So you finally get it squared away in your thinking, writing, and speaking that the word “immigrate” means to go into a new country to live, and the word “emigrate” means to exit a country to go live somewhere else. Grammarians often teach that people either immigrate to or emigrate from, but they do not immigrate from or emigrate to. They point to the beginning vowel of each word as a way to remember which word to use. “Immigrate” starts with I and so does the word “in.” “Emigrate” starts with E and so does the word “exit.” It all seems so very cut and dried until it isn’t.
If you are searching for information about ancestors who came to the United States from other countries in the late 1800s to mid-1900s, you might find a document called a Declaration of Intention. That document is often referred to as “first papers” because it was one of the first forms a person submitted to become a U.S. citizen.
After finding such a document, you excitedly start reading your ancestor’s Declaration of Intention that gives you all sorts of information, such as height, weight, eye color, place of birth, port of departure, and name of the ship on which the person traveled. But you are surprised to see that on this official form your ancestor signed, it says, “I emigrated to the United States of America from [fill in the blank].”
Well, that’s curious. In one sentence, it says a person emigrated to one place and from another. Upon further research, you discover that wording is exactly the same on many declarations of intentionopens PDF file . As you continue researching your ancestry, you might run across a directory, such as the 1873 History and Directory of Yates County, New York, where on page after page it says people “emigrated to” various places in the United States, and it names those places where they settled. And then you might discover that between the years 1852 to 1853, the state of Wisconsin had an Office of Emigration that existed not to aid people in exiting the state but for the purpose of attracting people, especially German-speaking Europeans, to come into the state and take up residence.
By then maybe you’re thinking it’s just antiquated language or people way back then not knowing which words to use. But then you discover some congressional records from the late 1970s, such as the Emigration Waiver or Waiver of Freedom of Emigration that speak of people from the countries of Romania and Hungary emigrating to the United States, West Germany, or Israel.
At this point, you might be tempted to send an email to your former English teacher or to Grammar Girl about how badly you’ve been led astray by the insistence that people immigrate into and emigrate out of a country. But please don’t. Instead, let’s look at those two words and their usages a little more closely.
Most, if not all, dictionaries say that an immigrant is a person who enters into a country to become a resident, and an emigrant is a person who leaves or exits a country to reside elsewhere. But that does not mean that immigrants and emigrants are two different types of people who undertake two different activities. Emigrants who leave one place and settle in another are also immigrants. Or, to say it another way, immigrants who settle in a new country are also emigrants of the country they left.
The online Merriam-Webster dictionary in answer to the question “Must an ‘immigrant’ also be an ‘emigrant’?” says there is little difference semantically between the two words because both refer to a person who leaves one country and moves to another. That dictionary also confirms that both “immigrate” and “emigrate” have been used interchangeably, and significant evidence exists showing those words used with a variety of overlapping prepositions. To quote that dictionary, “the borders between these words are somewhat porous.”
Similarly, on an “Ask the Editor” page of The Britannica Dictionary, it says that “immigrate” and “emigrate” both mean someone is moving from one country to another, and sometimes both words are used the same way.
So what should we do in light of this information? Is there a difference between “immigrate” and “emigrate”? Does it matter how we use those two words?
Although there is a difference not only in spelling but also in meaning, the usage of those two words demonstrates it is not something to be dogmatic about. Technically, “emigrate” means to exit and “immigrate” means to enter, but sometimes the choice of word used is based on the perspective of the one using it and if the emphasis or focus is on exiting or entering a country. Other times, it’s just a matter of choosing one word for the sake of an economy of words or not having an awkward-sounding sentence. Even though it is grammatically correct to say that your great-grandpa immigrated to the United States and emigrated from Germany, it is grammatically correct and makes sense to say the same thing in four different ways without altering the meaning. You could say that he emigrated from Germany to the United States, emigrated to the United States from Germany, immigrated from Germany to the United States, or immigrated to the United States from Germany.
Regardless of how you use “immigrate” and “emigrate” or how you see those words being used, the important thing to remember is that even though they have different meanings, they refer to the same person and event, which is a person who moved from one country to another to take up residence.
Therefore, the answer to the question of whether immigrants or emigrants are coming or going is “yes.”