Migrants vs. Immigrants

This is not the type of blog I usually write, but I thought it was a really interesting distinction that I felt was worth delving deeper into. While the entire story line of Exit West centers around the idea of people fleeing their country and seeking new lives in a different country, Mohsin Hamid never calls these refugees immigrants, rather he exclusively refers to them as migrants. (I don’t know this for a fact because no PDF is available online for me to check this, but it is true as far as my memory and skimming skills can tell.) Nothing is particularly strange about this choice except when I read about the Syrian Refugee Crisis or the influx of people from Mexico, the media always seemed to use immigrant instead.

Perplexed I decided to look up the exact definitions of immigrant and migrant. Immigrant is defined as “a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.” Migrant is defined as “a person who moves from one place to another, especially in order to find work or better living conditions.” The thing that stuck out to me the most about these definitions is immigrant’s emphasis on permanent and foreign. An interesting article in The San Diego Union-Tribune, titled “‘Immigrant’ vs. ‘migrant’; what’s the difference?”, expands the differences beyond the dictionary definition. In the United States immigrant has a legal definition that focuses on the settling in the new country. Furthermore, immigrant has many negative connotations associated with it like illegal, undocumented, etc. Migrant, on the other hand, is an “umbrella term” and encompasses refugees and those just leaving for economic reasons, causing it to have a less negative connotation. Additionally, news outlets with a wide, international audience like the New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters tend to prefer to use migrant while local outlets typically use immigrant.

So now you know way more about the differences between immigrant and migrant than you ever needed or wanted to know, but I think knowing the differences adds a whole new layer to Exit West. One of the main conflicts in this book is the conflicts between the natives and migrants. Besides the fact that the two protagonists Nadia and Saeed are refugees, Hamid subtlety shifts the readers opinion in favor of the refugees with the use of the word migrant because the use of the word immigrant would automatically shift the perspective to those already settled, the natives. These people are not actively trying to settle in a new place or take it over; they are just trying to escape where they came from. This is shown in Nadia and Saeed’s willingness to leave Mykonos and London. Until they arrive in California there is no indication that they want to stay anywhere permanently, just the desire to move from one place to another. We, the natives, impose this idea of permanence on the refugees because of our fear of the permanent and irrevocable changes they will cause our home. Hamid’s use of the word migrant helps us look through the lenses of the fleeing refugee.

It is possible that Hamid unconsciously chose to use migrant as that’s how all British news outlets referred to those fleeing from Syria around the time Exit West would have been written, but I like to think that it was a purposeful decision meant to sway us ever so slightly to supporting the thousands of migrants looking for escape in our country.