Quotes About Immigrant

A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.

My dad was a scientist. More than that: my dad grew up in a tiny terraced house in Swansea, the only child of a second-generation immigrant family - his father sold cloth, zips and buttons from door to door - and so science - biochemistry at Swansea University, followed by a PhD at Imperial College - was his way out, his way up.

I didn't fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive, I created this 'ideal America.' Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, 'Oh, I don't belong here, either.'

In America especially, if you're Chinese and you work at a restaurant, there's a certain connotation among the Chinese immigrant community: It's the first generation that opens restaurants as a way to survive. You open to support your family so your kids can become doctors and lawyers.

As you know, I'm an immigrant. I came over here as an immigrant, and what gave me the opportunities, what made me to be here today, is the open arms of Americans. I have been received. I have been adopted by America.

I came to the US as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the brief time we spent on welfare, and the difficult task of assimilating into a new culture.

I read on the back cover that the author was born in Russia and came to America when she was young. She barely spoke English, but she wanted to be a great writer. I thought that was very admirable, so I sat down and tried to write a story. Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight. That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one.

I felt like a young Tony Montana having come to America, except the only person I wanted to kill was myself.

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

As a former refugee myself, I am very grateful for the help my family received and the opportunities this opened up for me and where it has brought me.

My mom is a Sikh immigrant born in a refugee camp. My Irish-Swedish-Norwegian-Danish-English-American dad grew up Baptist.

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.

If you're the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help.

I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.

Conversations about money, culture, power, class - it's at the center of my identity. I think it's a combination of being born to immigrant parents, growing up relatively poor, and really living in a world where formal institutions, like banks and anywhere that you had to sign a contract, was really feared and avoided at all costs.

As a Hispanic American, this country has done a lot for me, and I think that people have to be more grateful for what they have in this country.

My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.

I'm a big supporter of the military simply because I'm the daughter of a Polish immigrant who fled Europe during World War II from Poland and lied about his age to join the Army simply because he was proud to be an American. And who isn't?

DiMaggio was never a rube. He was very smart and very urban. Coming out of the Great Depression, he was the immigrant boy who made it big. Coming back from World War II, he had all the wealth and power that New York aspired to. When New York saw itself as the center of the world, he was its paragon of class.

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

Being an immigrant and living in England, I feel like I lived in two worlds. There was the world that, when I was at school with my friends, was very English, and then I'd go home to another country, with exotic foods and colours. I have a sense of colour pairings, and that came from my background, I think.

Maybe to feel like an Afghan I needed to be born and raised in the States, and maybe I needed to live in Afghanistan for nearly a decade to feel like an American. Both worlds shaped me, but neither one of them completely correspond to the picture I have of myself.

Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.

I had never been in a supermarket before coming to America. At home, my parents wouldn't let me open the refrigerator, because they worried I'd damage the door by opening it too many times.