Quotes About Immigration

immigration program, focused on the way that hashtags like #shutthedoor and #immigrationreform had their roots in historical attitudes of isolationism.

It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.

In sum, before an eighteenth-century boom in the African slave trade, between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people.

I tried to picture a bunch of guys in blue suits running around a beachside neighborhood, knocking on doors and flashing Fed creds. That should cause a stampede of illegal aliens heading south.

I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century.

United States: the country where liberty is a statue.

Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.

The bottom line, says Rodrik, is that freer immigration has a much more positive net impact on global domestic product than liberalizing trade, movements of capital, or financial services.

According to standard economic theory, free trade helps global welfare. The same is true for free trade in people, via open-border immigration policies.

Bagdad-on-the-Subway.

Instead of learned young people we have donkeys with University degrees. Instead of future leaders we have mollusks with expensive blue jeans and phony revolutionaries with ski masks. And do you know what? Maybe this is another reason why our Moslem invaders have such an easy game.

Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized.

She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.

Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common -- not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons.

Historians will look back in stupor at 20th and 21st century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.

All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don't die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don't have to fight. I don't have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.

No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...

And heroin was a street drug, sold out of the back of a car by anonymous young Mexicans of uncertain immigration status, whereas OxyContin had been approved by no less an authority than the Food and Drug Administration. The Sacklers were legitimate businesspeople, pillars of American society. Even after the felony conviction for Purdue, as controversy continued to swirl around OxyContin, Richard Sackler served on the advisory board of the Yale Cancer Center.

But in virtually all societies with more inclusive voting systems, single-issue anti-immigrant parties now attract a remarkably high share of the vote. Far from forcing sane debate on immigration policy by the mainstream parties, the emergence of extremists has further frightened them away from the issue. Either you regard this outcome as a shocking condemnation of ordinary people, or as a shocking condemnation of the mainstream political parties: I view it as the latter.

as tidal waves of immigrants poured into the United States, many carried in their mental baggage fond images of the promise of their future homeland, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. The 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus that is inscribed on its base ends: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, Yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

La familia que existe en la cabeza de las personas es más importante que la que se registra en su libreta de tomador del censo...La experiencia de la inmigración proporciona una visión especial sobre cómo las personas aprenden a prescindir de aquello a que estaban acostumbradas para poder adoptar lo nuevo.

They came with their children, for no one left the children behind - it was for the children they had come, wanting to give them the halls of American, the streets, the seasons, the New York of America.

The weary Italian woman nodded at her children behind her. "Where we came from, everybody lives only one kind of life. Alessandro said he wanted his children to choose the life, not the life to choose the children. And also," she added, panting, slowing down and wiping her brow, "he said America is the only place in the world where even the poor can be smart.

Again: What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?