Bizcuits | Why stay?

Leanda Lee

Are you an expatriate? Some foreigners don’t think of themselves as one because the term has been traditionally used to describe a high-flying executive on a fat package dropped into a ‘lesser’ developed economy by a mostly Western parent-company to head up, or manage part of, a ‘subsidiary’ for a defined period. Depending upon the parent-company origin the reason for the assignment might be command and control, knowledge transfer or liaison with head office. If you’re one of these, you’re probably living in a spacious apartment in Grantai or One Central, perhaps in one of the newer Ocean Gardens plots or a quiet villa in a secluded part of town; your children’s education has been guided by HR and they are in an ‘international’ school or boarding somewhere better; you have return holiday flights for yourself and family back home, perhaps in business class or even first; and you still have a house back home and unlikely to be renting it out.
This description is inaccurate for the majority of expatriates who are now self-initiated, or self-
made. They choose to move overseas for a slew of reasons different from that of the corporate expatriate: financial (Australians certainly enjoy Macau’s tax regime), economic (Portuguese too frequently find the cost of living and inadequate job opportunities at home insurmountable), career development (the opportunities to work on incredible projects with a diversity of people), personal (in search of adventure/travel and new experiences: this reason is often the most important), and social (being with significant others).  Neither should we discount serendipity or “planned happenstance”.
About decisions, a quote from Boris, a British academic in New Zealand responding to an expatriate survey, gave me a chuckle: “I looked at a job in Macau, then I thought would that have helped my career? It would just sink it; it is too obscure for an academic.” Said pre-2005, now hopefully a little out of date, but the point is made. Whether we prefer to call ourselves skilled migrants or – if that’s a little too permanent or not high enough on the status ladder for your liking – self-directed expats, we make choices to come…and to go.
The reasons to repatriate home don’t mirror the reasons to migrate for work or entrepreneurial ventures. Those initial reasons act more as a barrier to repatriation: they embed them in their new home. The reasons to repatriate are focused more around family and lifestyle issues. Failure in work assignment or poor adjustment, important causes of repatriation for the corporate expatriate, don’t rate as too relevant for the apparently more resilient self-directed expatriate. These expats are more likely to be active in the community, have stayed longer and have stronger bonds.
A study by Tharenou and Caulfield talks about this embeddedness, but also shocks and dissatisfaction, two opposing sets of factors that contribute to the life-changing decision to pack up and go home. Career and community embeddedness both explain most of the reasons to remain: good expats in gaming can always find roles elsewhere but Macau has been THE place to be for gaming professionals, and in Macau a good social life is readily had and infinitely more exciting than home country suburbia, if stories and photos of recent association balls are anything to go by. The longer the sojourn for both expat and family, the stronger the emotional ties, the harder the decision to leave.
The life of a self-directed expatriate can however be with little security because residency is often tied to having a job and therefore somewhat precarious. We see this in Macau with Blue Cards and the Professional/Managerial category of temporary residency. Losing a job and not finding another quickly will propel an expat family unceremoniously back to country of origin regardless of ties to the community and however much you might call Macau home.
Studies suggest countries are less likely to lose strongly embedded expatriates even after experiencing the shocks that commonly send people home such as family illness or elderly parent care. I wouldn’t doubt the effect is stronger in Macau for somehow it gets under one’s skin. But then, not everyone is given a choice to stay.