shattering paradise - or, the difference between an 'economic migrant' and an 'expat'

As Gaby Hinsliff writing in today's Guardian suggests, influencers have sold the world a fantasy Dubai – and now it’s gone in a puff of missile smoke:

The city was portrayed as an aspirational place to live, but now those who moved there are realising the precarity that comes with being an economic migrant.

Who could have guessed that living a few hundred miles as the drone flies from Tehran might have risks? Certainly not the anonymous hedge funder who fumed to the Financial Times that “the trade was not that you were getting exposed to geopolitics”.

But if it’s hard to sympathise with the super-rich, as they discover that there are some things money can’t buy, then they are not the only Britons trapped in the Gulf. The deal Dubai offered economic migrants – which is what Britons seeking a better life in the Gulf are, much as some will hate the label – was a kind of real-life Truman Show: a sunny, shiny, sterilised low-crime haven for anyone itching to get rich or stay that way, sustained by stiff penalties for anyone publicly shattering its illusions.

Today's London Standard points out that influencers in Dubai have been warned they face prison for posting material about the conflict with Iran.

And earlier in the week, the Daily Mail's Guy Adams looked at The inside story of how the hollow Dubai dream has come crashing down... as expats are sent mysterious menacing warnings from the UAE government which hint all might not be as well as it seems.

Here we are looking at the world of the 'expat' - and a decade ago, the BBC was considering the difference between an expat and an immigrant:

The word expat is loaded. It carries many connotations, preconceptions and assumptions about class, education and privilege — just as the terms foreign worker, immigrant and migrant call to mind a different set of assumptions.

But what makes one person an expat, and another a foreign worker or migrant? Often the former is used to describe educated, rich professionals working abroad, while those in less privileged positions — for example, a maid in the Gulf states or a construction worker in Asia — are deemed foreign workers or migrant workers. The classification matters, because such language can in some cases be used as a political tool or to dehumanise — as the debate around the word “migrant” suggests.

It's not just 'semantics', it's also a question of law: Expat vs Immigrant vs Migrant vs Refugee vs Asylee Defined | American Visa Law Group

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