Quotes About Migration

Jews had lived in Sicily before Christians, settling on the east coast, then spreading outward, flourishing under Muslim rule. Palermo became a Jewish center, but everything changed under Aragonese rule.

The wealthy and satisfied do not migrate, they stagnate.

Folks that prosperous don't usually pick up and move. Mostly, movers are poor folks.

There is something of a congruence here between my grandfather's terror propelling him across an ocean to America and mine and my husband's rushing us into a three-room apartment in Jersey City. In fact, each of my moves is remotely connected to feeling my life or well-being was threatened.

Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.

Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. […] A bad smell of extinction follows Home sapiens around the world. (37)

Los puertorriqueños estaban acostumbrados a transitar de isla en isla y de continente en continente como aves cuya condición natural era tránsito.

they were looking for housekeepers and cooks, and I was dying to get out of Australia and see the rest of the world. It's a Sagittarius thing, you know. We just move on and on, like tumbleweeds.

The Irish move to the sound of the guns like salmon to the sea

Florida from its beginnings has served as a catch basin for the world's detritus.

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate

In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.

Some migrants are happy to depart.

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top.

Hay emigrantes que se alegran de partir.

El emigrante, por el contrario, puede prescindir totalmente del viaje; no es más que un mal necesario; lo que importa es llegar.

There is indeed something preposterous about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking education and economic opportunities.

I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.

The province of Texas is still part of the Mexican dominions, but it will soon contain no Mexicans; the same thing has occurred whenever the Anglo-Americans have come into contact with populations of a different origin.

No African has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen.