Best 141 quotes in «immigrants quotes» category

They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.

There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin. Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses.

These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent.

The voice was full of satisfaction with the things we had achieved, sadness for the life we had left behind, and hope for the unknown future. I could feel my heart beating strong and fast under my right hand. I wondered if anyone else could hear the beating of my heart. It felt like the integrated pulse of many hearts beating steadily together in this room at that very moment.

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best — less trouble).

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.

Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.

What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians?" I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

—Tú hablas sin palabras. Todos estamos siempre hablando sin palabras. —¿Y para qué valen las palabras, entonces? —No valen para mucho, casi nunca. La mayor parte de las veces, únicamente para ocultar aquello que realmente quieres decir, o algo que quieres saber.

Very timely too: "Suddenly Shirley understood why her father had brought her 10,000 miles to live among strangers. Here, she did not have to wait for gray hairs to be considered wise. Here, she could speak up, question even the conduct of the President. Here, Shirley Temple Wong was somebody. She felt as if she had the power of ten tigers, as if she had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

We of alien looks or words must stick together.

What emerged for me as purpose was the search for and cultivation of possibilities for experiencing meaningful human transactions in different languages and across cultural differences through play, sports, travel, food, literature, and conversation. I sought to establish relations of mutual understanding and love with people no matter what their culture or place of origin in the world—relations based on philia, eros, and agape, according to context and persons. I perhaps sensed instinctively that such relations were the key to being equally at home everywhere, even in la Yunai. More than an immigrant, at that time I still felt myself to be a sojourner in this country, but I wanted my sojourn to be imbued with the meaning found in earnest, sincere connections with the people and places that life brought to my experience.

What is important about immigration is how immigrants arrived and what the individual immigrants do with their lives after arriving. Do they open a restaurant or other business, do they provide for their family, do they integrate into the larger community - in essence, do they become proud Americans? Or do they try their hardest to stay "economic migrants" or "hyphenated-Americans"? Or, at worst, do they attempt to convert America into the countries from which they escaped?

What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.

We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.

We fold our immigrant selves into this veneer of what we think is African American girlhood. The result is more jagged than smooth. This tension between our inherited identities and our newly adopted selves filters into our relationships with other girls and the boys we love, and how we interact with the broken places around us.

Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are all different. How different, though? Different better, or different worse? Such basic questions underlie whether people are willing to accept outsiders in their midst

Why should citizenship depend on one exclusive form of a relationship? What about love between friends, community, love of work?

When we came to America, though, we didn't know what the right thing was. Here we lived with no map. We became invisible, the people who swam in between other people's lives, bussing dishes, delivering groceries. What was wrong? We didn't know. The most important thing, Abba said, was not to stick out. Don't let them see you. But I think it hurt him, to hide so much.

Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?

You and I. We are both immigrants. We both know it is hard to find your place in this world. You want to make your life better, work hard in country that is not your own - you make new life, new friends, find new love. You get to become new person! But is never a simple thing, never without cost.

Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping.

Years from now we might be saying it's hyperbolic to compare someone to Donald Trump, because we will be quite sure no one could be that cruel.

Years from now we might be saying it's hyperbolic to compare someone to Donald Trump, because we will be quite sure no one is that cruel.

With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or Götterdämmerung), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.

America was built on immigrants, and what they bring 'to the table.'

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same. I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world. I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

America is a nation of immigrants. We have to have a functioning immigration system.

You only really stop being an immigrant when you reject other immigrants and try to slam the door in their faces when they try to emulate you.

You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.

All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.

And they [illegal immigrants] will come back, but they are going to have to go out, and hopefully they get back.

My stomach sank. JP had come so close. His immigrant parents had sacrificed so much.

In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat.

It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants ... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.

Conservatives aren't anti-immigrant - conservatives are pro-legal immigration.

I have only one loyalty and that's to the immigrant community.

Men and women are immigrants in each other's worlds.

People associate farmworkers with illegal immigrants, and that's really not the case.

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Our politics at its best involves us recognizing ourselves in each other. And our politics at its worst are when we see immigrants or women or blacks or gays or Mexicans as somehow separate, apart from us.

The United States is historically a nation of immigrants.

There is a mass of immigrants, a million of them without work. We will stop this invasion.

The question of receiving the immigrant is an ethical issue that becomes a political issue.

We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox... and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.

Unlicensed, illegal immigrants are the safest drivers on the road.

When you're the son of an immigrant who came here seeking freedom, it makes you appreciate.

When immigrants go into the worse neighborhood and they fix it up, they should become citizens.