Quotes About Migrants

these merchants of men handle a new variety of human cargo: not hostages but rather migrants. A surreal interdependency, therefore, links the kidnapping of Westerners and the trafficking of migrants.

Both crackers and squatters—two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants—supposedly stayed just one step ahead of the "real" farmers, Jefferson's idealized, commercially oriented cultivators. They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty.

There is no analytic presumption that migration produces gains either for the societies that migrants join, or for those they leave; the only unambiguous gains are for the migrants themselves.

Whether or not migrants realize it, the impetus for their emigration is to escape from those aspects of their countries of origin that have condemned people to low productivity.