Top 100 Immigrant Quotes
#1. China cannot pull in the best and brightest from all over the world. It's an ethnically defined nation, the opposite of an immigrant nation. You don't see a lot of American engineers trying to be Chinese citizens.
Amy Chua
#2. Each poor immigrant girl had a plan in place to survive. Some had brothers or fathers for protection, others, young husbands; but for all of them, the first line of defense was their scissors.
Adriana Trigiani
#3. The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, trying to take this seat from which we have done so much for our community - to take this seat and give it to this Van Tran, who is very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.
Loretta Sanchez
#4. What inspired me to work so hard and to maintain my determination was seeing my mother. She was an immigrant and was struggling in America to make it by; that inspired me to work hard.
Michelle Phan
#5. If one has problems with immigrant communities in Europe, that should not be used against Turkey.
Martti Ahtisaari
#6. Tonight, the daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love.
Geraldine Ferraro
#7. I have a very hyper-sensitive sister, and when she saw in the papers the next day that I had proclaimed myself the daughter of an immigrant, she didn't like it at all, and was with difficulty deterred from writing to the press that my father might be an immigrant, but not hers.
Margaret Case Harriman
#8. It is actually costlier to hire an immigrant. And yet the farm worker is almost invariably an immigrant. You can't pay an American to pick blueberries.
Trey Gowdy
#9. I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile,
Ha Jin
#10. What I love most about New York is that I can walk in the street and nobody is looking at me as if I'm different. In my country and in Italy, you have to choose sides. I was a famous journalist and I was also an immigrant and ultimately I never stopped feeling like I was a guest.
Rula Jebreal
#11. I was raised by extremely strict - but also extremely loving - Chinese immigrant parents, and I had the most wonderful childhood! I remember laughing constantly with my parents - my dad is a real character and very funny. I certainly did wish they allowed to me do more things!
Amy Chua
#12. 'Lollipop Opera' is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It's utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It's like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.
John Lydon
#13. I am an immigrant in a sense. What happened was that my father was stationed in New York when my mother became pregnant, and she said, "I've got to go to Sweden so this child can be born there, because you don't have any idea where you're going to be transferred next."
Claes Oldenburg
#14. I have an immigrant story. Most people come here for economic reasons, or religious reasons, or racial reasons, or gender reasons, or one of those things. I had a good job in Paris, but America was, and still is, the golden fleece. And I've done very well!
Jacques Pepin
#15. I saw an opportunity to use a restaurant to identify a lot of my issues and concerns with being an immigrant in America, and Asian in America, and a young person in America.
Eddie Huang
#16. As you know, I'm an immigrant. I came over here as an immigrant, and what gave me the opportunities, what made me to be here today, is the open arms of Americans. I have been received. I have been adopted by America.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#17. I don't want to scream 'Immigrant Song' every night for the rest of my life, and I'm not sure I could.
Robert Plant
#18. Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
W.E.B. Du Bois
#19. Of all the questions I get asked as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, there are two - asked in various permutations via email, social media or in person - that chill me to the bone: 'Why don't you just make yourself legal?' And: 'Why don't you get in the back of the line?'
Jose Antonio Vargas
#20. '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.
Grace Paley
#21. Look, I'm an immigrant, so I know what it is like to dream about coming to America and then to get here and be able to make your dreams a reality, ... Of course, there are millions of people who want to come here. Let's help them, let's find a legal way t
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#22. There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
James Gray
#23. There is this kind of sense in the immigrant community, first we were going to do immigration reform, but then 9/11 happened.
Luis Gutierrez
#24. I have lived my life defined as a refugee in Nepal and India, a resident alien and immigrant in the United States. At last, I am a Tibetan in Tibet, a Khampa in Kham, albeit as a tourist in my occupied and tethered country.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
#25. Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores, and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world
our new world.
George H. W. Bush
#26. In a groundbreaking move, the Associated Press, the largest news-gathering organization in the World, will no longer use the term 'illegal immigrant'. They will now use the phrase 'undocumented democrat'.
Jay Leno
#27. I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen.
Mike Medavoy
#28. This is the superhumanity of the immigrant, but woe be to the all-too-human offspring living in the shadow of such strength.
Gary Shteyngart
#29. Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Pankaj Mishra
#30. Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker.
Jeb Bush
#31. It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year ... Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?
E.L. Doctorow
#33. 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.
Chang-rae Lee
#34. That is a reward that humbles me: the fact that immigrants coming to America, much like I did, can come into a Forever 21 and know that all of this was started by a simple Korean immigrant with a dream.
Do Won Chang
#35. What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.
Al Lewis
#36. We need to build bridges between the LGBT community and the larger immigrant community. In the end, the bigger the tent we build, the more successful we'll be.
Luis Gutierrez
#37. Every time, every time a tourist or an immigrant or a refugee shows up in another country there's a security risk.
Justin Trudeau
#38. America isn't Congress. America isn't Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.
Barack Obama
#39. Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.
Mark Helprin
#40. Whatever country you go to, you need to definitely follow the rules. So I believe it's very important for people, wherever they go, any immigrant should know or should try to learn something about the culture.
