My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America’s strength is not our diversity; it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.
The Bronx, I remember, was a very poor neighborhood, but that was all that immigrants could afford at that time. Life was tough. I grew up – my father didn’t have a job, but there weren’t too many people who did have jobs.
For us to become a nation, everyone – including Arabs, Druze, ultra-Orthodox and new immigrants – must feel that they belong. Their success is extremely important to us. If they succeed, they will come to understand the advantages of democracy and freedom.
These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.
New York’s food scene is truly unique because it is this wonderful melting pot where immigrants from all over the world have brought with them their cuisines and their ingredients.
If the United States has normalized relations with Cuba, why would we treat illegal immigrants from that nation any different than those from other countries? It is time we level the playing field and end the outdated, preferential treatment for Cubans.
The illegal immigrants are like termites. They are eating the grain that should go to the poor; they are taking our jobs.
Immigrants and foreigners have always been an indispensable part of our country, including its great record in scientific research.
My parents were immigrants and janitors.
We cannot continue to allow immigrants to come here illegally. And in this age of terrorism, we must not let in refugees whose intentions cannot be determined.
While low-skilled immigrants have a place in our economy, a greater priority needs to be placed on attracting high-skilled immigrants to match the economy’s needs.
Our country is a nation of immigrants, who, for centuries, have come here, fleeing persecution, bringing their dreams, their fears, and their hopes for a better life.
I think we’re very uptight in America. You have to remember that we’re descended from Puritans. Whether or not the country is now composed of immigrants, our culture as American really begins with the landing of the Pilgrims and a puritanical view of things.
I’m saying we’ve got big problems in our cities. It’s not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don’t assimilate.
Now that private prison companies have found that they can make a killing on mass incarceration, these private prison companies are now in the business of building detention centers for suspected illegal immigrants.
Movement of people is taking place on an immense scale, and from a European perspective, the number of potential future immigrants seems limitless.
We need to wake up to the fact that it is not immigrants who are causing economic dislocations. It is technology and an evolving economy that is pushing more and more Americans to the sidelines.
We can prove that we are in the business of governing responsibly, upholding our rule of law, and giving priority to those immigrants willing to apply legally versus those who leverage our system’s loopholes.
We are a country where people of all backgrounds, all nations of origin, all languages, all religions, all races, can make a home. America was built by immigrants.
Successful immigrants assimilate or become bi-cultural.
Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.
Feeling unsafe in your own home? Look no further than those terrorists and criminals and illegal immigrants who have been given free reign and on whom Trump says we need to ‘get tough.’
Toronto is a very multicultural city, a place of immigrants, like my parents.
The attacks on the Paris Metro in the 1990s were committed by members of the local Muslim community, immigrants from the Maghreb region of North Africa.
Here in Minnesota, we don’t only welcome immigrants; we send them to Washington.
Illegal immigrants make a rational choice when they decide to violate our immigration laws. They weigh the costs, including the risks of getting caught, against the benefits of a better life.
Punishing individual immigrants who are deeply embedded in American communities is not the mandate Trump was given when he was elected.
And because he knows that we don’t have an ounce of talent to waste, the president took action to lift the shadow of deportation from a generation of young, law-abiding immigrants called dreamers.
My parents never understood why I didn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer. They’re Cuban immigrants who wanted to give their children the American dream, and, to them, that was more of what ‘the dream’ entailed.
Men and women are immigrants in each other’s worlds.
I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor’s flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement – before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.
First of all, we haven’t always welcomed immigrants.
Our nation relies on immigrants.
65 immigration acts went through right at the time of the Great Society program. So pre-1970 immigrants – and that’s basically when it kicked in – pre-1970 immigrants, 30% went home. They couldn’t make it.
The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?
With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn’t feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.
Countries around the world have their own immigration laws and methods of dealing with a recurring theme: desperate people searching for peace from volatile parts of the world. And nations everywhere thrive and prosper from the contributions of immigrants and the children of immigrants – including right here in the U.S.
The rise of populism is in part a response to stagnating incomes and job loss, owing mostly to new technologies but widely attributed to imports and immigrants.
Too often, our most vulnerable students – English-language learners, immigrants, poor kids, teenage parents, students with behavioral problems and learning disabilities – fall through the cracks.
There are 12 million illegal immigrants in this country – drawing welfare benefits, sending their children to public schools, and pushing down wages for American workers – but the problem extends well beyond amnesty and open borders.
If somebody takes masses of non-registered immigrants from the Middle East into a country, this also means importing terrorism, criminalism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.
As far as income tax payments go, sources vary in their accounts, but a range of studies find that immigrants pay between $90 billion and $140 billion in Federal, State, and local taxes.
Doing difficult things like passing marriage equality, passing the Dream Act, doing common sense things that allow new American immigrants to fully participate, pay their taxes, play by the rules and take care of their families. That’s the inclusive America that I believe all of us want to move to.
To fully understand the roots of anti-Asian prejudice in America, you need to know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned all immigration from China, even though it was Chinese immigrants that had essentially built America’s railroad system.
America is a country of immigrants. It’s what makes America unique.
So, where are the robots? We’ve been told for 40 years already that they’re coming soon. Very soon they’ll be doing everything for us. They’ll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren’t here. Meanwhile, we have illegal immigrants doing all the work, but we don’t have any robots.
I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends’ parents, everybody’s parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.
Our goal should be to protect our borders and our national security, while instituting humane policies that reflect our values as a nation of immigrants.
The open-borders Right regularly insists that immigrants and their children are assimilating at a brisk clip. It would be nice to see them advocating as well, then, an English-only practice in all government communications.
A big part of the anti-immigration narrative is the perception that the majority of immigrants are poor, uneducated, and unskilled.
When I went to school, I didn’t know a lick of English, but it was okay because there were so many immigrants in the area, a lot of the kids didn’t speak a lick of English, either. It was normal to have a wicked accent.
In my town, and especially in my area, there were people from everywhere: Algerians, Senegalese, French people, Asians, all kinds of immigrants and natives, and everyone circulated.
Australians are coffee snobs. An influx of Italian immigrants after World War II ensured that – we probably had the word ‘cappuccino’ about 20 years before America. Cafe culture is really big for Aussies. We like to work hard, but we take our leisure time seriously.
