Quotes About Immigrants

#1. I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.

Agona Apell

#2. The factual reality is that the vast majority of immigrants - legal and illegal - contribute more to this country than they take out in social services.

Juan Williams

#3. For the undocumented immigrants, the big priority is just to get out from the shadows, be able to get a driver's license, buy an airplane ticket and stop worrying about sudden deportation. But for the country as a whole, it's crucial that everybody have a citizen's stake in the nation's welfare.

Gail Collins

#4. 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.

Jacob K. Javits

#5. Our parents taught us to love God, love our family and love our country. Their own grandparents were immigrants. Their first language may not have been English, but the hopes and dreams they had for their children were purely American.

Martin O'Malley

#6. The Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal immigrants cost the United States taxpayer about $10.4 billion a year. A large part of that expense stems from the babies born each year to illegal immigrants.

Nathan Deal

#7. At times in the past, the U.S. did not restrict the number of immigrants.

Jeff Hawkins

#8. I know that some poor immigrants from that era had unrealistic expectations and were disappointed, but I don't think my grandparents were disappointed at all, even though they experienced some very hard times during the Great Depression.

Samuel Alito

#9. Women disappear all the time. Nobody misses them. Immigrants. Whores from Russia. Thousands of people pass through Sweden every year.

Stieg Larsson

#10. I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama!

Kerry Washington

#11. We are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

Bob Inglis

#12. 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.

Luis Gutierrez

#13. We certainly employ a lot of immigrants at Fox ... and we do not take any consistent anti-immigrant line.

Rupert Murdoch

#14. 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

#15. Illegal immigrants should be required to return to their home country.

Mitt Romney

#16. Most previous immigrants came to the United States to become Americans, with no intention of returning home. They relinquished their ties with their homeland. English was their key to prosperity, and they worked hard to master it.

John Shadegg

#17. The U.S. tries to provide immigrants who grow up here with a world-class education and imbue them with the can-do attitude that has long defined American innovation.

Gary Locke

#18. I think there are too many guns. That's a problem. I'd rather have immigrants than guns.

Myka 9

#19. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.

Alan Greenspan

#20. Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.

Amy Chua

#21. Told reporters Wednesday he can support a pathway to citizenship for some of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and that he actually prefers it to a plan that would create a second-class of citizens through alternative programs.

Darrell Issa

#22. The Startup Act should give all Americans, not just immigrants, a better shot at being tomorrow's engineers and entrepreneurs. And that opportunity could begin at a young age with education in computer programming.

Marvin Ammori

#23. Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from government. Now they come looking for free health care, free education, and a free lunch.

Harry Browne

#24. The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans.

Betty Smith

#25. Americans believe in the value of immigration. We are the most generous nation on earth to immigrants, allowing over one million people a year to come here legally.

Marco Rubio

#26. As the 109th Congress continues to debate legislation that will affect the lives of immigrants, it is important for us to remember that we are a nation of immigrants.

Jose Serrano

#27. Nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently live within our borders. That's 11 million people living in the shadows whom we know next to nothing about.

Steve Israel

#28. America was built by immigrants. Almost nobody that I know is any more than three generations, maybe four generations, American.

Michael Bloomberg

#29. I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.

Hector Tobar

#30. Immigrants provide skills that we simply cannot afford to do without. They have contributed hugely to Britain's success.

Charles Kennedy

#31. They [illegal immigrants] broke the law, but it's not a felony, it's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family.

Jeb Bush

#32. The Democratic Party is the party that opened its arms. We opened them to every nationality, every creed. We opened them to the immigrants. The Democratic Party is the party of the people.

Richard J. Daley

#33. America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is mixed. America is immigrants.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#34. 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

#35. There was a fleeting cold front, the slight judgment that said immigrants were a necessary fact of life, one that must be tolerated but never truly accepted. The only way to ever become a permanent part of America's greatness would be to defend it. Cassidy

Adriana Trigiani

#36. In California, more than 1 million undocumented immigrants become eligible to apply for driver's licenses. People who entered or stayed in the country illegally will be able to drive legally in the state.

