Quotes About Immigration

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

I hear from non-Afghan immigrants - Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs in France - all the time. These people have had to redefine their lives, which is what my family went through when we came to the U.S. in 1980.

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.

I'm a son of immigrants. I'm not going to reduce my commitment to immigration. But can I empathize with the fact that if your town was 95 percent all white and now it's down to 60, that that can scare you? Can I empathize with that? Yeah.

I fully recognize we need to improve the path to citizenship, just as we need to value the hard work of folks who become American citizens legally.

My mom and my dad wanted my brother and I to have a better life, you know, better education, better jobs. It was probably harder, much, much harder, for my parents. When you're a kid, you can learn a language much more easily; I learned English in less than a year.

My parents did not come to the U.S. with much; they had a lot of hardship.

I think we have to secure our borders and make sure that people coming in are coming here not to do us harm.

I always thought that the U.S. was just amazing, and it was just a dream. I thought it was Heaven. Coming here a couple years ago, you know, the U.S. is still nice, but it's not like what I thought it was going to be.

'Self-deport?' What the heck does that mean?

It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

There's so many Chinese or Asian Americans that were either born in another country like I was and raised in America or born in America and raised in America. They're normal Americans, and they just happen to have a different heritage.

My mother is amazing. She moved from Surrey to London, taught herself English, and found a job.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.

Resettlement agents are special people," Sanja says, "and organizations that do this type of work should be celebrated more than they are.

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

I fell in love with this country from the moment I first stepped upon its soil. It felt so right, so expansive, so free, so hospitable, and I desperately wanted to become part of the American mainstream.

They are imported by companies, controlled as serfs, worked like slaves, and at last go back to China with all their earnings. They are in every place, they seem to have no sex. Boys work, girls work; it is all alike to them.

Most previous immigrants came to the United States to become Americans, with no intention of returning home. They relinquished their ties with their homeland. English was their key to prosperity, and they worked hard to master it.

For generations, people have come to U.S. shores to seek opportunity. It's what my grandfather did a century ago, when he came to Seattle, and worked as a houseboy just one mile from the Washington State governor's mansion that I was privileged to inhabit for eight years.

Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful.

At age 14, my paternal grandfather fled Poland to escape the pogroms that killed tens of thousands of European Jews. He worked full-time for a cobbler in Boston, making his way to California and eventually starting his own business in Taft - the Goldman Oil Supply Company.

I was born in London in 1919. I first went to America in 1946 for a three-month holiday. Then I came back, worked here for almost a year sold up my home and went back on immigration in 1947.