The Immigrants Quotes

#1. 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

#2. You coulld put girls' boyfriends in jail, and I could teach the immigrants how to dress!!!

Meg Cabot

#3. In 1900, as the immigrants come down the gangplank into Jersey City, they expect the streets to be paved with gold, and they were only paved with gold in Frank Baum's 'The Wizard of Oz,' of course.

David Levering Lewis

#4. Keep the immigrants. Deport the Columbia faculty

Jason L. Riley

#5. America is a melting pot of immigrants. So actually, if you took all of the immigrants outside of America, you'd be missing a lot of flavor, starting with the food, with the culture, with the dance, with everything.

Wyclef Jean

#6. American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.

Khaled Hosseini

#7. Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move.

Samuel P. Huntington

#8. The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don't understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars - many of which this country has had a hand in. Although

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Oscar Handlin

#10. Throughout Philippine history, it's the immigrants who built fortunes and, in the process, helped build Philippine economy.

John Gokongwei

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

Mimi Kennedy

#12. I mean, we must act with intelligence. We must work on this framework, so that immigration becomes an asset to both nations. Believe me, what - just the Mayor Bloomberg said here in New York, that this city would be stopped, totally stopped if it were not by the immigrants working here.

Vicente Fox

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. So given that reality, let us not cast that all of the problems and ills of our society are somehow upon the immigrants who have come to this country.

Luis Gutierrez

#16. Jesus reveals salvation, as the Marxist critic and occasional atheist Terry Eagleton observes, to be a matter not 'of cult, law and ritual', but of 'feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich'.

Kenan Malik

#17. These officials changed names they couldn't pronounce and tore people from their families, consigning to a return voyage old folks, people with bad eyes, riffraff and also those who looked insolent. Such power was dazzling. The immigrants were reminded of home. " Ragtime

E.L. Doctorow

#18. The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.

Susan Vreeland

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. You know, a huge drain on California's economy is the illegal immigrants. We need to close the borders.

Larry Flynt

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. A lot of schools benefit from parents who are first- or second-generation immigrants, who expect the best for their children.

Michael Gove

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.

Isabel Wilkerson

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up.

Howard Fast

#43. 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

#44. All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.

Malcolm Gladwell

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.

Margaret Mead

#49. Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

Eric Liu

#50. 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

#51. California has the highest number of illegal immigrants residing in its borders. The estimated number of illegal alien residents in California was about 2.2 million, or nearly 32 percent of the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States.

Gary Miller

#52. Dishwasher safe, debit only, Deborah produced from the arsenal of useful English words for immigrants, with barely a pause for thought.

Sorin Suciu

#53. Mexicans alone - forget other immigrants - have murdered a minimum of twenty-three thousand Americans in the last few decades.68

Ann Coulter

#54. Since the '86 amnesty, the number of illegal immigrants has quadrupled. That should teach Congress a very important lesson: Amnesty 'bends' the rule of law. And bending the rule of law to reach a 'comprehensive' deal winds up provoking wholesale breaking of the law.

Edwin Meese

#55. What we did with deeming rules were designed - it was designed to keep costs from coming on to the government that should be borne by families of immigrants who actually have incomes and can afford to pay.

William J. Clinton

#56. Because women have been marginalised, they're more likely to behave like immigrants and continue to push themselves forward in order to avoid falling through the cracks, but I don't think a happy ending comes from matriarchy.

Hanna Rosin

#57. It is unacceptable that immigrants, including children, are shackled and detained in deplorable conditions. And it is unacceptable that already this year immigrants have died by the dozens in the California desert or in other parts of the Southwest.

Roger Mahony

#58. People who say that there's a vote within the Republican Party that moves against immigrants is just factually not accurate.

Grover Norquist

#59. The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes.

Spencer Bachus

#60. My grandfather did not travel across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland.

Stephen Colbert

#61. The problem is, then you see immigrants saving cities in Baltimore and you see 40 Korean groceries get burned down.

