Quotes About Immigration

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

When I came to America, I was really into all the things people eat here. . . . People called me Muffin because I would eat muffins all the time.

We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally.

There should not be a question of legal or illegal immigration. People came and immigrated to this country from the time of the Indians. No one's illegal. They should just be able to come.

There should be a path to earned legal status for those that are here. Not - not amnesty - earned legal status, which means you pay a fine and do many things over an extended period of time.

Every time anybody in Washington talks about legal status, amnesty, anything of that nature, it becomes a magnet that lures people in quickly into the United States.

Part of comprehensive immigration reform is not just the path to citizenship for undocumented workers, but also the ability for families to be together.

The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

I was convinced that the logic of healthcare reform was so obvious that even in the face of well-organized opposition I could rally the American people's support. Other big initiatives—like immigration reform and climate change legislation—would probably be even harder to get through Congress; I figured that scoring a victory on the item that most affected people's day-to-day lives was our best shot at building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.

Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn't a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE's budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.

However, the politics didn't fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on construction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions.

in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I'd

America has nothing to fear from these newcomers, that they have come here for the same reason that families came here 150 years ago—all those who fled Europe's famines and wars and unyielding hierarchies, all those who may not have had the right legal documents or connections or unique skills to offer but who carried with them a hope for a better life.

I'd had a chance to meet many Dreamers, both before and after I entered the White House. They were smart, poised, and resilient—as full of potential as my own daughters. If anything, I found the Dreamers to be less cynical about America than many of their native-born contemporaries—precisely because their circumstances had taught them not to take life in this country for granted.

about 40 percent of America's unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.

my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn't a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE's budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

The way he talked sounded part Yankee, part foreign, like one of those friendly Irish policeman in the old movies: Ouch, mind you!

I don't know where to start, Lou Ann," I told her. "There's just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they're down—look what they do to those people at Mattie's. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.

You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?

The Statue of Liberty wears size 879 shoes!

Some US leaders invited the destitute of the world to cross their leaking borders with assurances that they would be entitled to the same.

They extolled America as the "great melting pot" and in the next breath engaged in dangerous games, pitting one group against another, then summed it all up by saying that "Americans needed to come together!