Definition
A person who voluntarily leaves their home country for a lawful reason with the intent to settle permanently elsewhere, typically taking their family and property with them. The legal definition emphasizes both the element of intent — a design to settle, not merely to travel or sojourn — and the lawfulness of the departure. The term describes the act from the perspective of the country being left, as opposed to the country of arrival.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone who leaves a country to settle in a new country.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Removing from one country to another; emigrating; as, an emigrant company or nation. Pertaining to an emigrant; used for emigrants.
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned at their core, but the legal definition adds precision the ordinary usage omits: specifically, the requirement of a lawful reason for departure and the conditional phrase "if he has any" regarding family and property. Legally, a person traveling light — with no family and no property — may still qualify as an emigrant provided the intent to settle permanently is present. Common usage tends to collapse emigrant and immigrant into interchangeable descriptions of the same person in transit; legal sources treat these as distinct perspectives anchored to different sovereigns and different legal relationships.
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Common Confusion
EMIGRANT vs. IMMIGRANT: These terms describe the same movement from opposite vantage points. An emigrant is defined in relation to the country departed; an immigrant is defined in relation to the country entered. Historical legal dictionaries address emigrant almost exclusively from the standpoint of the departing state's rights and obligations — the right of expatriation, the sovereign's claim on the subject, the transfer of allegiance. Modern immigration law, by contrast, is largely built around the immigrant frame. Researchers working across historical and modern sources must track which sovereign's perspective is organizing the analysis.
EMIGRANT vs. EXPATRIATE: Expatriation is the legal act of renouncing or being released from allegiance to one's home country. Emigration is a factual condition of removal. A person may emigrate without formally expatriating, and expatriation can occur without physical emigration. The conflation of these terms in historical sources is common and consequential.
EMIGRANT vs. REFUGEE or EXILE: The historical legal definitions consistently specify a lawful reason for departure and a voluntary design to settle. This excludes those expelled by force or fleeing persecution under legal compulsion — categories that would later develop their own distinct doctrinal treatment. Early dictionaries do not draw this line explicitly, but the word "lawful" does the work.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term sits at a doctrinal crossroads that shifted significantly across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early American and international law sources — especially those drawing on Vattel — treated emigration primarily as a question of the individual's relationship to the sovereign: did the home state have a claim to prevent departure? Could subjects freely remove themselves and their property? That framing governed debates about expatriation rights throughout the antebellum period and into Reconstruction.
Researchers using Bouvier or early Black's should understand that the definition descends almost verbatim from Vattel's Law of Nations (Book I, Chapter XIX, §224), which means it carries natural law premises about sovereignty and domicile that may not translate cleanly into statutory or constitutional arguments drawn from later sources. When you encounter the term in pre-1900 legal materials, it is often doing work in an expatriation or domicile argument, not an immigration restriction argument.
By the time of Black's 2nd edition, the case citations added — including Williams v. Fears (1900) and The Danube (1893) — signal the term's entry into labor law and admiralty contexts respectively. Rapalje & Lawrence's specific note on "emigrant laborers" in contract law points to a distinct practical context: the statutory regulation of contracts with foreign laborers, which was a live legislative concern through the Alien Contract Labor Acts of the 1880s. Researchers tracing "emigrant" in late nineteenth-century statutory materials should be alert to this labor-contract meaning running parallel to the domicile-and-allegiance meaning.
Modern immigration law largely abandons "emigrant" as a term of art in favor of "alien," "national," "immigrant visa holder," and the like. Searching modern federal materials for "emigrant" will mostly surface historical references or the specific phrase "emigrant agent" statutes, which several states enacted to regulate those who recruited foreign laborers.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries reproduce the Vattel definition with only minor variation in phrasing, which itself signals something important: this was not a term being actively litigated or reformulated by common law courts in the nineteenth century. It was borrowed wholesale from public international law and treated as settled. The unanimity of the sources on the core definition masks the term's instability at the margins.
Bouvier adds a cryptic citation to "2 Cra. 302" alongside the Vattel reference. This appears to reference Cranch's early Supreme Court reports, suggesting the term appeared in an early federal case in a context Bouvier found worth noting, though he provides no explanatory gloss. Researchers should treat this citation as a pointer rather than authority.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source to separately call out "emigrant laborers" as a recognized legal category with its own contract-law implications, citing an English Manne & Granger report. This is a useful divergence: it suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century, "emigrant" had acquired a specific technical meaning in the context of labor contracts that the more general dictionaries did not fully capture.
Black's 2nd edition adds American case citations absent from the 1st edition, reflecting the term's gradual absorption into domestic statutory and admiralty frameworks. The entries collectively show a term entering American law through international law doctrine and slowly acquiring domestic legal texture through legislation and litigation — without the core definition ever being formally revised.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term "emigrant" carries different legal weight depending on whether the source is international law, federal immigration statute, or state law. Several states passed "emigrant agent" statutes in the post-Reconstruction South to restrict recruitment of Black laborers to other states; these statutes gave the term a racially specific enforcement context that does not appear in the dictionary definitions. Federal statutory use of "emigrant" declined sharply after the Immigration Act of 1917 standardized the terminology around "aliens" and visa classifications.
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