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In Tough Times, the Career Expat is a Sitting Duck
Why the skilled, white-collared migrant worker is the perfect whipping boy in the age of globalization and corporatization.
I recently wrote an article about what it felt like to watch my expatriate life in Hong Kong come to an end. The story engaged people in a way that I hadn’t expected. I received comments from readers who identified with the expat lifestyle and its accompanying psychological dissonance. I also received comments from readers expressing outrage at what they perceived to be a lifestyle of unwarranted privilege and a disregard for the environment. My critics expressed what seemed to me to be strong anti-capitalists sentiments, and they had plenty of viciously interesting things to say about my former expat life.
This morning, I read a BBC article about the Singapore government’s attempts to curb the number of high-earning expats coming into the country. Singapore’s finance minister Lawrence Wong said, “Countries everywhere face the same concerns about whether foreigners are taking over jobs and opportunities for locals, whether this might result in higher income and wealth inequalities, whether there will be unfair hiring practices, these are not unique to Singapore.” He added that these concerns have always been there, but that they have been “accelerated, amplified by the pandemic.”
