Hello, stranger, and welcome abroad.
Strangers or strange land
Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, besides having brough us the beautiful word-concept to grok [en] (to understand and accept completely), also, in its very title, highlights the two aspects of a stranger: he's seen as strange, but he can also see the land he's in as strange. If you care to see things in a bright light, the stranger can help you put into perspective all that you consider as a given, by seeing as strange what you see as normal, whereas you see as strange what he considers normal. His very existence proves that there are more than one language, more than one country, more than one culture, more than one "morality", etc., and thus forces you to acknowldege the non-absolute nature of your point of view.
The premise of the book is actually identical to that of Voltaire's L'Ingénu (see also his other great classic Candide: the two words have the exact same meaning as naïve [fr] - yet another French word!).
The word stranger [en] has roots in old French, thus comes from the same Latin root (extraneus [la]) as étranger [fr], straniero [it], extranjero [es]. But since stranger has other meanings as well, if you wish to refer to someone born in country A and living in country B, you're more likely to use foreigner [en], immigrant [en], if you reside in country B, and emigrant [en], or expatriate [en] if you reside in country A. (Likewise, English has both border and frontier [en] (from French frontière [fr]), but frontier also has the beautiful meaning of limit of current knowledge, science or exploration that we can overcome.)
It all loses much of its relevance if you try to involve countries C and more, of course. In the age of globalization, you can be born in one country, live in a second, have the citizenship of a third, pay your groceries in the money of a fourth, sell services on-line paid in the currency of a fifth, and, ideally, pay your taxes in a tax haven sixth country. So who's a foreigner, and who isn't? And what's a foreign language? And what could "foreign country" possibly mean? Hey, Americans and French people, do you know you live in a foreign country according to most of the world?
Answer: everyone is someone's foreigner (likewise: on est toujours l'imbécile de quelqu'un [fr], everyone is someone's idiot) and there are no foreign languages.
It's like that old French hamster joke:
Un hamster stupide se balade au bord d'une rivière. Tout à coup, il aperçoit son copain le hamster crétin sur l'autre rive. Il veut le rejoindre et l'appelle :
-Eh ! Hamster crétin, comment t'as fait pour passer de l'autre côté de la rivière ?
-Mais, imbécile ! T'es déjà de l'autre côté !
A stupid hamster is walking alongside a river. Suddenly, he notices his friend the moron hamster on the other bank of the river. He'd like to join him and so he calls out:
-Hey, moron hamster! How did you manage to get on the other side of the river?
-You idiot! You're already on the other side!
Or this Russian anecdote (a Russian Jew is interrogated by the KGB):
-Родственники за границей есть?
-Нет...
-А здесь написано, что у Вас брат, сестра, родители и дядя в Израиле...
-Так они — на родине, это я — за границей.
-Do you have relatives abroad?
-Nope.
-But it says here that your whole family is in Israel?
-Ah yes, but they're the ones who're home -- I'm the one who's abroad!
Nevertheless, the word-concepts involved tell us a lot about the history of the perception of the movement of people.
Immigrants or emigrants
Even a mere 100 years ago, migration was mostly free throughout most of the world. Not only that, but immigation was even encouraged and welcomed: the Statue of Liberty was completed in 1886. And not only encouraged, but sometimes even coerced, through the penal transportation system.
Notice also the once common practice of deporting nationals - now only "foreigners". Notice that foreigners could once hold political office, play important political roles. Hell, in general, resident alien suffrage was legal in the US until 1928.
Therefore, the concern was over emigration, not immigration. Expatriation was something you were a victim of, not something you'd undertake on your own (to the possible annoyment of the inhabitants of the (un)welcoming country):
III.− Emploi subst. Toutes les couches de la misère humaine, les expatriés, les excommuniés, les déshérités (Hugo, Corresp., 1856, p. 250).
– expatrié [fr]
Today's meaning of expatriate [en], inasmuch as it is different from immigrant, usually comes down to either being pushed by a foreign company to move (thus the same notion of "unwilling" migration as émigré [fr]), or, conversely to socio-economic factors, to distinguish the glop [fr] foreigners from the not glop [fr] (better yet: unglop) foreigners (glop and unglop are used to deride a too reductionist dichotomy, from French comics character Pifou, who knew no other word-concepts but these two):
The differentiation found in common usage usually comes down to socio-economic factors, so skilled professionals working in another country are described as expatriates, whereas a manual labourer who has moved to another country to earn more money might be labelled an 'immigrant'.
