migrant

plural migrants

1. A migratory animal, in particular a migratory bird.

   Gilbert White writes, "I have consulted a sportsman who tells me that […] often there are amongst them little parties of small blue doves which he calls rockiers. The food of these numberless migrants was beechmast and some acorns."

   1887, Edwin Lester Linden Arnold, Bird Life in England, page 182

2. Traveller or worker who moves from one region or country to another.
3. informalA person who leaves one place in order to permanently settle in another.

   “But once you lose everything— your home, your school, your clinic, your road, your church—then it’s an impossible situation. You become an environmental migrant because you have to find those facilities in some other place.”

   2021 April 22, Aryn Baker, “Environmental Crises Are Forcing Millions Into Cities. Can Countries Turn Climate Migrants Into an Asset?”, in Time, archived from the original on 22 Apr 2021

   1 more example

   These first English migrants to Jamestown endured terrible disease and arrived during a period of drought and colder-than-normal winters. The migrants to Roanoke on the outer banks of Carolina, where the English had gone in the 1580s, disappeared. And a brief effort to settle the coast of Maine in 1607 and 1608 failed because of an unusually bitter winter.

   2019 November 25, Peter C. Mancall, “Pilgrims survived until the first Thanksgiving thanks to an epidemic that devastated Native Americans”, in CNN

4. Any of various pierid butterflies of the genus Catopsilia. Also called an emigrant.

comparative more migrant · superlative most migrant

1. Migratory.