Quotes About Immigration

I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.

She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not.

He came over the border at night, as he had no papers. It is not easy, Mma, to have no papers. If you are a person without papers, then you are nothing. Even cattle have papers these days, Mma—I'm joking, of course, but that is what it can feel like to have no papers.

Time was the first thing I noticed about the United States.

Carter also was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped.

growth solely accounted for by immigration – led to the usual strains

The upsides of migration have become easy to talk about: to simply nod to them is to express values of openness, tolerance and broad-mindedness. Yet to nod to, let alone express, the downsides of immigration is to invite accusations of closed-mindedness and intolerance, xenophobia and barely disguised racism. All of which leaves the attitude of the majority of the public almost impossible to express.

A continent which imports the world's peoples will also import the world's problems.

we know that we Europeans cannot become whatever we like. We cannot become Indian or Chinese, for instance. And yet we are expected to believe that anyone in the world can move to Europe and become European.

Public opinion surveys suggest that a failure to do anything about immigration even while talking about it is one of the key causes of the breakdown in trust between the electorate and their political representatives.

They often start with economic arguments, but they can just as well start with moral arguments. If mass immigration doesn't make you a richer person, then it will make you a better person. And if it doesn't make your country a better country, then it will at least make it a richer country.

the six Gulf Cooperation countries comprising Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman had granted asylum to a grand total of zero Syrian refugees by 2016.

The consensus remained that the good thing to do was to invite all migrants in. The bad thing was to suggest any limitations on their numbers. Or even the enforcement of laws already in place. As so often in the past the government weighed up the pros and cons of holding the line and decided not to hold it.

To speak for the people of Europe was to be on the side of the devil. And all the time there existed that strange assumption that Europe was simply letting one more person into the room. Whether that person was genuinely about to be killed in the corridor became immaterial. If he was cold, poor, or just worse off there than the people inside the room, he too had the right to come in.

I was willing to take on the struggle to establish myself in a new country because I knew that was the price I would have to pay for the freedom to think, speak, and write whatever I pleased.

Jewish refugees trying to flee to the United States found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than four dollars out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone "likely to become a public charge.

While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number - two and a half million - arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone.

Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation's rate of immigration "the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.

Before 1919, Mexicans who entered the United States at the border did not need to apply for entry.

I think I feel not at home in America, but not necessarily at home outside of America.

It is well documented that thousands of unreconstructed Nazis were brought to the United States and rolled into the military-industrial complex to aid in the Cold War against the old Soviet Union.

The contradiction between the government's avowed actions to protect the country from Ebola and the Obama administration's lenient immigration policy, which has allowed a flood of illegals carrying any number of diseases across the nation's southern border, has been noted by many.

Moreover, from reforming the tax code to our immigration system, to commonsense legal reform, President Bush put America on notice that he will continue fighting to make the country, and the world, a better place for future generations.