Quotes About Migration

As a global community, we face a choice. Do we want migration to be a source of prosperity and international solidarity, or a byword for inhumanity and social friction?

I grew up in South Africa, but like many people at that time, I couldn't bear living in the country. The main motivation for moving to Britain was to get away.

The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

When I left South Africa there were 10 million people - when I came back there were more than 40 million. I had to learn how to get to the highways because when I left where there were no highways.

We emigrated to South Africa and later to Canada so I went to school in several places.

My grandparents all came from Lithuania to South Africa.

Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane.

In Australia, I almost became a counsellor. At the end of each performance there would be a queue of sobbing people backstage. They all wanted to explain why they left South Africa.

My family came to Newark in the '20s. We've been there a long, long time. My father's name was LeRoi, the French-ified aspect of it, because his first name was Coyette, you see. They come from South Carolina.

I don't think the current regime of South Korea will deal actively with the issue of North Korean defectors.

My father had a lot of allergies, and he just didn't like the cold of Chicago, and his father - his parents had broken up when he was young, and his father had lived in Pasadena for a while, and he kind of fell in love with Southern California.

I'm glad I'm Southern. I'm the Southerner who's very Southern in that she left to move to New York.

Dentists, doctors, surveyors from Latvia wanted to come to England, do anything to get away from the Soviet regime.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

My family came over from Spain about nine generations ago. I was born in San Diego, but by the time I was four days old, I was on a flight back to Spain because that's where my family was living at the time.

Brain drain is hard to reverse

The Pilgrims' descendants have proven to be, if nothing else, fruitful. In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the United States, which represents roughly 10 percent of the total U.S. population.

The Mi'kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description—all of them poured from the hulls of Colón's vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.

What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the "New World.

Peru was not the only destination in the mid-century Chinese diaspora. A quarter of a million or more zhuzai, almost all of them men, ended up—more or less willingly, more or less knowingly—in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States.

way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas—a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. In that period, perhaps 3.4 million Europeans emigrated. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip.