Top 100 Immigrant Quotes
#1. The DREAM Act was intended to benefit illegal immigrants who were brought here as children, the most sympathetic subset among our large illegal immigrant population.
Jan C. Ting
#2. 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.
David Schwimmer
#3. If you grow up in an immigrant culture, there are going to be foods you eat that other people just don't get.
Eddie Huang
#4. I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate: I'm a woman; I'll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate; I am an immigrant; I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, 'Yes, but are you gay?' and I said, 'Nobody's perfect.'
Mazie Hirono
#5. I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.
Shyam Selvadurai
#6. Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
Junot Diaz
#7. Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.
Sasa Stanisic
#8. I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.
Sergio Troncoso
#10. In Psalm 72, Solomon prays for power and fame but he says the purpose of influence is to speak up for others and one is the immigrant. He doesn't delineate between legal and illegal.
Rick Warren
#11. The German stamp on Wisconsin endures in the state's commitment to efficient agriculture, hard work, education, culture, and to good citizenship and political freedom - all of which were an integral part of the German immigrant's language.
Richard H. Zeitlin
#12. People want a result. Immigrant voters aren't stupid, and they're going to know who's on their side.
Tom Snyder
#13. I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.
Pete Seeger
#14. My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.
Lisa Papademetriou
#15. We're not meant to be, Daniel. I'm an undocumented immigrant. I'm being deported. Today is my last day in America. Tomorrow I'll be gone.
Nicola Yoon
#16. 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.
Francis Maude
#17. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.
Rachel Maddow
#18. I have only one loyalty and that's to the immigrant community.
Luis Gutierrez
#19. I really feel that my life story is a continuation of the Great American Dream - the immigrant who comes to this country and is allowed to excel. How many other countries would let me do that?
Friedrich St. Florian
#20. I am in favour of the notion of Australia as an immigrant society.
Tony Abbott
#21. I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.
Saul Rubinek
#22. New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.
Edmund White
#23. As it is, I guess I find "Jack & Diane" a little disgusting. As a child of immigrant professionals, I can't help but notice the wasteful frivolity of it all.
Mindy Kaling
#24. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#25. They decided to let immigrants in and I am an immigrant. They gave us a chance to participate in this country's life and I took it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#26. 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.
Gloria Estefan
#27. You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#28. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!
Rashers Tierney
#29. We can certainly defuse the intensity of the anti-immigrant feeling if we can bring some reality to the discussion by showing that they are not using that many resources.
Barbara Jordan
#30. I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.
Junot Diaz
#31. I took Laura on a trip once where we followed the Immigrant Trail for about six hundred miles. She really learned a lesson. People forget too often how it was back then.
Bruce Dern
#32. 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.
P. J. O'Rourke
#33. It's a project that touched me as an immigrant and as a New Yorker.
Daniel Libeskind
#34. From the windows of my office in Boston ... I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first time. That immigrant spirit of limitless possibility animates America even today.
Edward Kennedy
#35. Immigrant: An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.
Ambrose Bierce
#36. In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I'm constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It's above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.
Mark Bradford
#37. 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.
Jeff Greene
#38. When Jesus comes to the earth in the New Testament, we are quickly introduced to him as an immigrant. Fleeing a brutal political situation in Bethlehem after he is born, Jesus' family travels to Egypt, where they live for years as sojourners in a foreign land.
David Platt
#39. 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.
Mike Huckabee
#40. If Obama can force you to get health insurance just by calling it a tax, than there is nothing to stop him from making you gay marry an illegal immigrant wearing a condom on a hydroponic pot farm powered by solar energy.
Stephen Colbert
#41. ...a Nigerian couple visiting from Maryland, their two boys sitting next to them on the sofa, both buttoned-up and stiff, caged in the airlessness of their parents' immigrant aspirations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#42. America is a country formed by diverse communities from different countries. Overall, the country is very hospitable and gives opportunities to grow. Saying that, I'd also say I'm not a 'white' immigrant; a South Asian's experience is different than, say, a European immigrant's.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#43. Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe ... and it worries me.
Tony Judt
#44. Finding Mecca in America weaves social theory and concrete ethnography into a significant contribution on Muslims in the United States, illuminating broader questions about the integration of minority and immigrant groups along the way. This is an important work and a joy to read.
Eboo Patel
#45. Ronald Reagan basically legalized every illegal immigrant in this country. I just like to bring this up because every week I like to make Republican heads explode about how they love Ronald Reagan, but would despise everything he did.
