Migration Semantics

The white supremacy of it all

Recently I found myself sitting at a table in Lisbon with a collection of other Westerners and one Australian. (Google tells me Australia is part of “The West” even though it’s technically in the Eastern hemisphere.*) We were English speakers, all, and mostly white. None of us native to the country we live in. Few of us fluent in the language. Some very newly arrived, still buoyant with that incoming honeymoon flush.

Most of us had not met before our gathering under the pine trees at the Jardins do Bombarda, and so the conversation was introductory, swinging from origin stories to language acquisition struggles to favorite city neighborhoods. Then from across the table, a hiccup in the calm as two Americans disagreed about whether or not it’s reasonable for Westerners to say they “fled” the country of their birth.

One thought “fled” was an inappropriate word for the choice she had made to leave the States, arguing the ridiculousness of a privileged white middle-class American claiming to “flee” anything at all. The other said the word was an apt description of her mindset when she moved to Portugal in 2022. She maintained that in the wake of Trump’s first term and probable second, with the underbelly of the country flashing far right, the options were fight or flight. To leave felt like fleeing.

It wasn’t a true argument, was barely even a discussion. Just a flash of discord quickly smoothed into politely opinionated difference between two white women, both loathe to make the other uncomfortable. The flow of conversation snagged around them for a minute, then moved on and away.

But I haven’t been able to shrug it off: the semantics of “fled,” my own experience of leaving when stacked up against these other Americans, the temptation to define a choice by its personalized particulars, by the size of my own feelings on the matter.

I am not immune to the desire to characterize my exodus from the United States as something bold and brave, something more risky and rebellious than reality. But the actuality is this: No matter what fraught feelings I may have worried to the bone, no matter what attacks of anxiety or panic, no matter the very real horrors gathering on the horizon, in 2020 when we decided to GTFO, our home was not the mouth of a shark, as poet Warsan Shire wrote.

Sure, there were sharks in the water, but their jaws had not closed about my neck. Their jaws were in fact mostly hypothetical, a fear flickering behind my eyelids in the narrow hours of the night. A fear that was plausible, certainly. But not probable. Not for me, in my middle-aged white skin. Not for me, in my middle-class house in the Outer Avenues. Not for me, with a 401k plan and a savings account.

The dangers loomed larger for my own young and female-bodied child, fresh meat for the shiver. Still, she is blond-haired and blue-eyed. There is danger for her in the world, no doubt. But it is a different sort of danger, the kind that lurks in legislation and testosterone-fueled predation.

My family and I did not cross borders because our house had been bombed to shards or stolen, whole and fully decorated, by settlers with violence in their eyes. We did not fling ourselves into a flimsy boat and test our luck against the sea. We didn’t stow aboard the landing gear of an aircraft or risk a raging river in the darkest hours of the night.

I did not run from my home with teeth at my neck and flames at my back, nothing to my name but the clothes on my body and the child in my arms. Marido and I sold our house and pocketed the post-mortgage payoff. We packed our best-loved books and most-prized cutlery in bubble wrap and settled them gently in a shipping container, insured and GPS-tracked. We left our country with a plan and a spreadsheet, visas glued to our passports, and flew to a sun-soaked place where brand new beds awaited us, the sheets soft and white.

Despite the dread in my belly, the premonition of worse things to come if we stayed, we had good choices to make and plenty of time in which to make them. We looked around, we saw what was coming, we weighed the options, we set a date, and we took our leave. Calmly and with purpose. Walked to the gate and got on a plane.

No one with the means to leave (and the savings account and the scouting trip and the shipping container) has truly fled the United States.

In light of the current (ongoing) onslaught of violence against black and brown bodies — the genocide in Palestine, the devastation in Sudan, terror in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ICE raids and Alligator Alcatraz and visa bonds and ongoing occupation — a few white folks leaving their country in search of a better life is barely a blip.

And yet, we envy a traumatic backstory, cozy up to the idea of oppression. In my youth in the fundamentalist Baptist church, we were encouraged to imagine how it might feel to have a gun pressed against our heads and while some faceless, godless heathen (the bad actors were usually characterized as Communists back in my day) threatened to pull the trigger if we didn’t immediately renounce our faith in Jesus. “That’s what the world wants,” the visiting evangelist would intone, “to round us Christians up and kill us because we believe the Holy Bible is the actual word of God.”

My life in farmtown, mid-America was never in any kind of real danger, but for years I kept a go-box underneath my twin bed just in case the Communists came in the middle of the night and I had to run.

