Well, I grew up in Switzerland where my parents were immigrant workers, but my whole family are very good cooks – my father also. So I always saw my parents enjoying to cook and prepare the food.
Donald Trump has shown no interest in working toward increasing the minimum wage, no interest in doing anything but immigrant baiting, no interest in doing anything but filling the swamp with a band of billionaires who are simply trying to help the wealthy.
Take it from this immigrant from Israel, a proud Israeli-American, born in Egypt, a Muslim country: America is great. Not perfect, but great. And we shouldn’t allow any rhetoric to make us think otherwise, because America is great – period.
My mom is a Sikh immigrant born in a refugee camp. My Irish-Swedish-Norwegian-Danish-English-American dad grew up Baptist.
Our schools face immense pressures caused by the different needs and languages of children from immigrant families, particularly in urban areas.
I grew up with a single mum, an immigrant mum who couldn’t speak the language, no money, three kids on her back, coming from Rwanda, and she’s done a sterling job with all three of us.
It’s true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn’t a single novel that doesn’t travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.
Immigrant parents dream that their children will find a place in their new home, and they willingly suffer hardships in service to that dream. That was certainly true of my parents.
By the time I was 16, I was someone to reckon with. I was so eager to repudiate any connection with any immigrant race, I would go above and beyond. I was desperate to belong to something. That was my drive as a teenager.
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.
I think our immigrants are a strength for us in San Diego. I think it’s a strength in our communities in California. Our immigrant community in San Diego has been part of the fabric of our city for decades, and it’s one that I’m proud of.
I’m an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.
My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina – well, both grandfathers were born in the South.
My great-great-grandfather lived to age 28, my immigrant great-grandfather Pedro Gotiaoco died at 66, my grandfather was 68, and my father died at 34.
Immigrant characters now are getting much more well-rounded, and they have personalities, which is important because we do need to portray immigrants in a humanizing way.
My grandfather worked in a shoe factory – he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.
The city has become a serious menace to our civilization… It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.
My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.
Everybody was a democrat where we grew up. It was a blue-collar town and the democrats represented the working class and the unions. But very, very super-conservative Catholic, very proud immigrant community, very stoic.
What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American – and sacrosanct – cultural institution: the NFL.
Kim’s’ is one of the most unique shows to hit the air, with its focus on individual and communal growth, family, and most importantly: immigrant culture.
The immigrant experience in ‘Ilustrado’ was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.
And you have to remember that I came to America as an immigrant. You know, on a ship, through the Statue of Liberty. And I saw that skyline, not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as really the substance of the American Dream.
If you got up this morning and had fruits for breakfast, it was probably picked by the bent back of an immigrant worker. If you slept in a hotel or motel of the nation, you probably had your room done by an immigrant worker.
I was the daughter of an immigrant, raised to feel that I needed to get excellent, flawless grades and a full scholarship and a graduate degree and a good job – all the stepping stones to conventional success.
As a young black immigrant at an inner-city school, I saw how poverty of ambition left many from disadvantaged backgrounds on the scrap-heap.
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.’
My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation.
To the European immigrant – that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life – the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.
I’m a brown-skinned Indian immigrant, low-caste untouchable – I don’t know how many labels you want to put on me – who’s fought all his life.
My grandfather was an undocumented immigrant. My great-grandmother, my bisabuela, carried him over the border in her arms.
For immigrant women, the very act of immigration is about opportunity, equality, and freedom. Women immigrants come to America to care for their families, escape gender-based violence, or express their sexual identity.
Yeah, I’m a young immigrant and I came to Canada with nothing.
Because I sidestepped all the stereotypical roles, in a way I’ve made a career out of not being Asian – a lot of my roles weren’t written as Asian – so there’s an impulse in me that wants to take a U-turn and play a very grounded, real Asian character, maybe an immigrant.
In America especially, if you’re Chinese and you work at a restaurant, there’s a certain connotation among the Chinese immigrant community: It’s the first generation that opens restaurants as a way to survive. You open to support your family so your kids can become doctors and lawyers.
We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act… about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.
The journey from employee to entrepreneur was a complex and taxing one for an immigrant like me.
As the youngest child of a single immigrant mother with a third-grade education, I never thought in my wildest dreams that I’d ever be an elected official.
Depriving immigrant families of health care, healthy food, insurance, and antipoverty supports does not just hurt them. In the long term, it hurts everyone.
If cheap immigrant labor is made unavailable, employers can hire Americans at a higher wage, or replace low-wage immigrant workers with technology and automation, which will create a smaller number of skilled jobs for Americans.
The best way to prevent the homegrown-inspired attacks is literally positive engagement with Muslim communities. Making sure that any immigrant population that comes into America assimilates, becomes part of our culture. That has been our history; it has made us strong.
Lots of special interests play the immigrant blame game every day because they like things the way they are and don’t see a need for change.
‘The Immigrant Story,’ which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn’t think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That’s the only way you get it sometimes.
Other Asian actors, especially American-born actors, sometimes shy away from immigrant roles.
I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others’ stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.
For black and Asian people of my generation, the England team and the cross of St George were once ingredients in a toxic broth. For decades, a minority of England fans brought the nation and the national team into disrepute, bringing violence both to foreign streets and immigrant communities at home.
I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.
When I think of my work, I’m aware that I’m American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.
We should be the natural home for the millions of Britons of immigrant origin. But we’re not. Because too often we’ve sounded like people who wish they hadn’t come here at all.
