Best 141 quotes in «immigrants quotes» category

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, “All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.” Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions--from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate--are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.

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

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn’t an INS officer. I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn’t see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it’s so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned,and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger.

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

You could say that Trump is the 21st century version of Pat Buchanan. Protectionist, anti-immigrant.

All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

America is not a country of immigrants, we are a country of pioneers.

American teachers said I was illiterate, so they put me in ELL classes. Although I spoke English, I did not speak their English.

America is a nation of immigrants who forgot where they came from and poor people who think they'll soon be rich.

America was a land of machines, and it was through machines, the miraculous handmaidens of mob culture, that the muses of illiteracy brought America her voice and vision during the years of the immigrants’ waves. Centuries ago, movable type had given literacy to the common man. Now, through these wondrous newer machines, he would give it back.

And I believed him. It was genuine, that confusion, and that was the first time I really saw him, I think- when I understood that his social persona was concealing none of what I'd always thought it was, but actual kindness instead, that there was a kind streak at his core.

A nation forgetting its own laughter is in a sad state of affairs

And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.

As the nation diversifies, the homogeneous communities that people seem to prefer become increasingly fine grained. When immigrants become landlords, many rent only to people from their own country. Apartment buildings can become entirely Korean, Salvadoran, or Guatemalan, for example. Immigrant landlords are often unaware of non-discrimination laws, and do not hesitate to tell others they are not welcome. A lawyer for Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles noted that some managers rent only to people from a particular state of Mexico, adding, 'Our fair housing laws haven't even anticipated that.

And yet. When I read the Dawn on line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that I understood the unspoken as much as the articulated among its inhabitants; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing; I knew I couldn’t think of Karachi and find any easy answers, and I didn’t know how to decide if that was reason to go back or reason to stay away.

An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot

As it was, being a Zimbabwean immigrant was the worst thing a person could be in Southern Africa. They were the new Hebrews – homeless.

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

A third layer of nativeness was composed of those whom others thought directly descended, even the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion of the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it. An unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future transplanted soils.