To expect to have the opportunity to vote in the EU referendum

[Mistigri]

I'm British living abroad in the EU. As things stand I don't expect to get a vote in the EU referendum - the Tory right will fiercely resist enfranchising both 16 and 17 year olds, and expats.

AIBU to believe that the estimated 2-3 million British people who have taken advantage of free movement within the EU should get the right to vote on this issue?

(I don't have or expect a vote in general elections btw, as a general rule I don't believe that people who are tax-resident elsewhere should have the right to choose a government that doesn't affect them directly.)

Also, it's a myth that the "expat" (ie British immigrant - let's call a spade a spade) community is largely self funding.

In the big cities like Paris or Tolouse or Frankfurt this is probably true. However in rural France and Spain, these immigrants are undoubtedly a net drain on local economies, because they are old (big consumers of healthcare) and poor. I know not a single British family locally which is totally self-funding. I help run a group for English speaking families in France, and benefits and how to claim them are the single largest subject of conversation. Jobs here are low paid and not easy to get, especially if you don't speak fluent french (the vast majority of British expats in France don't) and the British are therefore mostly living on low paid and precarious self-employed work, usually selling services to the expat community (often on the black), meaning that they are enthusiastic consumers of benefits.

These are the people you'll be getting back. Giving them a vote is in your interests ;)

Thanks TooBee. I'm really worried for the future - I can't imagine that the thousands of EU nationals suddenly applying for citizenship will run smoothly. And without dh's EU funded job (he's an academic - God knows what leaving the EU will mean for our universities) I'm not sure where the necessary £1000 will come from

My chances of being a "self funding" expat will be zilch if all the other expats bugger off, as they are my source of income.

So what do I do? Come back to the UK and take my chances with all the other unemployed? Try to claim benefits here? Get deported?

Or continue to be a tax paying, contributing part of the society in which I have chosen to live, and yes I do contribute to the UK economy too.

Fucks sake why shouldn't I have a say in my own future?

Fingers crossed you get the chance fortunately. You are like most of the British immigrants I know, "hard working people" who make a relatively modest living and are unlikely to be net contributors if you look simply at taxes paid and benefits/services consumed. Of course many contribute non-financially: I know british people who are town councillors, work for local non-profit associations, run sports clubs for kids etc.

Of course they are not all like that and there are quite a few I'd happily see despatched back to the mother ship ;)

People see to think that in the event of a brexit it would be easy for the UK to negotiatena favourable alternative, but I think the practical reality is that EU states would see little reason to make concessions, especially on freedom of labour and social security/health care access.

OH is an EU national working at a large company's EU headquarters in the UK. Over 50% of his colleagues are EU nationals. The uncertainty alone prior to a referendum could be damaging when business decisions are being made.

I hope the thousands of EU citizens living, working and paying tax in the UK get a say as well as those UK nationals currently residing in other EU countries.

What I find terrifying is the prospect of losing my job. I work in a sector which is entirely dependent on other migrants, and although I am highly skilled in the UK it's not a skill which I can utilise in the non expat community in the host country.

So my choice is work where I work at the moment, or not work at all.

If I lose my job I can't get another in the host country. However I can't leave the host country as I'm divorced with a dual nationality child. I already know I can't leave as I've tried though the courts to come home and been told no (exh stopped me).

So if I can't work, what happens to my child? I can't stay without a job, but I can't leave with my child.

I'd love to hear what yes voters think I should do!

YANBU at all op and thanks for starting a thread on an issue I haven't thought about. It seems ridiculous that British migrants shouldn't have a say in this decision.

We sell c£12bn of goods to the EU each month, they sell c£20bn into the UK. It is very much in thier interest to play ball and let the UK be an odd outlier.

I'm an EU migrant who has decided not to take British citizenship as my country of origin does not allow dual citizenship. Where that puts me is anyone's idea, except that I live in Scotland and I imagine we'd be falling over ourselves to organise another independence referendum and apply for membership of the EU on the double.

RolodexOfHate

Yes. How horrible of me to distance myself from a word that props up a scale of acceptability in terms of emigrants/immigrants and is used to differentiate between acceptable people and "yukky spongers stealing all our jobs !" based on race and nation of birth.