Anonymous

#37. Consular offices make no attempt to determine whether the person obtaining the card is legally in the United States. In fact, the only people who need these cards are illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists. Consular cards also are easily forged.

Elton Gallegly

#38. It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

Eric Hoffer

#39. If you think the President was right to open the doors of American opportunity to young immigrants brought here as children who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should vote for Barack Obama.

William J. Clinton

#40. Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights.

Eric Liu

#41. Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America's diverse Muslim population - that they are foreign and exotic and un-American - was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago.

Reza Aslan

#42. The goal of immigration policy should be what is in the best interests of the American people as a whole. I would recommend limiting immigration to spouses and minor children of citizens, plus additional immigrants chosen for special skills needed in the U.S.

Jan C. Ting

#43. At the end of the day, it not only doesn't make logical sense to deny licenses to undocumented immigrants, it doesn't make financial sense.

Cheech Marin

#44. 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

#45. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.

Jeb Bush

#46. Most of the first voluntary Irish immigrants came from Ulster in the north of Ireland. These immigrants were generally, although not exclusively, Protestants. They were known as "Scotch-Irish" or "Scots Irish,

Ryan Hackney

#47. We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you're immigrants, you're not part of that history.

Michael Emerson

#48. That should be our test regarding immigrants. Those who come to America to tear it down or live off of others should not be welcomed.

Marvin Olasky

#49. Immigrants can spread diseases for which we may have no immunity. There is also the question of crime and culture. Many immigrants come from countries with different legal structures and are not willing to behave in the way we expect American citizens to behave.

Ron Paul

#50. Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.

Lionel Sosa

#51. There's a perception out there that the U.K. has become unfriendly to immigrants. Even if that isn't true, the very fact that that is the perception will make people not even want to come.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

#52. To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.

Mark Helprin

#53. It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants ... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.

Rudolf Arnheim

#54. Our policy is guided by the principle that we will keep unauthorized aliens out of the United States, welcome legal immigrants, and protect refugees from harm. Our solutions rely on working in partnership with States and communities.

William J. Clinton

#55. Immigrants aren't the reason wages haven't gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.

Barack Obama

#56. Spelling is difficult because there are too many rules. Silent letters only exist to make it harder for illegal immigrants to learn English.

Daniel Tosh

#57. The time for common-sense immigration reform is now," Grayson said in a news release. "We must set forth a straightforward route to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants who already live in our communities, work for our businesses and want to give back to the country that they call home.

Alan Grayson

#58. My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.

Daniel Nathans

#59. People associate farmworkers with illegal immigrants, and that's really not the case.

Eva Longoria

#60. When I started Cove, I spoke to three immigration lawyers who gave me a long checklist of things to do before my company could hire immigrants.

Ruchi Sanghvi

#61. I am the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. My mother is a survivor of both polio and of the Igbo genocide during her country's civil war in the late 1960s.

Uzo Aduba

#62. We need to remain a nation that doesn't just welcome but that celebrates legal immigrants who come here seeking to pursue the American Dream.

Ted Cruz

#63. We must honor our country's tradition of openness and continue to welcome new immigrants.

Jose Serrano

#64. My grandfather was Catholic; my grandmother, Jewish. Crossing over from Bavaria, as immigrants to the United States, the ship started to sink. My grandmother jumped overboard. My grandfather followed, to save this girl he had never met.

Emanuel Celler

#65. Hillary Clinton made a campaign stop in Las Vegas yesterday. She said she wants citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But after seeing Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo yesterday, immigrants said, 'You know what, we're good. We're gonna head back now. We had enough.'

Jimmy Fallon

#66. The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English.

Bobby Jindal

#67. Immigrants are more fertile.

Jeb Bush

#68. First generation Indian immigrants are mass guinea pigs. When a race that subsisted on plants for centuries subsists on a meat-dominated diet, it scares me to know what's in store for them

Siddharth Katragadda

#69. My parents were European immigrants. They came to the States with $1,500, two suitcases, and me, and they managed to build a business, a family, and a future for their family. They didn't have any of the resources of people who have lived here for two or three generations.

