Note 12 — Chapter II · THE UNITED STATES. COLONIAL PERIOD

There has not only been much looseness and ambiguity in the use of the word “immigration,” but also an apparent feeling that immigration and emigration are two different things, as is witnessed by the title of one of the standard works on the subject. They are, in fact, only two different ways of looking at the same thing. As so often happens in the social sciences, the student of immigration is under the necessity of taking a word from the common language, and giving it a more restricted and inflexible meaning than either everyday usage or the etymology of the word would warrant.