Also a dude, sewing is fucking great! Thinking back, I’m pretty sure I learned to sew long before I learned any other forms of making, childhood me made lots of felt toys and crafts for friends and family because materials were cheap, accessable, and pretty easy to work with. I love being able to take a pile of fabric and make it into something functional, or at the very least mend my clothes to get more life out of them.
The etymology might help break down some of the nuance here
According to etymonline the etymology for expatriate (often shortened to expat) is:
Immigrate, is similar, but is more used to describe moving to a place:
The closer synonym to expatriate would probably be emigrate, the opposite of immigrate, to leave a place.
As to why one might use expatriate over emigrate; consider the sentence “I’m an American immigrant”. It’s kind of unclear if you’re trying to say that you are an American that has migrated to another country (as in “I’m an American immigrant living in Brussels”*), or someone who has migrated to America (as in “I’m an American immigrant from Slovakia”). Using expatriate removes the ambiguity: “I’m an American expatriate” and makes it clear that the speaker is trying to convey where they are from.
* technically, using emigrant here would be more clear, but English is a lawless and lazy language