It wasn't personal to you, the bloody thing is everywhere. Despite my best efforts even I fall flat on my face and use it sometimes. Long term habits are hard to break. When talking about the problem of EU migration, it's pretty much always "expats" for us, and immigrants/economic migrants for t'others. If that doesn't get challenged it will be all the harder to ask people to think about the less rosy ramifications of an out vote. Becuase they will be looking at a warped picture, propped up by vocabulary choice.

Owning the lable economic migrant, becuase... that is what I am, is not a race to the bottom. It's a race to leaving behind language that has come to acquire xenophobic and racist content. And dumping it is well overdue.

Right now is a good time to dump, and dump hard. Even if one's motivation is nothing more than raging self interest rather than a realisation of the not so nice whiff around expat v eco.mig. We have shot ourselves in the foot by hanging on to it. Becuase those of us that do not fit the picture of "could easily survive forced repatriation due to high level skills/buckets of money" are invisible to the people who will decide our fate. They have no idea that rather than a few Britons forced home wafting in, a tad miffed, but essentially able to transition with few hiccups... there are rather a lot of economic migrants of their own nationality. And they will hobble back in not insignificant numbers and need gobs of help, not waft.

However I can't leave the host country as I'm divorced with a dual nationality child.

Yes. I know a large fistful of other parents in similar circs. Having seen so often advice on here where people say "just leave and take the kids home" I don't think there is wide spread comprehension that you can't just take your children home if you want to if the other parents isn't on board. There are parents trapped by this reality all over the world. Their numbers would surge if an out vote happened. Both in the Uk and in the EU.

That is another drum we need to bang and hope to god people hear it.

Quite right,

A friend of mine in a different sector lost her job, and had to eventually go back to the UK trailing her debts behind her.

Her and her family had a year on welfare, then a council house and are just about getting back on their feet.

There will be many more like them if UK migrants start losing their source of income due to the UK leaving the EU.

AiCee No what was so horrible was how patronising you were to me.

The word expat is from latin - it just means living outside your country of nationality. Different people will attach different connotations to the word, but it's not my problem that you only associate it with negative connotations. Away from somewhere like Benidorm (not that I think you live there) it is definitely seen in a different light.

I think what people don't also realise is that if you are forced back to the UK, then you won't be entitled to benefits or housing anyway if you have been living abroad. It's going to be a mess!

I think "expat" should really be reserved for people who are temporarily expatriated, like british engineers working at Airbus in Toulouse . These people often retain strong links with the mother country, and educate their children in English-speaking schools ahead of a planned return home.

It is noticeable however that many british migrants living permanently in France really don't like being called immigrants, even though that's what they are. I think it's sad that immigrant has become such a dirty word.

Which makes many of your Romanian and Polish immigrants not immigrants but expats.

There you go, immigration crisis solved ;)

It's not a given that UK exit from the EU would mean that ex pats couldn't continue to live and work in the EU. It would require us to leave EFTA and EEA as well, which seems unlikely. There's plenty of Swiss and Norwegian nationals living and working in EU countries, without massive visa formalities.

But why would eurosceptics vote for remaining in the EEA, given that their main issue with the EU is labour movement, but this is a condition of EEA membership?

nothing wrong with expat

polish people (example) are quite free to call poles who live abroad whatever the polish for 'expat' is. i expect they do.

It depends if your objections to the EU are from the left (coming over here, taking our jobs and depressing wages) or from the right (coming over here to scrounge benefits). EEA nationals don't have an unconditional right to reside, and may have to have health insurance.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate
Not Benidorm

www.degruyter.com/view/j/njmr.2012.2.issue-3/v10202-011-0043-8/v10202-011-0043-8.xml?format=INT
Not Benidorm

www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration
Not Benidorm

www.thelocal.de/20140617/are-you-an-expat-or-immigrant-in-germany
Not Benidorm

magazine.good.is/articles/immigrant-v-expat
Not Benidorm

www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2011/expats-and-migrants
Not Benidorm

www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2011/apr/11/mind-your-language-expat-brits
Not Benidorm

I can get more. Google is extraordinarily generous on this topic.

