As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don’t want our blunders in history to get repeated.
An estimated 7 million illegal immigrants were residing in the United States in January 2000. This is double the size of the illegal immigrant population in January 1990 and constitutes 2.5 percent of the total U.S. population of just over 281 million.
It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.
It is important to have safe borders, but at the same time, we can’t forget what brought us here. This is an immigrant nation.
I have a lot of rage about things that didn’t happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world – and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.
American literature has always been immigrant.
I’m an immigrant.
I came here as an immigrant. We were poor. We went to flea markets to sell gifts to make ends meet. Just the mere fact that I can be running for Congress is something that can only happen in a place like America. It’s such a wonderful country.
I don’t know if it’s because my father’s from Argentina, that I’m the son of an immigrant, I don’t know if its because I’m Jewish, but I have always been mindful that the best insights occur when you have some kind of an outsider perspective.
I’m the first person in my family to go to college, and I’m an immigrant. My aspirations coming out of college weren’t particularly lofty. I wanted a good job with a good company.
I’ve commissioned an adaptation of ‘The Jungle’, by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.
There are few countries in the world where you can go in one generation from immigrant to parliamentarian.
With immigrant parents, they’ve had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they’re trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.
If certain books are to be termed ‘immigrant fiction,’ what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me.
All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.
The immigrant blame game is constant. Cynical politicians believe it drives poll numbers; cynical commentators believe it drives TV ratings.
‘Sesame Street’ early on and then ‘Little House on the Prairie’ was a big deal in our house. I always identified with ‘Little House’ because they were wanderers, and there was something about being an immigrant.
I’m a first generation immigrant.
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my life and friendships. I learned quickly how to stand alone.
It is inconceivable that releasing an illegal immigrant that could cause a tuberculosis pandemic here in the U.S. would ever be considered as a possible option.
If an African-American or a recent immigrant – or anyone else, for that matter – can’t feel secure walking into a police station or up to a police officer to report a crime, because of a fear that they’re not going to be treated well, then everything else that we promise is on a shaky foundation.
I identify with Superman. I am adopted, I am an only child, and I love the idea that he comes from another world, that he’s the ultimate immigrant. He has all these extraordinary powers, and he has a righteousness about him.
My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.
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.
It’s much too easy to come here illegally and very, very difficult to become an immigrant through lawful process. I think we need to reverse those.
No country has been more invigorated by immigrant culture, more rewarded by immigrant labor and immigrant ideas than America.
I made ‘The Farewell’ for me, for my family, and for other immigrant children, or children of immigrants, who feel caught in-between two worlds.
I’ve often felt like an outsider, not necessarily because I’m Korean, an immigrant, or female. I think writers are odd people.
I see the Conservative party becoming more and more attractive to people from all different backgrounds, particularly because so many of the immigrant communities are people who work hard and get on in life… so I think they are naturally Conservative.
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.
My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.
I’m still the community college kid with immigrant parents.
My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the ‘elite.’ If so, I damned well earned it.
I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it’s one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.
My mother is basically an immigrant because she came from Tonga.
As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.
For many immigrant groups, lack of trust in authority is something they actually bring from the countries they come from.
I came to America, and I made good. It’s an old story, but it hasn’t been told in a long time. Usually, it’s, ‘I’m an immigrant, I came here and got persecuted.’ My story is I came here, I worked hard, and it worked out all right. So it’s still available.
Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
In my life as an immigrant living in low-income communities, as an emergency physician and as a public health advocate, I have seen more preventable deaths than I can count or recall.
We cannot shun our values as an immigrant nation. This is a wrong path. And while possibly it is a short-term political victory based on division and based on creating a wedge issue that splits people in this country, it is a long-term defeat for this Nation.
I was incredibly shy and insecure as a child. I was bullied. I was dyslexic. I had an immigrant single parent. I was the opposite of that kind of ideal, cool girl thing.
I’m the only child of immigrant parents, you know? So all the pressure is just kind of on me: You have to make it. And I was like, ‘Well, let me make it in music.’ They were like, ‘Nah, you gotta go to school.’
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.
Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
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.
The black immigrant experience in the U.S. must be understood not in contrast to the African American experience but as an integral part of it.
I want to present the immigrant community in more of a real light.
DACA led to a mass influx of illegal immigrant children crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. who came believing they would likely be able to stay.
Part of the reason why my folks – why any immigrant family – wants their kids to go into law or medicine is because there’s the promise of reliable work. That’s a powerful idea that got hammered into my head growing up: Be this thing, or else you’ll starve.
The textile industry became a huge deal in 19th century America, kind of like the tech industry is today. And that immigrant tradition continues, especially in tech, America’s most dominant and dynamic industry today.
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it’s also what makes you feel like an outsider.
My mother is deeply pragmatic by nature. Perhaps you had to be, as an immigrant. You made do.
Too many of our immigrant communities have been forced to live in fear, uncertain about their futures.
There’s a lot of negative speak about what it means to be an immigrant. I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t know where that came from.’ We do the dirty jobs. We do the good jobs. We get the job done.
