Migrants, emigrants and immigrants

A migrant is a person who moves from one country to another, intending to settle temporarily or permanently in the place of destination. An emigrant is one who leaves a country intending to settle elsewhere, while an immigrant is a person arriving in a country, intending to settle temporarily or permanently.

These definitions are not easy to apply in a world where movement between countries is greater than it has ever been before. Intentions are not always fulfilled. Some British people have 'emigrated' to Australia but come back again after a short time.Some have gone to the United States intending a short stay and managed to remain permanently, perhaps through marriage to a citizen there.

There are two important features of the word 'immigrant'. One is that its official use is often different from popular use. Another is that, in Britain and in some other countries, it is often used as a pejorative term.

In official use, an immigrant is a person who is subject to immigration control and arrives, not as a visitor or student, but to reside. He or she may be admitted to work, temporarily or permanently, or under one of the categories of dependent relative, returning resident, or business representative. Asylum-seekers are counted separately from immigrants.

A person who obtains entry by fraud or deception, or who is legally admitted on a temporary basis but overstays the permitted period, is officially classified as an illegal immigrant (illegal entrant or overstayer).

Until 1962, immigrants from Commonwealth countries and colonies were not subject to immigration control. Since then the law has been changed many times, mainly in a restrictive direction, though the Immigration Act 1971 freed from control those citizens of Commonwealth countries and colonies who had, through ancestry, registration or naturalisation, a 'United Kingdom connection'. In effect, this freed some millions of such citizens, nearly all of them white people, from immigration control.

Since 1973, citizens of European Community countries and, a little later, of European Economic Area countries have been entitled to come to work and live in the UK under conditions that almost amount to free entry.

Some categories of British national have, since 1968, had no right of entry. Most of them are not white. Since 2005, most inhabitants of colonies, now called British Overseas Territories, have been freed from control. Their numbers are very small - several thousand, and few actually come to the UK.

These official categories of immigrant and non-immigrant do not fit at all with popular perceptions of what an immigrant is. From the 1950s to the 1980s, people generally talked of Commonwealth immigration and ignored the entry of aliens from elsewhere. By 'Commonwealth' they meant non-white, and little attention was paid to the entry of white people from the Commonwealth: South Africans, Australians, and so on. The word 'immigrant', without the word 'Commonwealth', came to mean black, and newspapers and the public at large referred to black British-born citizens as second-generation immigrants - a nonsensical term.

By the 1990s, ordinary immigration from the Commonwealth had slowed dramatically and the admission of refugees from non-Commonwealth countries like Iraq, Iran and Somalia was growing. Some confusion between refugees and. immigrants arose, with anti-immigrant hostility in the press switching from ordinary immigrants to refugees.

Meanwhile, entry from the European Union had proceeded without attracting much attention, and a considerable number of British people (about a million) had emigrated under the same set of rules to Spain, France, Greece and elsewhere in Europe. From 2002, the British government began to encourage EU workers, especially temporary ones, to fill vacant jobs in the British economy. Some were highly skilled jobs, others unpopular ones, like fruit picking. The demand for labour was so great that non-EU migrants from eastern Europe and China were arriving illegally. From the beginning of 2004, with ten new member states of the EU, entry increased strongly from the 'accession' states, particularly Poland. Reception was mixed, with some employers full of praise for the new immigrants, others more cautious.

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