What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.
Especially for Haitian immigrant parents, being a musician is not a job.
I’m very inspired by him-it was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.
I can understand the value of the immigrant experience and that we have become the nation that we are because people like my grandmother were able to make a life in this country.
From my youngest brother to immigrant women to black queer folks, those are the people who keep me going. When I think about their various acts of courage, it reminds me that I am not alone and that we can do even more, and we deserve more, so we have to keep going.
My father was an immigrant who literally walked across Europe to get out of Russia. He fought in World War I. He was wounded in action. My father was a great success even though he never had money. He was a very determined man, a great role model.
The Pulitzer Prize was established when Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911, leaving a bequest to create the eponymous award. An immigrant from Hungary, Pulitzer struck it rich by combining the ‘St. Louis Post’ and the ‘St. Louis Dispatch’ to make the – wait for it – ‘St. Louis Post-Dispatch.’
In many immigrant families, the parents are just talking and talking about the home country until the children are like, ‘Oh, don’t tell us any more.’
My mum thought my TV and film addiction was laziness. If you’re an immigrant, you know you’ll never be an accepted part of society, but you hope your children will be, and you try to make them essential to the community in a practical way – being a doctor or a lawyer. Acting was beyond their comprehension.
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.
The first time I set foot in Boston City Hall, I felt invisible – swallowed up by the cavernous concrete hallways, and shrunk down even more with every checkpoint and looming government counter. My immigrant family tried to stay away from spaces like these.
I am an immigrant from Mexico. I came to the United States looking for a landscape where I could explore ideas freely and to test my entrepreneurial spirit.
I was standing on a ladder outside the Homestead juvenile immigrant detention center outside Miami, looking over the fence, and I saw children lined up like prisoners. They had been separated from their families and put in this private detention facility. It was horrible.
If an immigrant comes here, and they’re willing to create jobs, and they’re willing to contribute to our economy, we have to make it easier for the kinds of immigrants we want, because that is the past of America; that’s our greatness, and that will continue to be our greatness in the future.
The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.
If you had asked me growing up what a stylist does or what a magazine editor does, I would have had no clue – how do you research something like that when you are a first-born child of an immigrant who only grew up knowing doctor, engineer, and lawyer as careers?
We’re getting a very different kind of immigrant now, and it began as a specific plan to bring in lots of more Democratic voters, and it worked.
Growing up as the youngest daughter to immigrant parents, it was instilled in me from an early age to not be wasteful and to be respectful of money and possessions.
‘Suits’ fans. I’ve never met a more diverse audience: across gender, race, class. It’s incredible. People who are high-powered lawyers to doormen. A Chinese immigrant cable installer – who barely spoke English – loves ‘Suits!’
My parents were reasonably affluent in Kabul. In the States, we were on welfare. My mom became a waitress, and my dad became a driving instructor. That part of the American immigrant experience applies to people of any nationality.
Immigrant stories are good stories for everyone to know.
I am very proud to come from a diverse family. My mother is an immigrant from Japan and my father is from a steel town in Western Pennsylvania. My family spans across the political spectrum.
My real story is this: I am the citizen daughter of immigrant parents who were deported when I was 14. My older brother was also deported.
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.
The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I’ve seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.
It was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.
Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time – and maybe it’s because I’m an immigrant kid and not white – there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.
New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.
Being an immigrant myself, but feeling very American, and also being the child of immigrants, I understand the feeling of wanting a home.
