EuroYankee

Make sure to check out the current installment of German Word of the Week in German Joys. What a great language!

As a foreign worker, I’ve been following the immigration debates currently taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. What a mess. How can anyone talk about a complex issue when there’s no agreement on basic terminology? The use of words such as migrants, immigrants, nonimmigrants, foreign workers, guest workers, aliens differs from one person to the next. Or, in the case of journalists, from one sentence to the next.

Here are some interesting definitions from a U.S. immigration website:

Immigrant: A person who comes to the U.S. and wishes to stay permanently.

Migrant: A person who leaves his/her country of origin to seek residence in another country.

Nonimmigrant: A person who comes to the U.S. with the intent to remain only temporarily. For most classifications, the alien must maintain her/his permanent residence abroad.

Temporary Worker: An alien coming to the United States to work for a temporary period of time.

On a related topic, I can recommend this brilliantly written article (wink, wink) about the ongoing European Union attempts to create a unified policy for expelling illegal immigrants from the EU.