Top 54 Quotes About Immigrants In The Us
#1. Maybe next year the government might impose some immigration rules on the academy. Two Mexicans in a row is suspicious. [On Mexican immigrants in the US] I hope they can be treated with respect of the ones who came before and built this incredible immigrant nation.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#2. Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation.
James Surowiecki
#3. Because we were born of old country people in a new land, and, right or wrong, we had not felt equal to those around us, and had had to do a little more than they in everything we did.
Robert Laxalt
#4. 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
#5. Desolina and Tony had attended one-room schoolhouses until the third grade. ... According to Tony, there were hardly enough pencils and sober teachers to go around. [Author's grandparents educational background.]
James Vescovi
#6. After the oil crisis of 1973, many European countries tightened restrictions on immigrants. By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home.
Pankaj Mishra
#7. America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come here in order to practice their religious beliefs as they please. Our culture has always been, and will most likely always be, profoundly influenced by religion.
James Frey
#8. My belief in why America has been doing so well up to now is that we have been propelled by our immigrants and our encouragement of technical innovation and, indeed, creativity across the board.
Howard Gardner
#9. One thing is very clear: Illegal immigrants are not entitled to benefits.
Barbara Jordan
#10. Having met other immigrants like myself in America, I can say that a great number of us came to our same "Oriental" identity in a similar fashion. We arrived in the United States as Japanese or Korean or Filipino, but over time we became Orientals.
Alex Tizon
#11. The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.
Eula Biss
#12. Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up.
Howard Fast
#13. Paine and Joel Barlow attempted to change Jefferson's mind, urging him to settle thrifty German immigrants in the new lands and to permit black families to travel from other states to acquire their own land there, but the sugar interest triumphed,
Christopher Hitchens
#14. All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.
Malcolm Gladwell
#15. We're a nation of immigrants - there's no question about that. But we're also a nation of laws. I think we have to honor both of those.
Dan Webster
#16. You know, when President Reagan, who was one of my idols, granted amnesty to about three million illegal immigrants it was based on the fact that the borders would be secured. That didn't happen. It didn't happen during the Bush administration.
Jan Brewer
#17. 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.
Ernest Istook
#18. All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.
Daniel Pipes
#19. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#20. Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,
not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us
the Irish!
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
#21. All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.
Robert Laxalt
#22. I for one believe that we absolutely need an improved guest worker program, one that holds immigrants and employers accountable and yet still enables us to get a crop out of the ground in south Georgia.
John Linder
#23. We have over 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. And we simply cannot sustain it. It costs us a tremendous amount of money of course in health care, in education, and then, on top of it all, in incarceration. And the federal government doesn't reimburse us on any of these things.
Jan Brewer
#24. Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.
Matt Ridley
#25. Since Russia has the largest number of illegal immigrants, second only to the US, and immigrants from Central Asia bring in drugs, I'm calling for a visa requirement for all those wonderful people from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Alexei Navalny
#26. The story of undocumented immigrants in this country is not just about undocumented immigrants. It's about the country as a whole, and it's about us being able to tell the truth about where we are with this issue because we haven't been telling the truth about where we are with this issue.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#27. I am undoubtedly one of the more, if not the most, privileged undocumented immigrants in America. And for us at Define American, which is this culture campaign group that I founded with some friends, culture trumps politics.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#28. Let me be clear: we are still a nation of immigrants, and we honor all those immigrants who are working hard to become new citizens.
William J. Clinton
#29. You know, a huge drain on California's economy is the illegal immigrants. We need to close the borders.
Larry Flynt
#30. [It] has a lot of things in it that I like, but I think it's way too hard on financing things from immigrants.
William J. Clinton
#31. 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
#32. If you want to stop illegal immigration, you have to make it so that - so that the people that hire the illegal immigrants will not be in a position to hire them.
Jesse Ventura
#33. When people see Barack Obama, they don't necessarily see an African-American president. They see someone who is a child of immigrants. They see someone whose family has worked hard and struggled. And they see many similarities between themselves and Barack Obama.
Grace Meng
#34. Muslim immigrants like himself encounter prejudice here [in U.S.] but also find political and religious freedom.
Tom Gjelten
#35. No go sections of the city and they work on law and the police don't go in there. That is not helping anything [in immigrants' assimilation]. That creates a situation like France, unfortunately.
Kimberly Guilfoyle
#36. We need to decouple the movement for comprehensive immigration reform and justice for immigrants from the legislative process and from the Democratic Party process. They are too linked.
Luis Gutierrez
#38. It is said that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.
Grover Cleveland
#39. Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history.
William S. Burroughs
#40. After Donald Trump's derogatory comments about immigrants, NBC has officially cancelled Celebrity Apprentice. Think about it: Donald Trump isn't even president yet, and he's already made America a better place!
Conan O'Brien
#41. Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties, and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#42. None of my friends had grandparents like these. ... Tony and Desolina were exotic.
James Vescovi
#43. 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.
Tahar Rahim
#44. Contrary to what you might assume, I didn't start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty.
Kenneth Langone
#45. Immigrants use the library often. A lot of them don't have access to books and Internet at home. They seem so disconnected to the city.
Rabindranath Maharaj
#46. A lot of schools benefit from parents who are first- or second-generation immigrants, who expect the best for their children.
Michael Gove
#47. I'm a child of immigrants. That is the history of this country. Immigration is good and important for our country. Legal immigration needs to really be modernized.
John Barrasso
#48. My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
Junot Diaz
#49. They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a Native American, that number is more like 300 million.
David Letterman
#50. The church also does not condone a broken immigration system in the U.S., one that too easily can lead to the exploitation, abuse and even death of immigrants.
Roger Mahony
#51. We need to quit subsidizing the costs for illegal immigrants' residency in America immediately. How long will we allow them to siphon millions upon millions from honest taxpaying Americans by supporting their health care, welfare, education and criminal expenses?
Newt Gingrich
#52. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.
Ken Calvert
#53. There are many Sheriff Arpaios. People who have taken to local city, county, and state governments across the county the idea that immigrants are the problem. That immigrants are to blame.
Zack De La Rocha
#54. When you name your child after a grotesque gigantic creature known for slaughtering hundreds of innocents for the sole purpose of entertainment (okay so they were illegal immigrants who entered his realm) you must have a slight idea how that would turn out.
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
