drain migrant — are not simply synonyms, but can take on different meanings depending on who is speaking, who is being described and the social context.

And this is where things get interesting.

Because expat does not necessarily mean rich.

And migrant does not necessarily mean poor.

The issue is more subtle than that.

It is about how certain people are perceived when they cross a border.

A Western professional who moves to Singapore, Dubai, London or Lisbon for a few years may be described as an expat. A person from a country in the Global South, with a degree, a skilled profession and an employment contract, may instead continue to be perceived simply as a migrant.

Sophie Cranston's research has highlighted precisely this paradox: expatriate is often used to distinguish certain migrants from others, implicitly constructing the idea of a “good” migrant — desirable, temporary and, above all, Western.

So it is not the suitcase that makes the difference.

Nor, on its own, is it the profession.

It is the position that person occupies within a much larger hierarchy.

The name you choose. The name you are given.

There is a question perhaps worth asking:

Why is “expat” perceived as an identity that some people can choose, while “migrant” becomes almost a condition assigned to others?

This is where the word stops being innocent.

Because a person can say: “I'm an expat.”

But much more rarely do they choose to be called a “migrant” by someone else.

The difference is small only in appearance.

The selective use of the word can produce a discriminatory distinction between people who, despite having different experiences, share the same basic condition: living outside their own country.

Of course, their experiences are not the same.

Neither are their reasons for leaving, their income, passport, skin colour, education, knowledge of the language, possibility of returning, or right of residence.

But that is precisely why we need to look at mobility as a system.

Not everyone moves in the same way.

And above all, not everyone is valued in the same way when they move.

Italy has its expats too

The issue has recently returned to the centre of the Italian debate with the CNEL report Giovani Expat. Come farli tornare.

The report collected more than 2,500 responses from young Italians aged between 18 and 34 who had left the country; in the first version analysed, 93% of respondents had at least a university degree. CNEL talks about salaries, merit, professional opportunities and the loss of human capital.

It is a real and important phenomenon.

And there is nothing strange about it being discussed.

Quite the opposite.

What is interesting, however, is to look at the words being used.

They are young expats.

They are human capital.

They are talent to be brought back.

They are skills the country has lost and should recover.

The language is not accidental.

When a young Italian leaves, their departure can be described as a loss of human capital. When efforts are made to bring them back, the language is about attracting talent, incentives, opportunities and competitiveness.

Somewhere along the way, the person has become an economic resource.

That is not necessarily wrong; but it is revealing.

There have also been public policies designed to encourage those who had left to return, through incentives and tax benefits intended to turn experience gained abroad into new activities and new growth.

They left as people.

They returned as human capital.

The transformation is small, almost invisible.

But it says a great deal about the way we govern mobility.

Why some people are sought after

Meanwhile, a genuine market for international mobility has developed.

It is no longer simply a matter of leaving.

There are agencies that help people relocate, relocation services, tax advisers, international recruitment platforms, websites comparing salaries and the cost of living, and guides for professionals who want to choose the best country in which to work.

An entire economy has been built around the possibility of moving.

For some people, the question is:

Where would it be best for me to live?

For others:

Where will I be allowed to go?

These are very different questions.

And yet both are about the same thing: mobility.

The European Union demonstrates this particularly clearly.

On the one hand, EU citizens have the right to freedom of movement. On the other, for people arriving from third countries, access to the territory and labour market is governed by a different set of procedures, requirements and channels.

Not all passports provide the same freedom of movement.

A border, then, is not simply a geographical line; it is also a difference in possibilities.

A passport is not just a document

Imagine two identical people.

Same age. Same suitcase. Same clothes. Same qualifications. Same employment contract.

They arrive at the same airport.

The only difference is their passport.

The person does not change.

What the State can ask of them does.

The visa changes.

The procedure changes.

The right of residence changes.

Sometimes, even the way they are looked at changes.

This is why talking about “freedom of movement” without talking about passports risks telling only half the story.

