R.I.P. American Expat (1918-2025)

The Party’s Over, People. We’re All Émigrés Now

A sommarstuga by a lake.

In July, Stockholm is a ghost town. The seasonal cycle goes like this: In April, Swedes trickle outside, where they have not been spotted since the prior August. By the time the white nights hit, the town is unrecognizable, with cafes packed with smiling, tanned Swedes. Then, in July, poof! Everyone decamps to their sommarstuga, usually a rustic cabin in the woods somewhere. Everyone and their mother has a stuga, except me. I like summer in the city and there’s nothing I particularly need to escape.

Except America. I’ve been in the middle of a big fuck you, because the country of my birth is destroying itself before my eyes. It’s been hot and quiet here. So when I received an email from a team of sociologists at a university in Philly, inviting me to participate in a research project on the perceptions of American expats in Europe, I accepted. Specifically, they wanted to know how living abroad may have shaped my perceptions of social differences between the U.S. and Sweden, such as work-life balance and overall quality of life. You know what shaped those perceptions the most? The hundreds of messages I get from people at home, asking how they could get the fuck out. I got so many I put together a guide.

Anyway, the timing was eerie. Just that morning, a friend in the South of France had mentioned that the Americans there were bitching about the lack of air conditioning amid a raging heat wave. But he didn’t call them “Americans.” He called them “émigrés.” This was new. A chill ran down my spine. Americans abroad don’t look like expats anymore and I know why: They’re not going home.

“Expat” is a loaded word. It can start a war on Reddit. Unlike an immigrant, a migrant, or a refugee, an expat is associated with privilege, wealth and whiteness. In its Lost Generation variant, it’s the artists and writers of 1920s Paris. Dazed by grief and aimless after the destruction of World War I, they drew on that energy to bloom creatively. In its South of the Border variety, the expat is a disreputable, alcoholic and grubby loser (cf. Banana Republics, Jimmy Buffet). The Asian stripe has its fair share of sex-pats, alongside outcasts and ESL teachers. The Eastern European cultivar (which included me) flourished after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Prague and Budapest. We attempted to recreate the Paris of Les Années Folles, but succeeded only in achieving liver damage and beautiful memories.

The sociologists proposed to explore what compelled me to move abroad, what my experiences as an expat were like, and how I “compare social differences.” Their goal? A greater sociological understanding of American expats and “contemporary views on American exceptionalism.” Oh, honey, be careful what you wish for.

I wondered who they were expecting. Your classic latter-day expat is a corporate animal with a chipper outlook, a dry cleaner and a fancy title. That’s not me. I’m scarred and pissed off and I stalk my ex country online, desperately hoping for an uprising and, in my darker moments, much worse.

Anyway, I’m not really an expat. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines that simply as “a person who lives in a foreign country,” but it’s more complicated than that. If I’m any kind of expat, I’m a rex-pat, a repeat offender. But I’m really an immigrant, because I plan to die in Sweden, or at least in Europe. I’m also a dual citizen, which should factor in somewhere. And I’m an émigré, like those sweltering former Americans in France, because I left the country of my birth in part for political reasons. Whatever I am, I’m not going back there and neither are a lot of those chipper corporate expats. They’re trying to finagle a way to stay here, because the current state of American exceptionalism? It’s sitting in a for-profit prison in El Salvador with its head shaved.

I don’t know what I am. A Swede without a stuga. An American without a country.

The United Nation’s Organization for Migration defines an expat as “a person who voluntarily renounces his or her nationality.” But most of us don’t go that far, despite the enraging consequences for taxes and banking. In my lifetime, the game has been to collect as many passports as possible in order to widen your options, but that’s changing. Fresh research documents the American expats’ growing desire to renounce their citizenship, citing political frustration and concerns about affordability. The financial burdens on expats, described so well by Caroline Smrstik here, are another reason. There’s also, survey respondents reported, a sense that the U.S. has lost its global standing. No shit.

I get filthy comments on my work, lots of them. I seem to trigger a certain swathe of Americans. They seem not approve of me, a mere woman, having opinions and, further, they do not favor the opinions themselves. They reckon that leaving the country, as I did, is plain cheating. And obtaining a second citizenship through marriage, as I did, is double cheating, for reasons I don’t fully understand (although I suspect it’s because, for them, marriage is supposed to privilege only men). They see a “COWARD who turned Tail and ran!!!” These folks often confuse Sweden with Switzerland, but you can’t really hold that against them (it’s such a common problem that the Swedish Tourism Board was forced to make a video to address it). One of them wrote, “Dont let Switzerland hit you on the ASS on the way out!!” I couldn’t get the idea of this Swiss spanking out of my head. I was laughing for days.

I can’t help but notice their misspellings as I delete their comments and block them. Three times now, I’ve seen the word “expatriate” misspelled as “expatriot.” This coinage is an eggcorn, a word or phrase that results from mishearing or reinterpreting (or misspelling!) another word or phrase, creating a new expression that makes sense in the same context. I think it’s brilliant, however unlikely the source. I think my greasy brethren got it right for once. I think it may be the answer.