Do expats get annoyed by foreigners?

Long before the term gentrification was coined—a hybrid of a Spanish-English root that has nevertheless gained currency—popular wisdom had already coined the saying: “Guests will come and kick us out of our house.” In this increasingly globalized Western world, rejection of outsiders can reach xenophobic levels, like those wielded by figures like Trump and his “America first” ideology. But the truth is that the population of large cities is increasingly heterogeneous.

We've now coined a label for well-off foreigners who settle in towns like Barcelona: expat, which is short for the noun " expatriate. " The Neolosfera del Obneo (UPF's Neology Observatory) defines it this way: "It is used to refer to a person who resides in a country other than the one they were born in or the one they hold nationality in, and is typically applied to people sent abroad by the companies they work for. In this context, a person who may be seen as an expat in their country of origin may be perceived as an immigrant in the host country, but the reality is that the term "expat" is applied to people from developed countries, so it is a discriminatory and exclusionary term."

We already have names to discriminate against Western foreigners, positively or negatively.

When Obneo says "discriminatory and exclusionary," he doesn't mean it in a derogatory way, but rather the opposite. Calling someone an expat grants them a certain distinction, because they're someone who hasn't left their country in search of a better future, fleeing a war, or simply fighting for survival. They're usually people with medium to high purchasing power who can return home whenever they want.

I want to confess that it took me a while to get used to this new meaning because, as dictionaries still describe it, an expatriate (from the verb "expatriar ") referred to a person who had been forced to leave their country, as an exile or refugee. Now, however, this name has an aura of exaltation.

The problem is that now, in Barcelona, ​​expats and foreigners are mixed together. Both words refer to Western foreigners, but while the former has become positively discriminatory, the latter is negatively discriminatory. Many natives are annoyed by foreigners. But what about expats ? Are they also annoyed by their fellow citizens on vacation? An expat friend who works as a German teacher constantly expresses her displeasure at the uncivil behavior of her fellow citizens when they become hordes of foreigners. There's everything in the Lord's vineyard.