Sometimes I am confused as to which to use "immigrate" or "emigrate." In a recent "New Yorker" article, I read the following:

"His parents, Fritz Kohn and Ida Lowe, were born Jewish...and when they married they changed their name to Kerry (taking the name from a map of Ireland, the story goes) and converted to Catholicism before emigrating to America, in 1905."

Couldn't it be immigrating too? Can they be used interchangeably?

Yes, like come and go, or bring and take. (Japanese has two such verbs for give.) Motion from A to B can be described from the viewpoint of either A or B. They went to America in 1905, or they came to America in 1905.

Only one member of the pair is possible if the speaker is at A or B: you can't go here, or take something here. And you can't come from here to there, or bring something from here to there. But either is possible when both A and B are 'there' and the speaker can adopt either perspective.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Can they be used interchangeably?

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No, not really. I usually have to look it up to make sure I'm using the right one. The key is in the prefix. Think of immigration as "in-migration", migrating into a country, and emigration as "exit-migration", migrating out of a country. So a person coming (or going) from one country to another is really both an immigrant and an emigrant, depending on your point of reference. Confused? See the AHD Online's Usage Note under migrate.

Tinman

Yes, like come and go, or bring and take.

Yes, this is an interesting phenomenon, and it happens a bit in IE languages. Take the words for give and take. Our give comes from the PIE root *ghabh- which also yielded habeo 'to have, hold' in Latin. Our have is not at all related to Latin habeo which comes from the root kap- 'to grasp' which yielded capio 'to take'. The German nehmen 'to take' (cf. our nim 'to steel, pifler' and numb) which is from the root *nem- 'to assign, allot' but also 'to take' whence also Greek nemo 'to allot' and nomos 'portion, usage, custom, law, district'. Another root *ghos-ti- whence English guest, but also Latin hostis 'enemy' (also in the compound hospes 'guest, host, stranger' < *ghos-pot- 'guest-master') as well as Greek xenos 'guest, host, stranger'. Sometimes this occurs in the same language, e.g., Greek pharmakon 'drug, cure, poison'.

It really depends on the point of view of the writer. From the POV of the country being left, the travellers would be emigrants. Looking at it from the perspective of the new country, they would be immigrants.

Of course, one way to avoid the problem would be to use "migrants".

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Originally posted by arnie:
It really depends on the point of view of the writer.

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Or on the point of view of the sentence. In Kalleh's original quote:

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"His parents, Fritz Kohn and Ida Lowe, were born Jewish...and when they married they changed their name to Kerry (taking the name from a map of Ireland, the story goes) and converted to Catholicism before emigrating to America, in 1905."

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the sentence starts by mentioning their birth outside America, their marriage outside America, and then needs to describe their movement to America. As the sentence p-o-v has been established as non-American, the move to America must be an emigration. To replace emigrating with imigrating would cause a mental jolt for the reader as the sentence's point-of-view suddenly shifts from outside America to inside America.