Not all passports open the same doors.

And not all borders work in the same way for everyone.

A border can be a police check, a visa, an administrative procedure.

But it can also be a job interview.

A bank.

A rental agreement.

An algorithm.

An accent.

A surname.

A border does not have to be visible to be operational.

The governance of mobility

This brings us to perhaps the most interesting point.

Mobility is not simply a political issue.

It is a question of governance.

Who is allowed to move?

Who has to be selected?

Who has to be controlled?

Who is considered a resource?

Who is considered a risk?

In June 2026, the new European Pact on Migration and Asylum entered into application. The package strengthens registration and screening procedures at the EU's external borders, changes asylum and return procedures, and introduces new mechanisms for managing migratory pressure. At the same time, however, the European strategy also places emphasis on regular migration and the mobility of workers and talent.

The two are not contradictory.

They are part of the same system.

Controlling mobility and organising it are two functions of the same governance.

On one side, procedures are created to identify, register and select people and, where applicable, refuse entry or return them.

On the other, tools are created to attract the people considered necessary.

This is exactly what is happening with the new EU Talent Pool, the European platform designed to facilitate the recruitment of people living outside the Union for occupations facing labour shortages. The system matches skills, qualifications and professional experience with the needs of European labour markets. The platform is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2027.

Put simply:

not all forms of mobility are stopped.

Some are organised.

Some are encouraged.

Some are filtered.

Some are obstructed.

So the question is not whether Europe wants mobility or not.

The question is:

what kind of mobility does it want?

The border begins long before the boundary

It is easy to think of borders as the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Ceuta and Melilla, control centres, walls and fences.

They are borders.

But they are not the only ones.

The border begins much earlier.

It begins when a person has to prove that they are sufficiently qualified.

When they have to prove that they have enough money.

When they have to prove that they have a reason considered valid for entering.

When an employer decides that hiring them is worth going through the necessary procedure.

When one country is considered a place from which to attract skills and another a place from which arrivals must be controlled.

The same person can therefore be, at the same time, a worker, a foreigner, a talent, a migrant, a professional or an irregular migrant, depending on the door they are standing in front of.

And it is not the person who changes.

What changes is the administrative, economic or social category through which they are seen.

There is one thing words cannot hide

We can go on discussing endlessly whether expat is an elegant, modern, international word.

We can even decide that we like it.

The point is not to ban it.

The point is to understand when and why we use it.

Because if a word is used predominantly for certain nationalities, certain social classes, certain professional profiles and certain forms of mobility, then it stops being just a word.

It becomes a position.

And that position can be privileged.

Sociologist Sarah Kunz has argued that expatriate should not be treated as a natural category, but as a category to be examined: a social practice shaped by racialisation, gender, class, nationality and even colonial legacies.

Perhaps, then, the point is not to establish who really is an expat.

Perhaps it is to understand who has the privilege of choosing the name through which they tell the story of their departure.

And who, instead, finds that name placed upon them before they even have the chance to speak.

The person left. The name came afterwards.

In the end, we return to that conversation.

Are you a migrant?

No, I'm an expat.

Oh. And what's the difference?

Perhaps the answer does not lie in the person; it lies in the road ahead of them.

In the passport they carry in their pocket.

In the work they are able to look for.

In the visa they can obtain.

In the country they come from.

In the way they are looked at when they arrive.

Because leaving can be a choice.

But the possibility of choosing where, how and under what name to leave is not distributed equally.

Mobility has become one of the great promises of our time.

To move, to discover, to work elsewhere, to change countries.

But behind that promise lies a hierarchy worth looking at without turning our eyes away.

Not all journeys have the same value.

Not all departures are told in the same way.

Not everyone who crosses a border is called by the same name.

And perhaps that is precisely what makes this story so strange:

a person leaves.

They cross a border.

Then someone changes their name.

And it is from that name that an entirely different story often begins.