Quotes About Migration

I can't understand why someone wouldn't have a degree of sympathy for people that had to flee their country, travel to try and find their home somewhere, and nobody wants them. How could you not be a little bit sympathetic?

My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

All the literature of this century is somewhat burdened by the theme of uprootedness.

Il n'est pas très courant de voir un peuple durement opprimé accourir, tout juste libéré, chez son oppresseur, pour demeurer sous son administration ; il faut croire que la France, en fait, n'avait pas laissé sur l'autre rive de la Méditerranée un trop mauvais souvenir pour que ses ex-assujettis n'aient rien eu de plus pressé, à peine sa tutelle écartée, que de se précipiter sur son sol. Ou bien venaient-ils en conquérants ?

Comme si pendant le temps de notre vie, et moins encore, la France était en train de changer de peuple : on en voit un, on fait la sieste, c'en est un autre, ou plusieurs autres, et qui paraissent appartenir à d'autres rivages, à d'autres ciels, d'autres architectures, d'autres mœurs — c'est ce qu'ils semblent penser eux aussi.

I'd rather be poor but together," he said. I thought about my own father, and the choice he'd made to go north, the price we'd paid for that decision. Was my uncle right? Was it better to be poor but together? Or was it better to try to find a better life, even if it meant breaking up your family?

In the years following the Civil War, southern plantation owners urged replacing their former slaves with Chinese labor.

whosyourcity.com

the endless hostage swap of travelers east and west.

the American population was increasing rapidly, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 12.9 million in 1830, and from sixteen states in 1800 to twenty-four in 1830, most of the increase across the mountains in the trans-Appalachian west. The river steamboat from 1807, the Erie Canal between Albany, New York, and the Great Lakes from 1825, railroads from 1829, penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement. These new places and people needed lighting.

From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores of knowing.

By a decade after the 1521 fall of Tenochtitlán, the Mexican natives had already adopted a new set of flavors into their existing large assortment. There seemed to be an "absence of strong cultural resistance to the introduction and use of foreign plants," as one researcher found recently when he tried to discover what had become of so many of those pre-Columbian crops in modern Mexico.11

The idea of betrayal was in the air. The Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug-resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs about five years after its initial introduction.

Louise's possessions looked like a refugee's beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA.

In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates

She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn.

It reminded me of what Dad said after every snail's crawl home from Albany when snow hit."It's New York, people. It's winter. We get snow. If you aren't prepared to deal with it, move to Miami.

when Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman decided to leave the family cattle business in Bavaria, they chose by instinct or luck to settle in Montgomery, Alabama, a hub of the cotton trade. The

Their violence, plus the southward creep of the Sahara Desert, were driving people like Kiah to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean in inflatable dinghies.

Europe is creating the flight of refugees that's tearing it apart politically, and leading rightwing nationalist parties to gain power to withdraw from the Eurozone.

For every person who died in the westward migration prior to the Civil War from Native Americans attacking, the stuff of American legends, thousands, maybe tens of thousands died from water holes polluted by cholera and typhoid . . . but that doesn't make for a good movie.

Horace Pendergast, originally from Cairo, Illinois.

A million butterflies rose up from South America, All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain...