Emigrate means to leave your own country to live in another. Immigrate means to enter a new country to live there. They describe the same move from opposite ends: you emigrate from a place and immigrate to a place. The memory trick: emigrate starts with E for Exit, immigrate starts with I for In.
Updated July 2026
To leave your own country in order to settle permanently in another.
Emigrate looks backward at the border you crossed. It pairs with from: she emigrated from Vietnam. The noun is emigrant, the process is emigration, and the root is the Latin emigrare, to move away. The word belongs to the country losing you.
To come into a new country in order to live there permanently.
Immigrate faces forward into the new country and pairs with to: she immigrated to Canada. The noun is immigrant, the process is immigration, and because governments name the whole legal field after the arriving side, immigration is the version you will read a hundred times more often.
E is for Exit, I is for In. You emigrate on the way out and immigrate on the way in.
The test that never fails: find the preposition. From wants emigrate. To wants immigrate.
| The sentence | Why that word |
|---|---|
| My grandparents emigrated from Italy in 1954. | The sentence looks at the leaving, so it takes emigrate and pairs with from. |
| My grandparents immigrated to Argentina in 1954. | Same family, same year, seen from the arrival side: immigrate, paired with to. |
| Emigration from the region doubled in a decade. | Counted by the country losing people, so the noun is emigration. |
| Immigration built this city. | Counted by the country receiving people, so the noun is immigration. |
| Thousands of workers migrate for the harvest each year. | Movement without settling takes the neutral parent verb, migrate. |
Migrate covers movement in any direction, people or birds, and promises nothing about permanence. Seasonal workers migrate; settling families emigrate and immigrate. When you are unsure which side of the move a sentence describes, migrate is never wrong, only less precise.
From follows emigrate, to follows immigrate. When verb and preposition disagree, the sentence sounds off even to readers who cannot say why. Emigrated to and immigrated from are the two pairings to avoid.
Immigration is what the receiving country's laws, ministries, and queues are named after: immigration law, immigration status, immigration control. Nobody stands in an emigration queue. Once you start the paperwork, you will live inside the word immigration, whichever direction you feel the move from.
Traditionally, both words carry the intent to stay. A semester abroad or a nomad season is neither emigrating nor immigrating; it is living abroad. The words start to fit at the point where the return ticket stops being part of the plan.
Settled the direction? The neighboring words are worth five minutes each.
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