immigration

Noun

immigration (countable and uncountable, plural immigrations)

1. The act of immigrating; the passing or coming into a country of which one is not native born for the purpose of permanent residence.
   • The Bohemians had come then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and...1905 April–October, Upton Sinclair, chapter VI, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906, →OCLC
   • Another measure of the inadequacy of the Immigration and Nationality Act has been the huge volume of private immigration bills introduced in Congress. These are bills to deal with individual hardship cases for which the general law fails to provide. In the Eighty-seventh Congress over 3,500 such...1964, John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, Revised and Enlarged edition, Harper & Row, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 79
2. The process of going through immigration checks at a border checkpoint.
   • It took ages to get through immigration last time.