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I reverted two of your edits to Chengdu. You'd changed "expatriate" or "expat" to "immigrant" & that seems wrong to me; many expats are there for only a few years. If you think this is debatable (I don't), start a discussion at Talk:Chengdu. Pashley (talk) 23:59, 6 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Checking, I find you've done the same in other places & @Ibaman: has reverted those. Please stop this. Pashley (talk) 00:18, 7 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

‘Expat’ is a colonial word. Immigrants move in order to work, and so do expats, but the word immigrants has negative connotations, so expat is the word used for English speaking immigrants. AbsoluteCow (talk) 08:05, 7 April 2025 (UTC)Reply

Can you show evidence that "expatriate" was invented to describe colonists? According to Merriam-Webster, "expatriate" was first used as a transitive verb meaning "banish, exile" in 1768, and that is still the first definition they give the word. Where is the positive connotation in that? In addition, the word has a different definition from "immigrant." The definitions overlap but have different connotations. Here are some definitions from Merriam-Webster:

expatriate:

a person who lives in a foreign country

Hemingway himself in The Sun Also Rises, 1926, had given the picture of the dislocated life of young English and American expatriates in the bars of Paris, the "lost generation," as Gertrude Stein defined them.—

Robert Penn Warren

immigrant:

a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence

You are not entirely wrong about current usage, and I would object strenuously to describing American oil workers in Dubai as "expatriates" but Indian contract construction workers or Filipino maids on temporary work visas as "immigrants." I think your solution of using the word "foreign" in the Chengdu guide is fine, but I do think people on temporary work visas who don't intend to stay permanently in a country can be described as something other than immigrants. Foreign workers might be clearest. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:33, 7 April 2025 (UTC)Reply