Working holiday good, au pair bad, expat bad? Why not set the bar at one year regardless of purpose?

Question

So here's another new user being shot down for daring to ask about au pair/student visas (welcome to Travel.SE!). The current consensus as defined by Ankur Banerjee in this answer is that the following are Allowed:

Tourism
Business travel
Working holiday

And the following are Not Allowed:

Students
Immigrant workers
Permanent residents
Citizenship

Which means we're telling the exchange student and the au pair to sod off, while simultaneously welcoming the fruit-picker on a one-year working holiday in Australia, and exploding in a puff of logic the next time somebody comes around to ask about working as an au pair on a working holiday visa. Wat.

I propose we redefine the bar simply:

1. Going somewhere for up to a year? Welcome to Travel.SE.
2. Going somewhere for over a year/permanently? Scoot off to Expatriates.

And for avoidance of doubt, 'permanent travelers' who stay on the road for >1y without intention of settling down are OK in my book.

Discuss.

Answer 1

I expressed my discontent with the current state of affairs and the tendency to create many narrowly focused sites many times but it seems the expat site could be launched shortly. One approach could therefore be to see how it develops and act accordingly:

• If working holidays or au pair stays are well covered there, we could tighten our rules and start migrating such questions when we get them.
• If it turns out the expat site doesn't want these questions or doesn't address them properly, we could adopt the one-year threshold or something along these lines to make sure they don't fall through the cracks.
• If the overlap is big and the expat site fails to gather enough activity, we could consider a merge and redefine the topic of this site a bit more broadly. The question would then be moot.

Answer 2

Why set a bar at all? Simply apply what has consistently been the favored option on Meta, namely:

Expats are often simply medium-term travelers; thus expat questions are on-topic here.

If you're planning to come back home, then you're a traveler. If you're making yourself a new home, you're an immigrant.