Immigration

How to spell immigration

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce immigration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immigration mean?

1. nounThe act of coming to live permanently in a country that is not one's own.
2. nounThe official process or department that checks people entering a country at a border or airport.

Immigration in a sentence

• The surge in immigration reshaped the city's neighbourhoods over a decade.

• The queue at immigration stretched the length of the arrivals hall.

• Government policy on immigration became the central issue of the election.

• An officer at immigration asked to see his return ticket and hotel booking.

Where does immigration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb migrare, which simply meant 'to move from one place to another' or 'to travel'. Adding the prefix in-, here meaning 'into' and assimilated to im- before the m, produced immigrare, 'to move into' a place, while the same root with the prefix ex- gave emigrare, 'to move out'. English took the noun form in the eighteenth century, and it has always described the act of arriving in a new country to settle rather than leaving one's own. The single most useful thing to remember about the spelling is that the prefix in- collides with the m of migr, and that collision is exactly why immigration carries a doubled m, unlike its cousin emigration. The shared migr root also turns up in migrate, migrant, and migratory, all of which keep just one m because no prefix doubles it.

How the word is built

• im- (variant of in-: into)
• migr (from Latin migrare: to move, to travel)
• -ation (noun suffix)