David Ortiz
#41. 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.
Jan C. Ting
#42. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a
Lyndsay Faye
#43. 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.
Joseph O'Neill
#44. Immigrant children are highly vulnerable. Their level of disadvantage and fragility has consistently grown due to factors outside their control.
Irwin Redlener
#45. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.
Theodore Kaczynski
#46. Personally, it's a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.
Dinaw Mengestu
#47. 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.
Peter Landesman
#48. No country has been more invigorated by immigrant culture, more rewarded by immigrant labor and immigrant ideas than America.
Marc Veasey
#49. America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.
Harold Rosenberg
#50. 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.
John Edgar Wideman
#51. 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.
Grover Norquist
#52. I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
Dinaw Mengestu
#53. I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.
Vincent Cassel
#54. The racism in Europe takes the form of anti-immigrant extremism - which is bad enough here - I think it's hard to measure, but my guess is that it's probably worse there.
Noam Chomsky
#55. The next step has to be the necessary step. It's always to put the immigrant community and the civil rights movement ahead of partisan politics.
Luis Gutierrez
#56. One good thing about being an immigrant in the US, no one cares about my sociopolitical opinion. I exist like a bland wallpaper to all races.
Fidelis O. Mkparu
#57. I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election.
David Byrne
#58. 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.
Susan Choi
#59. Private prisons have a special interest in tapping the burgeoning immigrant groups to fill beds and cells, especially in the post-9/11 period of the so-called "war on terror." The
Mark Lewis Taylor
#60. No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.
Timothy Garton Ash
#61. It is the concern of every immigrant that their offspring will grow to embrace their adoptive culture at the expense of their natural heritage.
Guillermo Del Toro
#62. 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.
Philip Schultz
#63. 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.
Craig Ferguson
#64. One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession.
Michael Parenti
#65. As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in U.S, which was largely built by such families.
Pope Francis
#66. I think it's really important to realize that small businesses are often the portal for immigrants into the New York City economy. I think we have something like 40,000 small businesses that are immigrant-run in New York.
Christine Quinn
#67. It was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.
Zinedine Zidane
#68. I'm a big supporter of the military simply because I'm the daughter of a Polish immigrant who fled Europe during World War II from Poland and lied about his age to join the Army simply because he was proud to be an American. And who isn't?
Cindy Morgan
#69. I think all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.
Edwidge Danticat
#70. We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox ... and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.
Rupert Murdoch
#71. I do have very deep, fond memories of my family in Mexico City, but I also remember feeling funny for not speaking English - I was basically an immigrant. But I picked up the language fast and soon I knew that I wanted to be a writer.
Louis C.K.
#72. So-called generation gaps are especially common among immigrant families; these gaps can produce anxious and unpleasant tensions, and sometimes lead to nasty ruptures or chronic conflicts.
Ralph Nader
#73. 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.
Miguel Syjuco
#74. The first right an immigrant is stripped of is the right to be political.
Tania Bruguera
#76. I think one thing that has helped me to be an entrepreneur is being an immigrant and coming to the United States. I had to basically build a new life for myself, and adjust very quickly to a new environment, new culture, learn a new language.
Anousheh Ansari
#77. You are supposed to look at the unimproved and think about the way that we dismiss so-called 'chavs' and certain immigrant classes that are considered unworthy, the "undeserving poor". Those kind of prejudices are getting worse.
Jonathan Trigell
#78. I find it strange that Gisela Gschaider a 1974 immigrant from Germany is on the brexit panel telling us British what we should do .
Alan Sugar
#79. Racism ... fuelled by bitter assertions that no immigrant ever has the least respect for the environment in his adopted country because he never really believes it's his.
James Hamilton-Paterson
#80. Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres.
Neel Mukherjee
#81. 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.
Gene Luen Yang
#83. I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right.
Jorge Ramos
#84. How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.
Joseph O'Connor
#85. Maybe it's the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.
Cristina Henriquez
#86. Conservatives aren't anti-immigrant - conservatives are pro-legal immigration.
Marco Rubio
#87. If you chose a particular religion, you were siding with the government religion of whatever region you were in. That's never been true in America, but also, the United States also has so many more immigrant groups which also tends to imply more religious diversity right away.
Susan Jacoby
#88. I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.
Caitlin Flanagan
#89. Like other important immigrant communities, the Jewish experience in the United States represents the ideal of freedom and the promise and opportunity of America.
Jan Schakowsky
#90. 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.
Arlen Specter
#91. The senators know it's important to win statewide to have Hispanics and other immigrant populations supporting them.
Barack Obama
#92. 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.
Dinaw Mengestu
#93. Chinese immigrant: Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.
H.W. Brands
#94. Being an immigrant and staring life over, you learn to be a survivor and how to face your challenges and basically overcome them. And that has been a great skill set that I've developed and has helped me in my career.
Anousheh Ansari
#95. 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.
Jay Parini
#96. I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.
Tao Lin
#97. As a practical matter, every immigrant needs to master English to be a full participating citizen and to have full economic opportunity.
Richard Lugar
#98. 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.
Bob Menendez
#100. My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
Phil Jackson
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