Greg Gutfeld

#62. The conflict between the creatures of Native Lore and the immigration of the European preternatural hosts is hinted at in 'Blood Bound' and reflects the conflicts between the human immigrants and the Indian people who were already here.

Patricia Briggs

#63. Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best - monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.

Wendy Kaminer

#64. It has given me a global vantage point, being the daughter of immigrants from China, who had nothing when they came here. And now I am leading a company. It speaks to something deep in me, the concept that you don't have to start with anything.

Andrea Jung

#65. We've seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants - farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe.

Barack Obama

#66. The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource - the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.

Eric Ries

#67. 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

#68. The easiest way to hide a relationship is not to attempt to hide it.

Howard Fast

#69. 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

#70. The descendants of European immigrants do not govern the United States of America today. The foreign and domestic policies of the country are made by the Jews and their lackeys.

Julius Streicher

#71. My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

Ted Cruz

#72. More than 1 million U.S. citizens live in Mexico, and my country remains the largest source of immigrants to the United States.

Enrique Pena Nieto

#73. 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.

Otto Schily

#74. We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

Mark Steyn

#75. An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot

Mira Jacob

#76. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate ... It's time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment,

Sarah

#77. 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.

Julian Castro

#78. The fact of the matter is, this country is not going to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. What are we supposed to do with them? What are we supposed to do with these kids?

Jose Antonio Vargas

#79. I love the new legal immigrants; they want their kids to be safe just like I do.

Lou Barletta

#80. It is simply a fact that the birth rate of our illegal immigrants exceeds that of our legal residents.

John Linder

#81. Her occupation was the worst that anyone could think of. No guest in the park had to think of it because, unlike the wandering dwarf women, her job had no bearing on paper.

Pam Jones

#82. My parents were immigrants. And the place for all immigrants was the factories. They were the source of cheap labor.

Jack Kirby

#83. The effort to combine the general population of this country with the current burgeoning numbers of illegal immigrants is outrageous, simply outrageous.

Rush Limbaugh

#84. The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics ... restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this ... as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound.

John Pintard

#85. You seem damn sure of yourself for a man your age?"
"I am as old as I can be at my age. I don't know very much, but I know the water.

Howard Fast

#86. I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something.

Frank Oz

#87. The U.S. is a complex country. It has a high predominance of immigrants who have been eminently successful.

Azim Premji

#88. The current diversity visa program does a disservice to our immigration policy and to those immigrants who have moved through the more traditional process that allows them to lawfully reside in this country.

William L. Jenkins

#89. Finally, in my critique of the immigration image of America, it is also important to know that we're not only a nation of immigrants, but we are in some part a nation of emigrants, which often gets neglected.

Samuel P. Huntington

#90. We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens. I am sick and tired of the American citizen being demeaned and treated as a second-class citizen while anybody who crosses the border is treated as the most virtuous human being on the face of the earth.

Mark Levin

#91. Unlicensed, illegal immigrants are the safest drivers on the road.

Dov Davidoff

#92. Let me respond with a few points, the first being that all immigrants pay taxes, income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, every tax when they make a purchase.

Luis Gutierrez

#93. 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

#94. Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

Amor Towles

#95. My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.

David Lee

#96. That strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion.

Gene Tierney

#97. Israel's capital will never again be a divided city, a city with a wall at its center, a city in which two flags fly. This city, will, in its entirety, absorb immigrants, welcome pilgrims and be the eternal capital of Israel forever.

Yitzhak Shamir

#98. Our young immigrants have a lot to offer. They are motivated and hard-working, and in many cases have already contributed significantly to our society - by excelling in school, by volunteering in their communities, or by serving in the military.

Gerald Chertavian

#99. Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.

Lamar S. Smith

#100. I'm for the DREAM Act. It makes so much sense. Following the implementation of the DREAM Act, we'll have a case study we can point to where we can say that we provided a path to citizenship or legal involvement in the community for these young immigrants, and the sky didn't fall.

Beto O'Rourke