immigration

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)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 village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards.”

   “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 bills were introduced. Private immigration bills make up about half of our legislation today.”

   “[Stephen] Miller’s uncle, a neuroscientist, has been welcomed onto the public stage for his denunciations of his nephew’s immigration policies, which the elder Miller has characterized as hypocritical: the Millers’ not-so-distant Jewish ancestors were, of course, immigrants themselves.”

2. (countable, uncountable)The process of going through immigration checks at a border checkpoint.

   “It took ages to get through immigration last time.”