Expatriates or Emigrants: the Invisible Cost of Leaving

In the past, those who moved abroad were almost exclusively people fleeing poverty, war, or political repression, destined to become labour for mines, building sites and factories. The exceptions, among emigrants, were cosmopolitan aristocrats, artists, and political dissidents. The emerging middle class, in most countries, was too busy defining itself to imagine itself anywhere else.

Erasmus programmes and low-cost airlines gave my generation a new possibility: choosing a life elsewhere, far from our roots and from countries where the future felt increasingly narrow. At a moment when institutions such as political parties, the Church and the factories were completing their own process of dissolution, and with no great aggregating political causes left, leaving was an economic option and decidedly lacking in any epic quality. A large rucksack left over from a youth interrail trip, a bit of courage, and you could find yourself abroad in no time: many of us invaded European capitals without questioning too deeply what we were leaving behind. We did it out of simple curiosity, to improve living conditions that were already fairly comfortable, to extend our studies, becoming expats rather than migrants, according to a vocabulary that draws a sharp distinction between those who leave out of need and those who leave by choice.

We left with a light suitcase and a certainty that at the time seemed obvious: we could always go back. It wasn’t a flight, it was a parenthesis. Or at least that’s what we liked to think, in the early years, before we understood that parentheses, at a certain point, become the main text.

We moved between cities with an ease that surprises me today. We moved without job offers or contacts in the new cities, just a sense of adventure. Languages were learned out of necessity and pleasure at once, friendships formed quickly, in workplaces, shared houses, and Wednesday evening pubs. They were genuine friendships, I don’t doubt that, but they were born in a context where everyone was passing through and everyone, deep down, knew it. There was something light and slightly irresponsible about that way of being in the world, and I recognise it now, with hindsight. I was part of a generation convinced that identity could expand without losing anything, that adding a place to your life didn’t mean subtracting another. That you could belong here and there at the same time, at no cost. It was a generous and somewhat naive idea, and we believed it with a sincerity I find almost touching today. Expat is a word we use when we want to feel in control.

Then came those who were leaving for real, without metaphors. They didn’t call themselves expatriates, but emigrants, even when they avoided the word. I realised this gradually, over the years, meeting people who had made a similar journey to mine but carrying a completely different weight on their shoulders. I remember a colleague who arrived in Dublin from Sicily with almost no English and a part-time contract in a warehouse. He lived with four others in a two-bedroom flat in Tallaght, never went out to the pub in the evenings to save money, and spent his weekends studying for a qualification that would allow him to apply for a better job. He wasn’t looking for a city to explore. He was looking for the stability he hadn’t found in Italy, and which he was building here centimetre by centimetre, with a patience that I, with my permanent contract and my flat to myself, could not have managed. In their stories, there was no epic of the journey, but the accounting of sacrifices: wages to chase, shifts to cover, rents to split, documents to obtain in a language that wasn’t theirs. They weren’t looking for cafés with the right character or neighbourhoods with the right atmosphere. They were looking for something simpler and harder: a dignified life, perhaps a family that could grow without the anxiety of tomorrow.

Over time I understood that between us there was not only a difference of words, but of necessity. I could afford to go back, they often couldn’t. I collected experiences, they accumulated resilience. And yet, in the long evenings away from home, our solitudes resembled each other: nostalgia makes no distinctions of status. Perhaps that is where the two roads cross, in the shared desire to belong to something without giving up what one has been. And so I understand that being an expatriate or an emigrant is not just a condition, but an invisible measure of freedom and need, of choice and destiny.

The early years were marked by the adrenaline of discovery: a new language, urban routes to explore, friends who showed other ways of living and working conditions more favourable than those in Italy. My Dublin nights never seemed to end. Parties at home had more friends than square metres. The only regret was not having left sooner.

We felt cosmopolitan in our thinking and provincial in our affections, in a world that seemed far more manageable than it does now. There was also a form of smugness I look back on with some embarrassment: living abroad made us feel a cut above. We looked at Italy with fond condescension, happy to return a few times a year to see friends and family, and to leave again with a pillow in our luggage. We imagined, at most, going back one day, in old age.

When you’re young, the future is a strange concept: it only exists in its nearest form. What matters most are the years immediately ahead, where you can work better, earn more, where life is more stimulating and where you can enjoy yourself more. You don’t look further ahead, and choices don’t seem to carry any definitive weight.

Many of us, at a certain point, crossed an invisible threshold. A relationship, a professional opportunity, a flat that becomes available. And a foreign city is no longer a place of passage or a subject of anthropological research, but becomes a new home. For some it was a deliberate choice, for others simply a series of coincidences.

Once the momentum of discovery and wonder had run its course, the places that had once seemed exotic became part of everyday life. In Dublin, I began building an international career, I got married, I have a mortgage and a house where I tend a Mediterranean garden. To a stranger’s eyes, I am the expat who has integrated perfectly, and in some ways that is true. This doesn’t stop me from noticing the fragility of this balance. Every return home confirms the unchanged affection of friends and family, but also the evidence that a place you have left for decades does not wait for you.

Simone Weil recognised in enracinement, rootedness, the most important and least acknowledged need of the human soul, defining it as active participation in the life of a community that preserves the past and prepares the future. Living elsewhere, our past and our future inhabit two different places.

The European cities in which we live have become less and less welcoming: rising rents, increasingly fierce competition for both creative and intellectual work and for manual jobs, neighbourhoods once accessible now transformed beyond recognition by gentrification. My view of Dublin has grown more critical, more demanding. Partly because that is what age does to you, but also because, for this country, I gave up living in my own.

The feeling now is that we were pioneers of a way of being in the world whose real cost we hadn’t understood at the outset. Not the economic cost, that we knew well enough. The other cost, the one paid in terms of continuity, of presence, of all the things you say later, soon, next time, which then never happen or happen differently from how you’d imagined. We find ourselves living with conflicts we hadn’t even conceived of when we left. Not because we were naive, but because at twenty or thirty certain costs can only be seen in theory, not yet felt.

There is a German word I came across late, which describes well what many of us felt when we left: fernweh, the longing for elsewhere, the restlessness of wanting to be somewhere other than where you are. It is the right word for that impulse that sets us in motion, that physical sensation of wanting to see what lies beyond the perimeter of the familiar.

Its opposite, heimweh, the longing for home, comes later. Not always dramatically, often quietly and sideways. For me, it arrived on a March afternoon, a few years ago, while I was planting rosemary in the Dublin garden. I was trying to recreate something, I wasn’t quite sure what, perhaps just a scent, a particular quality of light, a way of being outside at the end of the day that belongs to another latitude. The garden came out well, and the rosemary too. But it wasn’t the same thing, and I knew it.

There is no moral to this. There is no regret of someone who took the wrong road, nor the satisfaction of someone who made the right choice. There is only the awareness, arrived slowly, that every choice carries with it something that doesn’t come back. That home, in the end, is not a place. It is a question you keep asking yourself, in whatever language.

We like to think the difference between expatriates and emigrants is about attitude, lifestyle, or even language. But it isn’t. It’s about power. Expatriates leave with options. Emigrants leave with reasons.

And somewhere between those two, many of us realise we didn’t just move country, we crossed a line we can’t fully uncross.