Quotes About Immigration

A girl like me gets stopped at immigration.

If this policeman began to suspect me, he could call the immigration people. Then one of them would click a button on their computer and mark a check box on my file and I would be deported. I would be dead, but no one would have fired any bullets. I realized, this is why the police do not carry guns. In a civilized country, they kill you with a click. The killing is done far away, at the heart of the kingdom in a building full of computers and coffee cups.

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.

I'm one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she'd make me read to her, anything with words on it—crates and bottles I found in the street.

My hands are clammy. It's a terrible kind of anticipation, not knowing what we're walking into. The last time I felt this way I was in the waiting rooms at Ellis Island.

Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story by Andrea Warren; Children of the Orphan Trains, 1854–1929 by Holly Littlefield; and Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains edited by J. Sanford Rikoon (which

My hands are clammy. It's a terrible kind of anticipation, not knowing what we're walking into. The last time I felt this way I was in the waiting rooms at Ellis Island. We were tired, and Mam wasn't well, and we didn't know where we were going or what kind of life we would have. But now I can see all I took for granted: I had a family. I believed that whatever happened, we'd be together. A policeman blows a whistle

Riddled his body with bullets"—my da talked like that. Mam was always shushing him, but he waved her off. "It's important they know this," he said. "It's their history! We might be over here now, but by God, our people are over there.

only link we had to our future was a name scrawled on a piece of paper my father tucked in his shirt pocket as we boarded the ship: a man who had emigrated ten years earlier and now, according to his Kinvara relatives, owned a respectable dining establishment in New York City.

It was worse for Mam, who discovered on the boat she was again with child and could hardly keep any food down. But even with all of this, as I stood on the lower deck outside our dark, cramped rooms in steerage, watching the oily water churn beneath the Agnes Pauline, I felt my spirits lift. Surely, I thought, we would find a place for ourselves in America.

Luego un patán mexicano le hizo un bombo, y mírala ahora, es criada. —Él era dominicano —murmura Molly. —Da lo mismo. Esos ilegales son todos iguales, ¿no? Molly

Immigrant families aren't, he notes, "a threat to America's moral culture." Rather, "America is a threat to immigrant children's moral development.

The notorious bark Libertad, which carried 560 passengers (although its legal limit was 297) lost 100 passengers on one run from China to San Francisco. Its passengers died of thirst—they had no water for the last week of the voyage—and the Libertad is frequently described by chroniclers of the passage from China as a "floating hell.

It is still possible, in an election, to use the word emigrant in such a way that it damages one's opponent

You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and when you arrive they put you in prison and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered they send you back.

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

Thanks in good part to that 1911 congressional report and to Lombroso, the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1924, more or less ending immigration for Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews. After the turn of the century, around two hundred thousand Italian immigrants were pouring into the country every year. After 1924, only four thousand were allowed in each year. A drop of over 90 percent. By

They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a native American, that number is more like 300 million.

Under President Obama, we saw an unwarranted extension of amnesty programs which neglected the root of the illegal immigration crisis. We saw a troubling lack of urgency in addressing the sanctuary cities which subvert the rule of law.

Senator Obama and I had been on the same side of many fights, and we had worked together on the issue that is most urgent to me - comprehensive immigration reform.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Although it's the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth.

While the Pence-Hutchinson immigration reform idea is not perfect, it does represent a useful discussion point for future action. As diplomatically and kindly as possible, with all the greatest respect for differing points of view, let me just say that the Tancredo-Buchanan attack on Mike Pence is nuttier than a fruitcake.

No mainstream politician believes in open borders, but a policy that uses its prolonged treatment of detained people as an ongoing deterrent to others has a deep flaw at its heart.