100 Quotes About Immigration

Over the years, immigration has been a hot-button issue of debate. Despite being very similar in nature and purpose, many people still do not understand what the term means and how it affects our society. The immigration quotes here will give you a better understanding of what it means to be an immigrant and how the process works.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than...
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The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here. Chuck Palahniuk
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God created every man to be free. The ability to choose whether to live free or enslaved, right or wrong, happy or in fear is something called freewill. Every man was born with freewill. Some people use it, and some people use any excuse not to. Nobody can turn you into a slave unless you allow them. Nobody can make you afraid of anything, unless you allow them. Nobody can tell you to do something wrong, unless you allow them. God never created you to be a slave, man did. God never created division or set up any borders between brothers, man did. God never told you hurt or kill another, man did. And in the end, when God asks you: "Who told you to kill one of my children?" And you tell him, "My leader." He will then ask you, "And are THEY your GOD? . Suzy Kassem
Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five...
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Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country. Theodore Roosevelt
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And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. Amy Tan
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...the Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless--'' Huddled masses, ' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'... Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass, ' and they all wanna come over. Neal Shusterman
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Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave. Orhan Pamuk
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Being articulate is no guarantee of intelligence, ” Zoe said. “I’m not doubting the value of education. I’m doubting its reach. Highly educated politicians still do stupid things. Anthony Weiner was educated; Mugabi was educated; Assad was educated; Mussolini was educated. For all their education, look at them. Michael Benzehabe
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If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ? . Alex Morritt
There is no envy, jealousy, or hatred between the different...
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There is no envy, jealousy, or hatred between the different colors of the rainbow. And no fear either. Because each one exists to make the others’ love more beautiful. Aberjhani
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and...
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Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. Franklin D. Roosevelt
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People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the fucking thing. It's all fucking crap. We're all human beings, we're all mammals, we're all rocks, plants, rivers. Fucking borders are just such a pain in the fucking arse. Shane MacGowan
AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it...
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AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish. Ambrose Bierce
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In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush'sorder calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial. William Safire
Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart...
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Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart people. Welcome to the new Dark Ages! Oliver Gaspirtz
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Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community. Aberjhani
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The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples. Lyndon B. Johnson
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What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil.. K.S. Inglis
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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. Durga ChewBose
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People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to Simon S. Tam
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Lady and gentleman, when my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream that one day amid the snowy hilltops of western North Carolina, their son would lose his virginity to a cheerleader in the woman's bathroom of a Waffle House just off the interstate. My parents have sacrificed so much for this dream! And that is why we must journey on, despite all trials and tribulations! Not for me and least of all for the poor cheerleader in question, but for my parents and indeed for all immigrants who came to his great nation in what they themselves could never have: CHEERLEADER SEX. John Green
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Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87 Mona Rodriguez
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Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381). Mona Rodriguez
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Why are you perpetuating a childhood you grew up despising? Pg 57 Mona Rodriguez
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But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them. Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha, ” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist. Padma Lakshmi
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The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks. Norman Manea
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They were both lost in cities that would not pause even to shrug Monica Ali
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Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody. Anna Quindlen
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It is psychotic to draw a line between two places. It is psychotic to go. It is psychotic to look. Psychotic to live in a different country forever. Psychotic to lose something forever. The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic. Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy. It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis. Bhanu Kapil
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Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable. Siri Hustvedt
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Every crossroad in life has four options — quit, adapt, proceed, or accept, but quitting is a dead-end. Sharon Nir
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Zoe leaned closer to Ruth, nearly nose to nose. “If they were made from better stuff, they would have pretended the fault was theirs. They would have made a moment of it--a pretty moment. Michael Benzehabe
