Quotes About Migration

I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.

Well, I was born in Scotland and spent the first six years of my life there. Then I went to Newcastle-On-Tyne in northeast England, close to Scotland.

It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.

Another wave of Cuban immigrants entered in 1980 as part of the Mariel Boatlift, and this group was both racially and socioeconomically very mixed. In that year 803,000 Cubans, or about 8 percent of Cuba's population, lived in the United States. Cubans overwhelmingly settled in Miami, and many found success as entrepreneurs and small-business owners.9

But for at least fifty thousand years, all humans have been connected to one another through travel, trade networks, and migration. The result is a genetically homogeneous population. As a practical matter, this means when we speak of human nature, we speak of all humans, both through the time span of fifty thousand years and across the planet. Our long-standing networks of connection mean there is no pressure to drift toward a new species, no pressure to evolve.

Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

The waters that fed the Missouri had once flowed northeast into Hudson Bay, not south toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat

If you count people as an invasive species—the science writer Alan Burdick has called Homo sapiens "arguably the most successful invader in biological history"—the process goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years or so, to the period when modern humans first migrated out of Africa.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their way to a region where Neanderthals were living, the Neanderthals in that region disappeared.

Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.

By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced—but moving.

The truth is, Bob, they need those immigrants. Maine's been losing its young people—you and I are a perfect case in point. And the truth also is: That's sad.

Demographics is destiny

Le monde n'a pas d'âge. L'humanité se déplace, simplement. (The world has no age. Humanity simply changes place.)

The tolerated Assyrians were those Assyrians who have accepted their unexpected guests to become the permanent residency of their homeland and yet they are not even the guest of another homeland?

If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global inequality.

Pakistan's first crop of leaders at the center consisted mainly of migrants from India with limited or no real bases of support in the provinces. Suspicious of their provincial counterparts, émigré politicians at the center focused on consolidating state authority rather than building the Muslim League into a popularly based national party.

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

I have been a Republican since I came to this country, fleeing communism when I was eight years old and Ronald Reagan was president.

You know, I left the country when Reagan got in; I went to France.

The real problem with Puerto Rico is that it keeps losing its best and brightest. It keeps losing its leaders and its future leaders due to a lack of opportunity.