We can be mealy mouthed and talk about dictionary definitions, origins of words that previously existed in a context that bears no relation to today's world and arguments about potential minute differences that may or may not have existed in the past. But we know in British sources:

-a Turk in Germany is more often than not referred to as a migrant worker/immigrant

-a Pole in Britain is more often than not referred to as an economic migrant/immigrant

-A Briton or American, anywhere except home, more often than not, is referred to as an expat.

It has nothing to do with differing reasons for coming, how long we stay, what we do for a living. That would require an interview per person regardless of exit point, a check list and some kind of agreed upon clear definition between the terms being behind who got called what.

IF there was just an objective specific ' how long / doing what / why" definition assigned to migrant worker/economic migrant/immigrant/expat as labels there would be considerable variance in the colour and national origins of the people in each seperate box of "foreign types".

But there isn't. Hand somebody an "foreign types" box, of all the "expat" references in the anglophone press, in any given week .... and they can predict correctly most of the nationalities contained within. Despite having an enitre world of nations to choose from.

IF there was a clear distinction between migrant worker, immigrant and expat we'd read more of this

"The number of Turkish migrant workers has fallen, whereas the number of Turkish immigrants is stable. In contrast expats from Turkey now number X."

and less of

"Turkish migrant workers now number X."

You'd even see references to "British migrant workers, immigrants and expats living in the rest of the EU..." in the Daily Mail. Cos it would be about distinct, measurable categories. And not value judgments.

We know these are subjective, value judgment laden terms. (Ever heard of an "illegal expat" ?)

If they weren't, almost no Britons/Americans/Australians etc. would be invested in clinging on to expat and there wouldn't be any need to scrabble away from being called a migrant worker, immigrant or economic migrant. Because it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference which one was used, so it would be no skin off anybody's nose in terms of how they viewed themselves, or how others viewed them.

Clinging to expat and its "not the same beastie as an immigrant/economic migrant" status isn't the best foot forward for Britons living and working in the EU who would rather not have a question mark plonked on their right to stay and work there. Many of the people who would vote Britain out of the EU will not factor in anything other than an outflow of immigrants and economic migrants.

Why would they ?

There are none to flow back in as far as they are aware.

Just some of those exotic expat creatures. Which is a completely different kettle of fish. Allegedly.

It's true that expat is often used as a way of not calling someone (or yourself) an immigrant. I'm on a mission on Facebook to reclaim the word immigrant from the right. In any population, immigrants are generally more open minded, more ambitious, more pioneering, more willing to take risks - and very often more intelligent and more educated - than those who stay at home. It's no wonder that the children of first generation immigrants often do so well at school :)

I have never once been described as an immigrant by anyone I've met in Britain unless it's someone who knows me well. I have been referred to as an expat numerous times.

I exclusively refer to myself as an immigrant. It's honest, it's what I am.

When I've asked people why they referred to me as an expat, I've had mumbled 'well, you're Australian, you're not a proper immigrant are you' and 'immigrant feels a bit rude' among similar variations upon a theme.

Expat is used to denote immigrants and emigrants who have society's stamp of approval. Immigrants and migrants are People We Don't Want Here.

No - You chose to go elsewhere and pay tax in a foreign country.

YABU and you have no right to any say on the matter.

That's a fabulously closed minded view there!

Goodness me I'm so glad that I travelled and expanded my horizons enough to see that maybe other people have differing views and a right to determine their own futures, God forbid I'd stayed in my home country and fostered a myopic "you chose it so you lump it" opinion.

That doesn't even make any sense! I chose to leave the UK under a certain set of circumstances - how was I to know the Tories would win a majority and moot a referendum! Fucking hell believe me if I'd had the power to predict the future I'd have bet the farm on Tories to win and made a fortune!

You can bet I see didn't see divorce and a kid on the horizon when I left the UK as a young free and single twenty something.

Oh dear, I'm having a wry smile to myself here

I always refer to myself as an immigrant. It's what I am.

I'm not leaving the UK - if the vote ends up being a yes to leaving, I'll naturalise - we are lucky enough that I can afford to, and to take the DCs (who were born here) along with me. I just think leaving would be a bad idea - for all the many logistical reasons outlined upthread and also for economic ones. I just hope the No camp will make its arguments crystal clear and in plain English, and I hope (but in vain) that the anti-EU right wing press will not hold as much sway over the referendum.