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Diplomacy is so weak and prosaic. Diplomacy must never become an end, itself. Facts are so much more important in science. Yet, I'm beginning to appreciate the value of a soft word and a smile. --Unassimilated pg 294 Michael Benzehabe
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Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others. Harsha Walia
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Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness– myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me. . Luisa A. Igloria
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In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly. Colin Quinn
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{...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons. Andrea Bouchaud
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Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't. DaShanne Stokes
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Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror. DaShanne Stokes
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I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Mark Steyn
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The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one. . Enoch Powell
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Not only was it impossible to truly belong in America, but he didn't fit in here anymore either. He was a dweller of two lands, accepted by none. Shilpi Somaya Gowda
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He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural, " apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there. Terry Pratchett
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Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.  Colum McCann
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Trump didn't divide America. He just doused us with gasoline and fanned the flames. DaShanne Stokes
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Building bridges takes us further than building walls. DaShanne Stokes
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Our fights must be rooted in experiences, in stories, and in anecdotes. People remember these more than sterile numbers or facts. Myths are powerful magic and can turn enemies into friends. In a world where too many still tell stories that some are illegal and that to be free we must control the movement of others, the work of making new myths is essential. Syed Khalid Hussan
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As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside. Jade Chang
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But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back. Jhumpa Lahiri
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Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist. . Aviva Chomsky
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Lincoln bought a German language newspaper. Harold Holzer
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No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. Warsan Shire
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We call it ‘back home’knowing full well that the majority of us may never go back. That we may spend but a handful of weeks in the tropic heat and relentless traffic, tolerating family members we may have convincedourselves to have missed, but very few will submit to that final pull to return. We know our land, our soil as back home, but for many of usit is only the home we left back, the one we left so far behind to be thrust into a lifelong searchof another, of another, of another. Naveed Khan
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Maybe I live in the gates that lead to outbound international flights. Maybe that is home. And do I feel more comfortable at the departures or at the arrivals? Michal Coret
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I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right. Jorge Ramos
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I’ll tell you what I don’t believe, Alwyn. I don’t believe there’s a pretty forest in the sky with castles and a white light and God and all his angels waiting to welcome all the good people in. And you and me standing there sick with nerves while they check us out to see if we’ve made the grade. That sounds too much like immigrating to Australia. Beverly Rycroft
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I believe that the victims and their families should start lodging civil actions for negligence against the politicians. Allowing treasonous murderers into our countries, at the tragic cost to our citizens is worthy of a court action. And as soon as the first judgment goes in favour of the plaintiff, that will change the immigration policies overnight, because, as we know, money is the only thing that talks. Robert Black
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People who are driven by love will overcome hardships and hurdles in ways that people who are only driven by profit never can. Simon S. Tam
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My family came to this country to take advantage of opportunity, not to take advantage of America. Jake Danishevsky
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I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. Helen Oyeyemi
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The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. Alexis De Tocqueville
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Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen. Andre Dubus III
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America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams. Barack Obama
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The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment. George Washington
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A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself. Barack Obama
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The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren't the lords of the earth. Cynthia Ozick
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They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering. . Yuri Herrera
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I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact. James Joyce
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[America]'s higher education system is excellent, both in terms of quality and accessibility. Here anybody can go to college. Many countries simply can't accommodate many students. And by the way, most people who came here in the seventies came to get an education. They didn't wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to America to be free.' they said, 'I'll go there to get an education.' That's an important distinction. It was only after they were here for a while that they fully appreciated the freedoms we enjoy here. Mahbod Seraji
