It got the ‘trendy buzzword treatment’. There was a time when people were using it pretty heavily to describe professionals with specific skillsets and expertise sent to foreign (usually emerging) markets where hiring locals might be spotty. There was a time when, if an expat asked a local where expats hung out, the locals would interpret it as them asking where the foreign professionals would hang out, and usually they’d all talk shop/share experiences, that kind of thing.

But it conveyed some sort of prestige, like ‘entrepreneur’. Now lots of people use it loosely as a colloquialism to describe anyone from a dyed-in-the-wool immigrant to someone who took a 6 month sabbatical to have an extended vacation on a sunny beach