Stana Katic

#70. But if we keep denying that there are problems with some male immigrants, then we will just drive the people into the arms of the right-wing populists. Without the ignorance or the trivialization on the part of all the political parties, there would be no Pegida or Alternative for Germany.

Alice Schwarzer

#71. As immigrants, we understand better than most that to be an American is a privilege that conveys not just rights but responsibilities.

Jose Andres

#72. Who are beneficiaries of the Court's protection? Members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers.

Pat Buchanan

#73. Your fear that your parents will actually kill you for dropping out of college is something that I think a lot of children of immigrants would maybe relate to.

Mindy Kaling

#74. [Illegal immigration] costs the taxpayers of the United States a lot of money. And it's unfair to Americans who are working every day to pay their own bills. It's also unfair to a lot of people who have waited in line for years and years in other countries to be legal immigrants.

William J. Clinton

#75. One girl said that she'd never support giving immigrants jobs because her dad lost his job a few years ago, and the reason he couldn't find a new one was because the government was letting immigrants have all the jobs.

Robin Talley

#76. In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival.

Rudolf Arnheim

#77. Not much was said of Gaberone except its riches and its danger. The prisons were said to be in-escapable, the shanty towns cheap, the police didn't bother the illegal immigrants unless they were caught committing crimes. A dangerous paradise.

Thabo Katlholo

#78. the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants

W.E.B. Du Bois

#79. America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.

Michael Gold

#80. I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

George Takei

#81. I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

Cristina Kirchner

#82. President Obama is doing the right thing by offering young immigrants, most often in this country through no action of their own, a chance to live and work openly, free from the fear of deportation.

Eliot Spitzer

#83. Originating in large scale electronic warfare and anti-jamming technologies for the battlefield devised by two Russian immigrants, these now one-chip systems can fit in a handset and enable intercommunication among the towers of Babel in urban America.

George Gilder

#84. If we had those 40 million children that were [aborted] over the last 30 years, we wouldn't need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today.

Tom DeLay

#85. Immigration is not an issue that I read about in the newspaper or watch a documentary on PBS or CNN. It's an issues I've lived around my whole life. My family are immigrants. My wife's family are immigrants. All of my neighbors are immigrants.

Marco Rubio

#86. The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Chuck Palahniuk

#87. If our focus in immigration reform is exclusively on high-skilled or STEM immigrants, where do the rest of the millions yearning to join our ranks fit in?

Cedric Richmond

#88. If two equally qualified persons apply for a job at a workplace with few immigrants, the one called Mohammed should get the job.

Mona Sahlin

#89. All of our people all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#90. It's the federal government's responsibility to secure our borders. We passed Senate Bill 1070 as another tool in order to protect the citizens of Arizona. We have over 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. And we simply cannot sustain it.

Jan Brewer

#91. I saw my parents come over. They were immigrants, they had no money. My dad wore the same pair of shoes, I had some ugly clothes growing up, and I never had any privileges. In some ways, I think the person that I am now, I think it's good that I had that kind of tough upbringing.

Amy Chua

#92. I grew up in northwest London on a council estate. My parents are Irish immigrants who came over here when they were very young and worked in menial jobs all their lives, and I'm one of many siblings.

Amanda Hale

#93. Because the truth is, today's immigrants, as they have for generation after generation, work the longest hours at the hardest jobs for the lowest pay, jobs that are just about impossible to fill.

Luis Gutierrez

#94. I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.

Anne Waldman

#95. Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

Oscar Handlin

#96. I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#97. I've always loved New York City and the idea of a cultural exchange: the immigrants coming to America.

Mimi Kennedy

#98. Rooted in the word 'history' is 'story.' And America's story is exceptional. It's amazing. Younger students should learn that we have always been and continue to be a land of immigrants - a land committed to bold new ideas.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

#99. Our country stands at a critical point in its history. Our heritage as a nation of immigrants is at stake.

Roger Mahony

#100. The oath of renunciation and allegiance is a solemn vow taken by thousands of immigrants each year to become a United States citizen. The oath is the fundamental statement of allegiance to the United States, and this allegiance is what unites America.

Jim Ryun