Why am I a liberal? Because I don’t forget that I’m an immigrant and that I’m a Hispanic and that I have a Latin accent when I speak English, and I want to defend those who get racially profiled by people who would discriminate against us?
People sort of misinterpret the immigration story. I often hear people say that, well, you know, they emigrate to another country for a better life. That is not what the story of the immigrant is. They go to another country to provide opportunities for the next generation.
You don’t have to be Latino to speak powerfully about how important it is to have a police department that cares for our immigrant communities.
What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.
I’m very interested in getting inside the heads of people society discards, people on the fringe, especially immigrant kids. We dismiss them without getting into details of who they are.
I’m a big supporter of the military simply because I’m the daughter of a Polish immigrant who fled Europe during World War II from Poland and lied about his age to join the Army simply because he was proud to be an American. And who isn’t?
What inspired me to work so hard and to maintain my determination was seeing my mother. She was an immigrant and was struggling in America to make it by; that inspired me to work hard.
It’s every immigrant child’s dream to tell your parents they don’t have to work anymore.
When a law enforcement officer apprehends an illegal immigrant, it makes no sense to simply release that individual who has been breaking our laws with no threat of sanction or penalty.
I had immigrant grandparents who came to this country and came for religious freedom and loved it, never made any money, Bronx, Brooklyn, but loved America. And they told me every day it’s the greatest country in the world.
I never did very well as an immigrant. I’ve lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.
For immigrant women, fighting for some of the standard platforms of the women’s movement may feel unthinkable when deportation is staring you in the face every day.
Every unskilled illegal immigrant who enters the United States for work drives up healthcare costs for every American. And, every illegal immigrant we turn a blind eye toward weakens the rule of law our country is founded on.
As an immigrant justice advocate, I, of course, want legal status for everyone trying to make it in this country.
The immigrant blame game is one of the most predictable, and most deplorable, elements of public debate in our nation.
I’m an immigrant.
I never, ever, had a person who could come up with the name of a person who could not get a job because an illegal immigrant had stepped in front of them, because it was either a job that person didn’t want to do or didn’t exist.
I’m the daughter of two Indian immigrant doctors, and I have an older sister and younger brother, and none of us have pursued medicine as a career. We’re all over the artistic side of things.
America was and is the immigrant’s dream.
I’m an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
It was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.
Hispanic citizens know that illegal labor is taking jobs from their children and their legal immigrant friends.
A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.
When I was at MIT I was a good model minority. But the concept of an Indian immigrant creating e-mail in Newark, N.J., blows the mind of certain people.
Yes, we become stronger when men and women, young and old, gay and straight, native-born and immigrant fight together to create the kind of country we all know we can become.
Immigrant essential workers are integrated into our communities and clearly into our workforce.
I’m an immigrant myself. It was a tough road to come to America and work.
My mother is an immigrant from China, and she filled my head with stories about ghosts and fighting monks in China, so the world of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ was a very familiar one.
In Holland I have seen well-meaning, principled people blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, while ignoring criminal abuse of women and girls.
I was the one that in a very overconfident immigrant way thought I knew exactly how to raise my kids. My husband was much more typical. He had a lot of anxiety; he didn’t think he knew all the right choices. And, I was the one willing to put in the hours.
There’s a narrative out there about Republicans being not just anti-illegal immigrant, but anti-immigrant. It was very important to me to break the narrative.
Immigrant communities have been genuinely accepted in London.
My childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn’t really as colourful that.
I understand the whole constant foreigner stereotype, but for me it’s important to portray immigrant characters like Jian-Yang and Danny Meng with humanity.
When you come from an immigrant home, you’re in a whole different world until you leave your house. In my teenage years, I had to learn to switch cultures the second I left my house and, when I came back, to go back to my fundamentals.
We have a lot of comments on the news, we have a lot of rhetoric over what an immigrant is and what a deportee is, but you don’t hear any real stories. I don’t think we ever had the chance to really tell our side.
I grew up in an immigrant household with an Italian father who came to the U.S. when he was 15.
There’s virtually nothing made up in ‘The Immigrant.’ So much of the film came from somewhere in my family’s past. All the details are from my own family.
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.
I have immigrant, African parents. They would say, in their Nigerian accents, ‘So you want to be a jester?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a court jester, Ma. I want to be a comedian.’
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
I have an immigrant story. Most people come here for economic reasons, or religious reasons, or racial reasons, or gender reasons, or one of those things. I had a good job in Paris, but America was, and still is, the golden fleece. And I’ve done very well!
Let’s stand together, stick together, and work together for justice of every description. Racial justice. Gender justice. Immigrant justice. Economic justice. Environmental justice.
When you look at what’s written under the Statue of Liberty, it’s the immigrant story. It’s about ‘bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ It’s not about ‘only bring me only your rich, your wealthy, your smart.’
DiMaggio was never a rube. He was very smart and very urban. Coming out of the Great Depression, he was the immigrant boy who made it big. Coming back from World War II, he had all the wealth and power that New York aspired to. When New York saw itself as the center of the world, he was its paragon of class.
Mum used to hide love letters from my boyfriends and put me down. Now I understand that she was a Polish immigrant forced to settle in Chicago. She was jealous of the freedom life gave me.
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
I’m made up of immigrant stock. I went to a primary school in London. I grew up eating Spangles, why shouldn’t I be as well placed to speak for Londoners as anyone else?
When we get to the third and fourth generation immigrant families and beyond there will be more England supporters among them, maybe even the majority. I have had British Asians tell me they support England because of me or Adil Rashid and that’s great to hear.
I am not a woman on Monday, an immigrant on Tuesday, a worker on Wednesday, and a mom on Thursday, I am all of those things all of the time, and I am going to fight for all of those things all of the time.
The business of being told to earn a dollar, that no one is going to give you anything – that was kind of my mantra throughout my childhood, and now it’s in my adult life. I find that people really tend to relate to the immigrant father, whether he be Italian, Greek, Spanish or whatever.
That’s sort of part of the American ethic – is not to worry too much about the past and that it shouldn’t define us. And most certainly, that was the case with my mother, who was an immigrant to America.
That is a reward that humbles me: the fact that immigrants coming to America, much like I did, can come into a Forever 21 and know that all of this was started by a simple Korean immigrant with a dream.