That kind of delusional persecution complex gives the same sort of energy as the middle-aged white American man on the periphery of my social network who moved to Portugal and changed his online bio to read “political refugee.”

The thing that’s really crazy is that you can, if you have the caucacity, call yourself both a “political refugee” and a “digital nomad” while you slurp a galão at the pastelaria.

Not all immigrants are created equal. Not in circumstance, not in reception, not in opportunity, and certainly not in the English language. We define the terms that create hierarchies within our societies: Who matters and who doesn’t. Who gets welcomed and who gets cast out.

In her insightful essay “When Will You Call Me Human?” storyteller Anoopreet Rehncy (ANOOPREET ) writes: We’ve been placed on a linguistic ladder, a new age caste system, so deeply embedded in our consciousness that we mistake it for natural law rather than colonial design.

On the top rung of this ladder sits the expatriate or expat. I’d put the “digital nomad” here, too. Anoopreet describes this category of newcomer as: Almost always Western, often white, typically armed with a university degree and a LinkedIn bio brimming with phrases like “global citizen” and “remote-first.” Their displacement is framed not as rupture but as “adventure.” They don’t migrate, they relocate. They don’t assimilate, they experience local culture. Crucially, they remain tethered to a place of safety and privilege.

On the next rung is the immigrant. Earlier this week at my Salted Books writing hour, I shared that I was working on this topic and it sparked a passionate discussion among the other writers. One, a novelist, filmmaker, and art historian from Ghana, said that “expat” seems to be a descriptor you can choose for yourself, while “immigrant” is a label that is put on you by someone else.

From Anoopreet: Immigrants must prove themselves, conditionally welcome but under constant pressure to work hard, keep quiet, contribute, pay taxes. Nostalgia and grief are luxuries they cannot fully afford. Assimilation is praised; cultural pride tolerated only if it is quietly contained.

Further down the ladder sits the refugee. Anoopreet describes this word as a category weighted with pity. Always running, never arriving. Seen only through the lens of need and suffering, narrated by headlines, confined to border camps and bureaucratic forms. Refugees are denied a future, allowed only a past.

On the bottom rung, the illegal immigrant. In the United States we also use the term “migrants.” Like the “migrant workers” in California who harvest the strawberries and artichokes and almonds and the grapes for that famous Napa wine. For human beings relegated to this category, Anoopreet writes, movement itself becomes a crime. The body is evidence. “Illegal” is not just a status; it is a moral indictment designed to dehumanise.

In December of 2024, the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos published their “Immigration Barometer,” a study that interviewed 1,072 Portuguese nationals to evaluate their perceptions, opinions, and attitudes about immigrants. The respondents, the authors of the study said, “seemed to have conflicting feelings about immigration. A large proportion consider it more of a threat than an opportunity, while more than two-thirds of respondents agreed that immigrants are fundamental to the country’s economic life.”

Two months before the study came out, a 26-year-old Portuguese man chased down two different immigrants in Porto and shouted racist slurs at them before punching, kicking, and viciously stabbing them. One of the targeted foreigners was Moroccan, the other was Indian. Both bore their otherness on their skin.

Pedro Góis, scientific director of the Observatory of Migrations, told the Lusa News Agency that “there is, in fact, a growing antipathy or antagonism toward some ethnic minorities, whether they are migrants or nationals with a skin color different from the Portuguese imagined as white.”

While white American immigrants swan around Europe as if on an extended vacation, marveling at “how cheap!” everything is in comparison to their former neighborhoods in Miami or Boston or San Jose, immigrants from other (browner) countries are selling sunglasses or driving TVDE cars to scrape together a life. We are not all allowed to claim the same rungs of the ladder.

Perhaps nowhere has the recent angst over immigration in Portugal been more obvious than in the May 18, 2025 snap election in which far-right party Chega snatched itself more seats in parliament than ever before. One of their first items of business was to come down hard on immigrants with the proposal of new laws that would double “the time it takes for a foreigner to become a Portuguese citizen from five to 10 years, restricting family reunion visas, limiting of looking-for-work visas to ‘qualified people’ and the creation of a police division called the National Foreigners and Borders Unit (UNEF).” {source} Most of these proposed changes have recently been struck down as unconstitutional, but that is not the end of Chega’s anti-immigration ambitions.

“People are struggling,” my cabeleireira Leelan said as she cut the ends of my hair with quick, efficient snips. “Rents have gone up, house prices are crazy. It’s hard for those of us who have lived in Lisbon all our lives to see the changes. It’s hard not to resent all the newcomers.”

