For the common cases of "import foo" and "from foo import bar", having a keyword avoids repeating the module/function name, as in "foo = import('foo')" and "bar = import('foo').bar".

Ignoring this detail, "import" could be simply a function, like "print" and "exec" in Python 3. And with lazy evaluation, even statements could be made into function calls: "if(True, 42, 1/0)" would evaluate to 42 without causing a ZeroDivisionError. The same can be done for assignment: "locals().__setitem__('x', 3)" instead of "x = 3". Keep this up and programs might start to look like this:

    define('fac', ('x',), product(range(1, x+1)))

Which is basically a copy of Lisp:

    (defun fac (x) (product (range 1 (+ 1 x))))