Quotes About Migration

My father was a headmaster in England and then the dean of a college in Australia. We moved there when I was about five, so my education was in Australia, and I always felt I was Australian even though my passport was British.

On my way back to the town I took a short cut through the forest. A swarm of yellow butterflies drifted across the path. A woodpecker pecked industriously on the bark of a tree, searching for young cicadas. Overhead, wild duck flew north, on their way across Central Asia, all traveling without passports. Birds and butterflies recognize no borders.

The first Manhattanites didn't arrive with lofty ideals. They came--whether as farmer, tanner, prostitute, wheelwright, barmaid, brewer, or trader--because there was a hope for a better life. There was a distinct messiness to the place they created. But it was very real, and in a way, very modern.

It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years' time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs.

Irish demographics reveal two startling facts: There are around 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish descent, and Ireland today has barely half the population that it had 160 years ago, a decline unmatched in the modern world. These facts are explained and connected by the undeniable social reality of nineteenth-century Ireland—emigration.

Ireland was a different place after the famine. The population was drastically reduced—an island of 8.2 million people in 1841 was reduced to 6 million in 1851. At least 1 million of those people had died. The rest fled the country, hoping for a new life in another land.

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It's the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

The multinational corporation and international production reflect a world in which capital and technology have become increasingly mobile, while labor has remained relatively immobile.

You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all.

My parents were both from Scotland, but had been resident in Lower Canada some time before their marriage, which took place in Montreal; and in that city I spent most of my life.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

There were three types of people in New York: people like Nora, who had found their home there; people who talked about how much they hated it and would always live and eventually die there; and people who always had one foot over the border, to Scarsdale or Roslyn or Boca Raton.

It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

a surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society. Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, and it left Western thinkers

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened

Taxation and the general conditions of life under the East India Company were so unpleasant and onerous that, as I have mentioned earlier, as many as could fled their traditional homes for refuge in domains beyond the Company's remit, whereas the migration of Indian peasants from the 'native states' to British India was unheard of through most of the nineteenth century.

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)

I think I was born with a suitcase.

After our earliest ancestors crawled out of the oceans, how soon did they feel the desire to crawl back in?

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land?

So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another.

People almost always imagine that life is going to be better in town and that the streets of the town are paved with gold.

I consider myself British and have very happy memories of the UK. I spent the first 14 years of my life in England and never wanted to leave. When I was in Australia I went back to England a lot.