Best 141 quotes in «immigrants quotes» category

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because in America there is a naive belief that we are all rugged individuals and can make it on our own, stock market and banking regulations became nonexistent. Consequently, on October 24, 1929, the New York Stock Market crashed, ushering in the “Great Depression.” It became a human tragedy that could have and should have been prevented! Well, not everyone was dancing anymore. The vast middle class was struggling; coal miners were still digging for the dirty black energy, deep within the earth and only getting black lung disease for their efforts. Farmers worked long hours to sow and harvest uncertain crops and the new immigrants just off the boat, worked for very small returns in the many unregulated sweatshops.

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.

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.

But she couldn't formulate the sentence in Chinese. Her knowledge of the language only extended to the daily necessities and small affections.

Because we were born of old country people in a new land, and, right or wrong, we had not felt equal to those around us, and had had to do a little more than they in everything we did.

Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror.

Certainly, they'd had to endure the war, but they had each other close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always a home!

Celui qui n'appartient à aucun lieu spécifique ne peut, en réalité, retourner nulle part.

Con l'attiva cooperazione di governi e di altri personaggi pubblici che trovano nell'opera di appoggio e fomentazione del pregiudizio comune gli unici strumenti sostitutivi di una politica tesa ad affrontare le cause reali dell'incertezza esistenziale che ossessiona i loro elettori, i "rifugiati" [...] sostituiscono streghe maligne, fantasmi di malfattori impenitenti e altri spiritelli e spauracchi vari che popolano le leggende metropolitane.

But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here." He touched his heart. "It isn't there." And he pointed at the dusty road.

Donald Trump, who had 5 kids (that we know of) with 3 wives (one of which was an immigrant), accuses immigrants of "breeding".

Doomed to Hell. Every last one of you.

Everyone wants Kashmir but no one wants Kashmiris. Aren't I a miracle? A seed that survived the slaughter & slaughters to come. I think I believe in freedom I just don't know where it is. I think I believe in home, I just don't know where to look.

Crazy how so many British people can walk into Tesco, see 30 self-service checkouts, and still believe that it's immigrants who are taking all the jobs.

Every voter knew that the Family Party had come to power promising to deport Illegals, to manage its borders more efficiently and to ensure that people of traditional European stock weren't overrun in their own country.

Foreigner, útlendingur. Ausländer. I have joined the Faculty of Foreign Languages. British people of my generation don't use that world, certainly not as casually as Icelanders. 'Foreigner' is a word I associate with the Daily Mail and the British National Party, a term used only by people who understand the world in binary terms of Us and Them.

For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.

He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people's shirts, just above the heart.

He had left home one day, yesterday, and come home today, and the change was too much for him to bear. And this was why he could not go home all at once.

He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered.

Comics aren’t for everyone. Created by the children of immigrants, it is the medium of the outsider and the outcast, the nerd who won’t fit in. We exist, we thrive because we recognize and amplify the voices of those who must struggle mightily to be heard. We say, I’m here.

Each pepper field is the same. In each one I am a failed anthem. I don't know English but there is so little that needs translated out here.

For most immigrants, moving to the new country is an act of faith. Even if you've heard stories of safety, opportunity, and prosperity, it's still a leap to remove yourself from your own language, people, and country. Your own history. What if the stories weren't true? What if you couldn't adapt? What if you weren't wanted in the new country?