{"id":219,"date":"2018-01-23T21:17:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T21:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/?p=219"},"modified":"2018-03-16T12:46:14","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T12:46:14","slug":"expats-vs-migrants-talking-about-identities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/2018\/01\/23\/expats-vs-migrants-talking-about-identities\/","title":{"rendered":"Expat vs migrant – Talking about identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

During last October I visited an exhibition, presented within a project of \u201cOpen Source Government\u201d called \u201cIdeology Meets Implementation<\/a>\u201d. In this context I took part in an interactive artwork created by Pendar\u00a0Nabipour, an Iranian artist, living and working in the Netherlands.<\/em> A<\/em>s presented in the attached picture, visitors were asked, at the entrance, to choose between acceding the place as either expats or migrants. Instinctively I\u2019ve chosen the \u201cexpat\u201d gate, without questioning my choice. Later on, while talking with the artist, I understood that the big majority of visitors emphatically identified themselves with the migrants. The experience made me feel uncomfortable and it stirred an inner debate. Why did I so confidently choose the expat identity? After some deliberate reflection,\u00a0 I began to understand why.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve reflexively chosen expat because I\u2019m a Romanian and, as Romanian, I carry the fear of being discriminated or facing prejudices. In front of that symbolic border, I\u2019ve subconsciously ran away from a potential negative, collective, perception. While personally I have never encountered direct discrimination, for a long time, media around West of Europe had a very inflammatory coverage of Romania and of workers coming from my country. Despite Romania being a Member of the European Union(\u201cEU\u201d) and my fellow citizens, as EU citizens, having the right to work in any of the countries forming the Union(fully since 2014), we were called migrants, more precisely migrants ready to invade different national, labour, markets. This attitude made us feel stepped on primarily because a \u201cmigrant\u201d is defined according to the EU law, as a citizen of a country\u00a0 outside EU . For Romanians this confusion was painful especially because we had to face it right after our accession to the EU, after the long process of preparations, when we were eager to enjoy the perks of what we thought it was our well-deserved reward.<\/p>\n

In this context I\u2019ve become, like many other fellow Romanians, defensive and I\u2019ve gradually taken up an alternative identity, a cosmopolitan one, with an larger dimension, namely that of citizen of European Union. For me such an identity equalled\u00a0 the freedom of movement, but it also gave me the feeling of belonging to an wider community of those who study abroad, work abroad, travelled, was mobile and existed in a transnational environment.<\/p>\n

However, the moment I\u2019ve settled down in the Netherlands, where the big majority of the population still perceives \u201cEU citizenship\u201d as a very conceptual notion, I came to realize that at \u201cnational level\u201d society is still divided between nationals and foreigners. Enjoying my residence came however smoothly.\u00a0 Moreover, after learning Dutch I was not only able to integrate, but to also better understand the local culture.\u00a0 Today I don\u2019t really feel as a foreigner, but neither as a Dutch. Netherlands is my adopted homeland and I\u2019m just a Romanian, married with a Dutch citizen and a mother for our little girl, who happens to have a Dutch citizenship. We do live in a suburb of Amsterdam, known as \u201cthe expat\u2019s heaven\u201d and we are accordingly surrounded by people having very diverse backgrounds. Here people communicate in English alongside Dutch and kids usually speak more than two languages. There is a syncretism of cultures, but also a strong appetence for experiencing different cultures, including the local one.<\/p>\n

What defines us and people around us is an element of transnationality, but also unpredictability. We love the Netherlands, and we would love our daughter to absorb the Dutch identity and culture, but we could very much end up living in a totally different corner of this Planet. We developed an emotional bond to all the countries we have lived in or visited. And exactly because of this bond, we don\u2019t label our identity, but we also don\u2019t know anymore which country to call \u201chome\u201d.\u00a0 Therefore we don\u2019t perceive our identity as fixed, but fluid, nomadic. We believe in a world where human mobility is a fundamental right, protected universally. In the end we are all \u201cnative foreigners\u201d, aren\u2019t we?<\/p>\n

Ps. If it happens to be in Amsterdam in the coming months, please go and visit the exhibition \u201cI am a native foreigner<\/a>\u201d at the Stedelijk Museum<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  During last October I visited an exhibition, presented within a project of \u201cOpen Source Government\u201d called \u201cIdeology Meets Implementation\u201d. In this context I took part in an interactive artwork created by Pendar\u00a0Nabipour, an Iranian artist, living and working in the Netherlands. As presented in the attached picture, visitors were asked, at the entrance, to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[42,38,40,39,28,43,41,37],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-artist","tag-citizenship","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-expat","tag-identity","tag-law","tag-migrant"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/22713253_1726128724072685_1921356286628900416_o-1-e1516742174288.jpg?fit=1200%2C900&ssl=1","views":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p92Eyv-3x","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sarahandthebluemoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}