Immigrate or migrate?
immigrate is a verb meaning “To move into a foreign country to stay permanently”; migrate is a verb meaning “To relocate periodically from one region to another, usually according to the…”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) migrate is about 6.6 times as common as immigrate.
What is the difference between immigrate and migrate?
| immigrate | migrate | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | verb | verb |
| Meaning | To move into a foreign country to stay permanently | To relocate periodically from one region to another, usually according to the seasons To change one's geographic pattern of habitation |
| Example | none recorded | Twice a year the geese migrate – from Florida to Canada and back again |
| Forms | immigrates, immigrating, immigrated | migrates, migrating, migrated |
| Pronunciation | /ˈɪmɪɡɹeɪt/ | /maɪˈɡɹeɪt/ /ˈmaɪ.ɡɹeɪt/ |
| In writing | about once in every 2 million words | 2.7 times per million words |
Sources: immigrate and migrate in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of immigrate and migrate
immigrate
- 1
To move into a foreign country to stay permanently
migrate
- 1
To relocate periodically from one region to another, usually according to the seasons
Twice a year the geese migrate – from Florida to Canada and back again
- 2
To change one's geographic pattern of habitation
Many groups had migrated to western Europe from the plains of eastern Europe
- 3
To change habitations across a border; to move from one country or political region to another
To escape persecution, they migrated to a neutral country
- 4
To move slowly towards, usually in groups
Once the hosts started bickering in the kitchens, the guests began to migrate towards the living room
- 5
To move gradually, especially from an intended to an unintended position
Oil was able to migrate from the accessory gearbox into the magneto housing through the improperly installed gland seals
- 6
To move computer code or files from one computer or network to another
They had finished migrating all of the affected code to the production server by 2:00am, three hours later than expected
- 7
To induce customers to shift purchases from one set of a company's related products to another
We were hoping to migrate the customers of the "C" series to the "E" series and the "E" customers to the "S" series
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, immigrate or migrate?
immigrate appears about once in every 2 million words; migrate 2.7 times per million words.
immigrate about once in every 2 million wordsmigrate 2.7 times per million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search immigrate vs migrate?
“immigrate vs migrate” is searched about 30 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.