immigrant

Pluralimmigrants

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person who comes from another country to settle permanently in a new one.

   The city welcomed thousands of immigrants fleeing the famine.

   As a recent immigrant, she navigated unfamiliar tax forms with help from her neighbors.

   Similarnewcomer, migrant, settler, incomer

   Oppositenative

   Note

   The word looks at a move from the arriving side: Latin immigrans, "migrating into," from in- "into" and migrare "to migrate." It names people by the place they have come to rather than the one they left, so it pairs naturally with a destination. Examples include Huguenot immigrants who founded a paper mill in a British village in 1648, and John F. Kennedy's A Nation of Immigrants (1964), which describes America as a whole society of newcomers.

2. 2
   adjective

   Relating to immigrants or to the process of immigrating.

   The new law expanded immigrant rights across several states.

   Researchers studied immigrant communities along the coast for a decade.

   Similarmigrant

   Oppositenative

   Note

   An adjective that classifies rather than describes: it sorts a noun into a category, as in immigrant rights or immigrant communities. For that reason it is not comparable, since nothing is more immigrant than something else. It sits directly before its noun, where the boundary with the noun for a person blurs. A phrase like an undocumented immigrant child reads equally well either way.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A plant or animal that establishes itself in an area where it did not previously occur.

   The zebra mussel is a notorious immigrant in the Great Lakes.

   Ecologists documented how the immigrant outcompeted native grasses for light.

   Similarinvader, colonist, alien, exotic

   Oppositenative

   Note

   Biology borrows the human word and keeps its core idea, which is staying rather than arriving. A plant or animal that merely turns up somewhere does not count. It must establish itself where it was absent before, just as the human sense implies settling for good. The word fits a species that has taken hold and spread, like a mussel in a new lake, better than a single stray individual.

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