Abroad or "foreign countries"
-¿Dondé esta el extranjero?
-El extranjero es un país muy grande.
-Where is abroad?
-Abroad is a very big country.
Similar to the welcome emigrant and the unwelcome immigrant, the currently negative perception of "foreign countries" was once the positive perception of "abroad", especially in the prison-countries of Communist regimes: in Czechoslovakia, zahraničí [cs], that which lies beyond the borders, as opposed to cizina [cs] that which is foreign. In Russian, заграница [ru], which is probably what Ayn Rand, who fled Soviet Russia, had in mind when writing about abroad [en]:
Consciously or not, in the mind of any rebel in Soviet Russia, particularly of the young, there is only one court of final appeal against the injustice, the brutality, the sadistic horror of the inhuman social system in which they are trapped: abroad.
The meaning of that word for a Soviet citizen is incommunicable to anyone who has not lived in that country: if you project what you would feel for a combination of Atlantis, the Promised Land and the most glorious civilization on another planet, as imagined by a benevolent kind of science fiction, you will have a pale approximation. “Abroad,” to a Soviet Russian, is as distant, shining and unattainable as these; yet to any Russian who lifts his head for a moment from the Soviet muck, the concept “abroad” is a psychological necessity, a lifeline and soul preserver.
That concept is made of brilliant bits sneaked, smuggled or floating in through the dense gray fog of the country’s physical and spiritual barbed-wire walls: in foreign movies, magazines, radio broadcasts, or even the clothing and the confident posture of foreign visitors. These bits are so un-Soviet and so alive that they blend in one’s mind into a vision of freedom, abundance, unimaginable technological efficacy, inconceivable achievements and, above all, a sense of joyous, fearless, benevolent gaiety. And if European countries, in this vision, are shining planets, America is the sun.
– Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
Indeed, she described the word-concept abroad as a magic one:
All heads bent over the table, over a tiny, round, orange and gold box. Vava whispered the magic words: “From abroad.”
They looked at it reverently, afraid to touch it. Vava whispered proudly, breathlessly, trying to sound casual: “Face powder. French. Real French. It’s smuggled from Riga. One of Father’s patients gave it to him—in part payment.”
– Ayn Rand, We the Living
Border crossing
Notice also that the very concept of "border" is contextual to a world where states, i.e. [la] monopolies of violence (Gewaltmonopolen [de] in Weber's German), have divided among themselves the World.
The concept thus gave birth to a whole range of related concept depending upon it, such as:
- douanier [fr], a person whose job is to watch the border;
- Republikflucht [de], the act of illegally crossing the border out to a better country
- illegal immigration [en], the act of illegally crossing the border into a better country.
- salzétrangers [fr], the "dirty foreigners", whether living in country B, or coming from country B to country A where they are welcomed by some and despised by others.
- alien [en], a person from country A living in country B with the authorization of country B's Gewaltmonopol [de] (legal alien [en]) or without (illegal alien [en]).
So of course, is it a coincidence, then, since the very concept of border depends on monopolies of violence, that the meaning of the words derived from it will also shift, depending on how that violence is directed?
"Emigration" was relevant because the Gewaltsmonopolen of that time chose to exert so much violence against "their citizens" (or their belongings or activities, causing economic impoverishment) that those citizens massively wished to leave, and then to exert even more violence against those who tried.
"Immigration" became relevant when some Gewaltmonopolen, again, chose to exert so much violence against "their citizens" (or their belongings or activities, causing economic impoverishment) that those citizens massively wished to leave. The main difference being that this time the "welcoming countries"'s Gewaltmonopolen chose to exert their violence against the current residents, in order to divert their money towards the residents-to-be. As violence begets violence, this of course causes hatred and rejection of the current residents against the "immigrants", thus, again, tainting the concept.
So yes, in a free world, where no violence was ever legal, none of the word-concepts described above would exist, except in historical discussion.