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America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants. Michael Gold
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And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains, ” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’s somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?. Unknown
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Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart. Marina Budhos
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Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority. Donald J. Trump
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Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. "Why not try it?" she thought, instead of "This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism. Scaachi Koul
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Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants. Pratheepan Gulasekaram
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These dreams These empty dreamsfrom the make-believe bedroomstheir parents left themare the after-effectsof television programsabout the idealwhite american familywith black maidsand latino janitorswho are well trainto make everyoneand their bill collectorslaugh at themand the people they represent Pedro Pietri
78
I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti- Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs. Richard Wright
79
The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores. A.E. Samaan
80
One who criticises capitalism while approving of immigration, of which the working class is its first victim, would do better to remain silent. One who criticises immigration while remaining silent regarding capitalism should do the same. Alain De Benoist
81
Your life depends on a random stranger who could kill you, will probably disrespect you, and will most likely pay you much less than you deserve. But even those prospects are better than the ones you used to have. This is the life of los jornaleros — the day laborers. Gustavo Arellano
82
It was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.' Innovation', said Greenspan in April 2005, 'has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants'. It is almost touching to find out that Greenspan cares so much about immigrants. Gilad Atzmon
83
Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land. We are unmoored and disconnected, like these poplar seeds blown into the crevices of the buildings, into the corners of the world. Elena Gorokhova
84
Then why do they come?” Buonarroti shrugged his shoulders.“ Because things are in such a bad way in their homeland, they’re ready to flee into a black hole in space, to a concentration camp, to the Sargasso Sea of international criminal brigands.”“ Between the devil and the deep blue sea, ” said the new consul, demonstrating his knowledge of international idioms. Vladimir Lorchenkov
85
Not again, Draper, " Frank sighed. "You're not going to stop us from crossing. You and I know that the one thing the Government does even more poorly than provide healthcare is secure its borders. Randy Quarles
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It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
87
Hanna reached for Margaret's hand, knowing nothing she could say would bring comfort. Margaret would never see her grandmother again. Nor would Hanna see her Oma, who had wept when Hanna boarded the ship for America, waving goodbye for the last time. Only the elderly and frail were left behind. And letters from home were not the same as a warm laugh or a cup of tea shared on a cold day. Meredith Jaeger
88
Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
89
After using a paint chart from a local DIY superstore to identify the skin tone of his penis as midnight chocolate, Miriam stayed down on one knee and offered him the citizenship he had always wanted and the middle-aged white woman he would grudgingly accept. David F. Porteous
90
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). Zadie Smith
91
Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits. . Laura Esquivel
92
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. Mohsin Hamid
93
Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much. But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I'd danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was. Mohsin Hamid
94
The country was a dreamland; and perhaps it even reminded my wife's grandfather of the night he woke up drunk in his friend's house, beside his friend's wife, everything similar but new, different, better. The United States of America was like an eternity of those first disorientating seconds of not knowing and not wanting to. Tod Wodicka
95
.. only a country to which people flock by the thousands from all corners of the world, has the right to advise others how to live. And the country from which so many others break out, across its frontiers, in tanks, or fly away in the homemade balloons or in the latest supersonic fighter, or escape across mine-fields and through machine-gun ambushes, or give the slip to packs of guard-dogs, that country certainly has no right to teach anyone anything - at least not for the time being. First of all, put your own house in order. Try to create there such a society that people will not dig underground passages in order to escape. Only then shall we earn the right to teach others. And not with our tanks, but with good advice and our own personal example. Observe, admire, then go and imitate our example, if it pleases you. Suvorov Viktor
96
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American..There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. Theodore Roosevelt
97
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement.. The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again. Charles Whibley
98
First, with the establishment of a state and territorially defined state borders, “immigration” takes on an entirely new meaning. In a natural order, immigration is a person’s migration from one neighborhood-community into a different one (micro-migration). In contrast, under statist conditions immigration is immigration by “foreigners” from across state borders, and the decision whom to exclude or include, and under what conditions, rests not with a multitude of independent private property owners or neighborhoods of owners but with a single central (and centralizing) state-government as the ultimate sovereign of all domestic residents and their properties (macro-migration). If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also nonexistent in a natural order, where all movement is invited). HansHermann Hoppe
99
As she continues to answer questions about her employment, all these words mean little more to her now than I AM SOPHISTICATED, I AM WORTHY, I AM SOPHISTICATED, I AM WORTHY. She attempts the posture of a politician's wife, shoulders held back, dignif Ied yet modest. Tania James
100
These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started.. but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Zadie Smith