That resentment does not show up equally. I get the random online comment accusing me of driving up housing prices. Meanwhile my friend Leticia had to alter her accent and hide the fact that she’s Brazilian in order to rent an apartment.

When I voiced concern recently over the government’s swing to the right, a Portuguese friend said, “Yes, but you’re not the kind of immigrant they have a problem with. You’ll be fine.”

Because as much as I turn up my nose at the label of “expat,” the top rung is still where I’m supposed to sit on the ladder: White. Western. Winning.

When it comes to the bleak history of white supremacy, Portugal’s hands are not at all clean. It was Infante Dom Henrique—"Prince Henry the Navigator”—who in 1415 convinced his father, Dom João the 1st of Portugal, to kick off the African slave trade.

In his 2019 essay How Racism Relies on Arbitrary Hierarchies, author, professor and historian Ibram X. Kendi wrote: Until his death in 1460, Prince Henry sponsored Atlantic voyages to West Africa by the Portuguese, to circumvent Islamic slave traders, and in doing so created a different sort of slavery than had existed before. Premodern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in premodern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies—they were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike. At the dawn of the modern world, the Portuguese began to exclusively trade African bodies.

A man named Gomes de Zurara, Kendi writes, became “the first race maker and crafter of racist ideas” when he penned a glowing biography of Prince Henry in 1453. One of the stories in this book described Prince Henry’s first major slave auction in 1444 in Lagos, Portugal. In Zurara’s words, some of the captives were “white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned,” but others were “as black as Ethiops, and so ugly.”

Kendi writes: Despite their different skin colors and languages and ethnic groups, Zurara blended them into one single group of people, worthy of enslavement. …Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race… to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created, it must be filled in—and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry’s evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” Zurara wrote. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.”

Within this new hierarchy, stripped of humanity, African people were unworthy of being treated with the same respect afforded to those who happened to be wealthier, whiter.

Language always matters.

And just as it behooves us to choose our words with care, to think about the consequences that ripple out when they land, it is also essential that we question our own vocabulary. That we wonder why these particular labels are slapped on these particular people. Who does it hurt, and who does it benefit? Why do some folks/news outlets/governments fight so hard against calling the annihilation of a certain people a genocide, reaching for lesser words like “war” or “conflict” or “such a complicated situation.” Why is a certain category of people categorized as “terrorists,” but those who fund and make and drop the bombs that turn children to ash are held up as the light-keepers, the democracies, the bastions of civilization and progress and freedom.

Race, writes Kendi again, creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude… But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.

In 2021, six months after we moved to Portugal, I described my understanding of the difference between expatriate and immigrant and decided to label myself the latter, rejecting the shiny veneer and permanent holiday of the expat mindset. I wanted to be simply an estrangeiro — a foreigner, like any other foreigner. Nothing entitled or deserving of special treatment.

And yet, four years down the line, I am more aware than ever of the fact that not everyone can move about the world in the same way I do. That my privilege — the accident of birth that dropped me into a white body in the Western* world — creates less friction, places me on a higher rung on the ladder, softens my landing.

So how do I leverage this birthright I did nothing to earn? How do I do my part to build a more equitable reality?

I begin by using my words.

The solution is not kinder words or more sensitive labels, writes Anoopreet Rehncy. True justice requires rejecting the colonial language that seeks to sort, confine, and demote us. When we see linguistic categorisation for what it is, namely a technology of control disguised as description, we hold the key to refusing its grip.

In a world where ICE launches military-style raids against people whose only crime is existing in the wrong category, refusing these labels altogether becomes an act of resistance. We have the power to change who deserves protection, who receives rights, and who remains forever foreign. These divisions are human-made, and that means they can be dismantled.

The words that categorise us were never built for our liberation, but our refusal to be contained by them is where liberation begins.

*A footnote: All of these terms — “the Western world” / the “Middle East” / the “Global South” / “third world” / “first world” — all of these places are labeled with the language of colonialism. As Egyptian writer, activist, and physician Nawal El Saadawi said, “Knowledge comes when you ask yourself Why?” Like: West of what, Middle to whom? If you consider yourself the center of the universe, as the empire of the United Kingdom once did (and could be argued that it still does), then everything is relative to London. Egypt was “Middle East” and India was “Far East” because that locates their place on the globe relative to London. It’s colonially correct, not geographically correct. Egypt is not in the “Middle East,” it is in North Africa. India is in West Asia. London is the geographical center of nothing, not even England.

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