In the salon, we meet everyone. The software engineer from Germany who moved to Antwerp for a logistics startup and calls himself an expat. The seamstress from Morocco who has lived here for twenty years, raised three children in Flemish schools, pays her taxes, and is still, in casual conversation, referred to as an immigrant. The difference is not duration of stay, nor level of integration. It is something far simpler — and far more uncomfortable to name.

The word “expat” — short for expatriate — is, technically, a neutral term for anyone living outside their country of origin. In practice, it has become a class and racial signifier. It describes, almost exclusively, white Western professionals who have chosen to live abroad. Everyone else is an immigrant.

This is not a trivial distinction. Language shapes perception, and perception shapes policy, and policy shapes lives. The word we use for someone who crosses a border determines how we treat them, how we integrate them, how we value their contributions, and how welcome they feel in a place they are trying to call home.

The Origins of a Double Standard

The word “expatriate” entered the English language in the mid-19th century, originally describing anyone who had left their homeland. It carried no particular connotation of wealth or privilege. The bifurcation happened gradually, and its roots are colonial. British administrators in India, French civil servants in Algeria, Dutch merchants in Indonesia — these were expatriates. The people they governed, the workers they employed, the subjects they displaced — those were migrants.

That architecture persists. Today, an American tech worker who moves to Berlin is invariably described as an expat — in newspaper profiles, in LinkedIn headlines, in community Facebook groups. A Congolese nurse who moves to Brussels on a work visa, takes the same language courses, joins the same neighbourhood associations, is invariably described as an immigrant. The difference is not legal status. It is not skill level. It is not integration. It is race, nationality, and the direction from which movement originates.

In Antwerp, Everyone Is From Somewhere

Antwerp is a city that has been shaped by migration for as long as it has existed. The medieval diamond trade brought Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. The port brought workers from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The European Union brought professionals from every member state. Today, the city holds 180+ nationalities in 500,000 people — arguably the most diverse city per capita in Belgium.

Salon California sits in this context deliberately. Our clients include people who have been in Belgium for forty years and still feel the word “immigrant” used as a kind of distance-keeping tool — a reminder that they are guests here, not residents. And they include people who arrived last year with EU passports who have never once had to think about what word describes them.

The conversations we have in the salon chair are a kind of unofficial census of this experience. What strikes us, consistently, is how much energy people spend managing the identity that the word imposes on them. The immigrant who overqualifies for every job application, anticipating scepticism. The expat who never quite learns the language because, unconsciously, they know their stay is considered temporary, whatever its actual duration.

Antwerp’s streets reflect one of Europe’s most diverse populations. Photo: Unsplash

Hair, Identity, and the Politics of Belonging

There is something particularly resonant about running a hair salon in this context. Hair is among the most culturally loaded aspects of physical appearance. The way someone wears their hair communicates identity, community, pride, assimilation — or refusal to assimilate. For migrants of colour in particular, decisions about hair can become a daily negotiation with belonging.

The woman who straightens her natural hair for job interviews. The man who shaves his head rather than maintain a style that marks him as “different” in a predominantly white workplace. The second-generation immigrant who asks us to help them reconnect with a cultural hairstyle their parents discouraged. These are not abstract political positions. They are decisions people make in front of a mirror, with real consequences for how they are perceived and treated.

At Salon California, our practice is to take hair on its own terms — to understand the particular texture, history, and intention of each person who sits in our chair, without projecting assumptions about what their hair should look like. That feels, to us, like a small piece of the same argument we are making about words.

What We Lose When We Divide

There is a practical cost to this semantic inequality, beyond the ethical one. When we treat some foreign residents as temporary visitors and others as permanent residents-in-waiting, we make it harder to build the kind of integrated communities that actually function. Cities with high social cohesion — places where people trust each other across difference — are not built on hierarchies between expats and immigrants. They are built on shared investment in place.

Research consistently shows that immigrants — by any definition — are net contributors to the economies that receive them. They start businesses at higher rates than native-born citizens. They fill critical gaps in healthcare, logistics, construction, and care work. They bring cultural richness that makes cities more interesting, more creative, and more economically dynamic. But they can only do that fully if they are welcomed fully — not as temporary workers or guests on sufferance, but as neighbours, colleagues, and future citizens.

A Single Word for a Human Experience

We are not naive about what would change if everyone used the word “immigrant” consistently and without hierarchy. Language is not policy. A software engineer from California moving to Antwerp faces different structural challenges than a domestic worker from the Philippines. Those differences are real, and they require different policy responses.

But language shapes the frame within which policy is made and the climate within which people live. A city that regards all its newcomers as people who chose to be here, who have something to contribute, who deserve to belong — that city builds different institutions, different schools, different social services than one that maintains a tacit hierarchy of whose belonging is assumed and whose must be earned.

In Antwerp, we have the chance to be that city. We have been, at our best moments — a port city that understood openness was not a vulnerability but a source of strength. We believe it still. And in our small corner of it, in a salon on a street in this improbable, extraordinary, 180-nationality city, we will keep having the conversation. One chair at a time.