Now for something completely different and equally fun. I had a conversation recently with a couple of friends over a coffee get together(beer might have been better!) One of them wondered why when Americans move to Costa Rica they are called expats, while when Costa Ricans move to America they are called immigrants? Why do we make this distinction in the words we use?
My friend is getting older, the years are piling up for him and he is getting a bit soft it seems. This difference in language seemed to him just another form of culture-centric bias. We are needlessly treating whatever an American does as special and we shouldn’t. It could be cultural bias, however there is a deeper reason for this distinction and this is a great subject to unpack. It does actually make sense.
An American typically isn’t going to live in Costa Rica to become Costa Rican. He is going there as a tourist, if on an extended stay. He is going to keep most of America in him. Mostly he is there for a nice weather, beaches and low cost of living. He does not want to merge with the old world.
The Costa Rican on the other hand is likely coming to America to transform himself. He wants to escape the old world with all of its requirements and restrictions. The promise of America, in imagination at least if not necessarily in reality, is that he can shed these layers and reinvent himself to be something more what he wants to be.
There are degrees and exceptions of course, but this theme has always been a characteristic of migration in and out of the US. One one level it speaks to the power of American wealth generation. To reinvent yourself you need a safe, stable and prosperous life setting. This America has provided( with varying degrees) far more than many parts of the old world.
You also need the cultural freedom and this is America’s superpower. The old world, whether Costa Rica or Germany or England or India or wherever, provides a cultural template for what you have to be. This is the old mythic way of living. It tells you what is right and wrong, gives you a place, a role. You can be something but often that’s all you can be and you may not like it.
America, because of its geography, its loose personal and cultural ties allows you the space to go out and be a lot of things, or at least try. You may not succeed, and you may well wish you didn’t have so much choice, but the opportunity is there. This openness allows you to hustle for what you want. So you have all kinds of endeavors happening in all kinds of realms, leading to a great amount of soft power via movies, music and pop culture.
Our pluralistic politically correct world does not like to make judgements but this is the flow of human history - from the periphery to the center. When the Roman empire was its zenith all roads lead to Rome, when the British Empire was at its zenith the streets of London were thought to be paved with gold. So the energetic flow for the last century has been into America.
The Trinidadian-Indian writer Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul wrote many books about this journey from the periphery to the center. One of his early stories was called In a Free State, about an impoverished Indian man who made his way to America to work as a servant and gradually dropped the old cultural roles and rules, took up a relationship with an American woman and moved to a ‘free state’.
One of Naipaul’s later books was The Enigma of Arrival, a slow, mediative reflection on what it means to have arrived at the center. The center for him was both physical and psychological. His birthplace Trinidad was a backwater outpost of the British Empire. As he himself noted, there were maybe 60 jobs on the entire island and most certainly no room for someone with his intellect.
He had to journey to England, the then center of the world as it were, to find a space where he could use his talents. His work of understanding the world, of coming to an awareness of Our Universal Civilization (as he describes) was a form of psychological integration to find the center inside himself.
As the title of the book suggests, arriving at the center is an enigma. This integral level of human consciousness has a ‘now what?’ quality to it. The protagonist in the novel spends a lot of time taking long walks in the English countryside. It is like he is in a deep meditation, wondering what to do with himself now that he has ‘arrived’.
The forces that move us can have multiple layers. The centripetal force that brings us from the periphery to the center is met by a centrifugal force as we get closer to the center - the force of going our own way. The 1990 film Avalon captures this centrifugal force very well. (Spoilers ahead)
Armin-Mueller Stall plays a young Polish immigrant arriving in America in the early part of the 20th century. By and by, his entire extended family arrives. The first decade or so are times of heady joy. They are able to capture the best of both worlds - tight family bonds of the old world along with the opportunities of America. It is the best time.
Slowly though the centrifugal forces begin to have their effect. Everyone wants their own space; the children don’t want to know about the old world and old culture, they would rather anglicize and fit in to the new. Brothers no longer talk to each other. Parents pass, bonds weaken and at the end an old Armin, sitting in a very clean but isolated room in an old age home wonders, what was it all for? That entire journey, all that work, all that transformation and you end up alone in an old age home?
This is the shadow side of our rational-pluralistic time, of the Universal Civilization - the atomization of the individual and consequent crippling isolation. Yes we can leave the old world with all its strictures and so we do. We also then leave the community, the tribe and all that it offers us. So then who stands for us? No one. Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe is a brilliant dive into this phenomenon. We walk around wounded with a gaping hole where home and belonging used to be.
Can we go back? It is difficult. As Tom Wolfe wrote, “you can’t go home again”. The journey from the center to the periphery goes against the tide, it is tough journey to make. Still, some expats do make it. After enough time in, say, Costa Rica, they find themselves to have adjusted to the life there. They have burrowed in and learnt the local language, adapted to and participate in the local customs. They’ve accepted the strictures that culture places on them. Maybe they found a local spouse. They’ve got kids, a settled home, a space, a place, a purpose and all the joys that come with it.
The openness of America no longer appeals, the hustle seems exhausting and the relentless consumerism empty. Trips back home to the US become fewer and far between. The Expat has become an Immigrant. But probably he is still keeping his American passport. It’s too convenient to let go of.
What’s the moral of the story here, what is the lesson? We choose our poison and live with the consequences. That is all.