Bill Maher
#46. 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.
Bryan Singer
#47. Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations.
Matt Taibbi
#48. Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.
Will Eisner
#49. The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
E.L. Doctorow
#50. 531he location of a temp agency-in inner-city immigrant neighborhoods, for example-influences not only the resulting population of temps but also the job opportunities that are available (or not) to workers54
Erin Hatton
#51. I'm a different immigrant. My life is so lucky compared to so many.
Jose Andres
#52. my generation's screwed - we're not the immigrant experience, we're not the assimilation experience - we're the first nothing generation, we've got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.
Joshua Cohen
#53. The question of receiving the immigrant is an ethical issue that becomes a political issue.
Ruben Martinez
#54. 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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#55. Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in.
Scaachi Koul
#56. Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language
Marc Prensky
#57. Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.
Henry Louis Gates
#58. Margaret looked at the ring on her finger. "Gran gave me this before we boarded the ship. It's the most special thing in the world to me. I'll never take it off, Hanna. No matter how hungry I am.
Meredith Jaeger
#60. We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.
Rand Paul
#61. Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs.
Julie Otsuka
#62. If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.
Bill Maher
#63. 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.
Aarti Mann
#64. Immigration, a lexicon. You're a 'migrant' when you're very poor; 'immigrant' when you're not so poor; and 'expat' when you're rich.
Laila Lalami
#65. When you see the Statue of Liberty, you will be in America.
Antonio Russo
#66. Arranged marriages are big business in the U.K. Second- and third-generation immigrant families, with no extended family structure, limited networks and religious restrictions on acceptable ways to meet future spouses, are turning to external matchmakers for help.
Jemima Khan
#67. As minorities and other immigrant groups become more important to our economy, the inner city is a crucible that gives us an early look at phenomena that are going to be spreading more broadly in the economy over time.
Michael Porter
#68. Their analysis clearly revealed the existence of a color line that effectively blocked black occupational, residential, and social mobility. They demonstrated that any assumption about urban blacks duplicating the immigrant experience had to confront the issue of race.
William Julius Wilson
#69. 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.
Bobby Jindal
#70. 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.
Dennis Lehane
#71. In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
Toni Morrison
#73. I wanted to talk to very young kids about self-image and about being different and how that can be your strength, especially from the immigrant perspective.
Gloria Estefan
#74. It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Barack Obama
#75. We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.
Akhil Sharma
#76. I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
#77. I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.
Ayad Akhtar
#78. 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.
Oscar Hijuelos
#79. I came from a traditional immigrant family where education meant there were only a few valid paths: doctor or lawyer - and I didn't want to be either one.
Suheir Hammad
#80. It's bewildering to me how you can just start chatting with a complete stranger on Facebook, and - next thing you know - it seems as if there's some intense connection with the person - or at least you feel that closeness and hope it's mutual
Zack Love
#82. I realize my life here is much richer than I ever could have imagined. [Why one Canadian immigrant to Italy stays]
Ivanka Di Felice
#83. 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.
Mark Leibovich
#86. As you know, today was Don't Take Your Illegal Immigrant To Work Day here in Los Angeles. No, all across the nation they had a Day Without Immigrants, is what they call it. Or, as Native Americans call it, the good ol' days.
Jay Leno
#87. NSEERS was so poorly conceived and badly managed that it created chaos and fear. Trust between the immigrant community and law enforcement was severely strained and, in the end, there was no evidence that any terrorists were apprehended as a result of the effort.
James Zogby
#88. I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
Gary Shteyngart
#89. Christianity is seen by more and more people as a negative message: anti gay, anti immigrant, anti abortion (as the only life issue), anti gay marriage, anti the Democratic party.
Richard Rohr
#90. I come from an immigrant family, but I know no other nationality apart from British.
Maajid Nawaz
#91. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#92. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.
Enoch Powell
#93. As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.
Jennifer Gilmore
#94. 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.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#95. 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.
Dinaw Mengestu
#97. I was the son of an immigrant. I experienced bigotry, intolerance and prejudice, even as so many of you have. Instead of allowing these thing to embitter me, I took them as spurs to more strenuous effort.
Bernard Baruch
#98. Considering our history, I can think of nothing more American than an immigrant.
Conor Oberst
#99. We should embrace our immigrant roots and recognize that newcomers to our land are not part of the problem, they are part of the solution.
Roger Mahony
#100. Times are ripe to discuss about the vote right, at least on an administrative level, for immigrant persons.
Gianfranco Fini
