Quotes About Assimilation

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.

Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating. When we talk of the conscious mind "assimilating" an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.

The assimilation and ingestion of the "content," the eaten food, produces an inner change. Transformation of the body cells through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes experienced by man. How a weary, enfeebled, and famished man can tum into an alert, strong, and satisfied being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating drink: this is, and must remain, a fundamental experience so long as man shall exist.

Ego consciousness is a sense organ which perceives the world and the unconscious by means of images, but this image-forming capacity is itself a psychic product, not a quality of the world. Image formation alone makes perception and assimilation possible.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.

For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal.

Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there. "It

What sort of attractions do you think lured our coreligionists out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European culture? Was it the wit of Molière, or the ingenious stage mechanisms of Pixérécourt? Or was it simply the opportunity to cast an eye, without shame, upon the living, unclad human form?

like any outsider, you cope, you try to copy to belong, you overcompensate for what you think you hear is the norm.

BERRI: "Yes," I remember my first word in American English was "yes," and I remember as a boy speaking quickly, effortlessly, without a trace of an accent in American English. And, just as swiftly, I remember losing my Hebrew vocabulary, as my parents spoke German at home, which I understood but never spoke.

Sometimes when Australians go overseas, it's as though the 'Aussie' is refined out of them. I don't know why. It's never happened to me, because I'm really proud of it. I'm not embarrassed about where I'm from or who I am any more. I know who I am. I don't fit in everywhere, but I know where I do fit in.

Helping refugees settle and integrate peacefully, often in the face of distrust and prejudice, is essential work.

We must go back and we must be sure that our immigrants will be well-integrated into our society, and the best way to do that is to have more economic immigrants, less refugees a little bit and less reunufication of families.

Americans are people who prefer the Continent to their own country, but refuse to learn its languages.

People who refuse to integrate into our society and want to live apart in their ghetto don't make our society strong.

Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens.

The open-borders Right regularly insists that immigrants and their children are assimilating at a brisk clip. It would be nice to see them advocating as well, then, an English-only practice in all government communications.

Among immigrants today, it is increasingly fashionable to reject American exceptionalism in favor of multiculturalism. To pretend that this isn't happening isn't optimism; it's sheer fantasy.

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.

So I was really excited when I came to America about meeting black people. But it was a huge culture shock, because I was rejected by the black community. They were like, 'You talk like a white girl.' People would call me an Oreo. All I wanted was acceptance.

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.

People of color grow up steeped in 'white' culture. The reverse is not true. And, no, listening to hip-hop on the way to work does not count as immersion.