We Are All Immigrants Quotes

#1. We are all immigrants, a glorious confection of races and beliefs, united by the rock that we live on. As the years wash over us and new generations march into the future, family histories are subsumed into the greater narrative. We become, simply, Americans.

Alex George

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

Malcolm Gladwell

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. One thing is very clear: Illegal immigrants are not entitled to benefits.

Barbara Jordan

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Howard Fast

#14. 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

#15. None of my friends had grandparents like these. ... Tony and Desolina were exotic.

James Vescovi

#16. 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

#17. Illegal immigrants are using our resources, taking our jobs, filling our schools, our hospitals and our prisons, and we are paying for it all.

Dan Benishek

#18. We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.

Jay Parini

#19. Why are we outsourcing millions of high-paying jobs to China and India? Why don't we secure the border and stop the country from being flooded with millions of illegal immigrants? These are important questions on the mind of middle class voters all over America.

George Noory

#20. In this room we're all here together, but there's probably a lot of different views, people sitting here thinking, I don't own any slaves, all the slaves are dead. Why am I responsible? My family were immigrants, too.

Johnnie Cochran

#21. 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

#22. All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.

Margaret Mead

#23. All Americans are either immigrants or descendants of ancestors who came from somewhere else, including Native Americans. We should all respect and admire immigrants.

Jan C. Ting

#24. We are a country where people of all backgrounds, all nations of origin, all languages, all religions, all races, can make a home. America was built by immigrants.

Hillary Clinton

#25. We [Americans] are a nation of immigrants. We all understand what this country has become because talent from all around the world wants to come here, people who are willing to take risks, people who want to build on their dreams and make sure their kids have an - even bigger dreams than they have.

Barack Obama

#26. I'm born and raised in the Northeast. My parents are Irish immigrants. So our tendency is to shy away from the big yellow ball that comes up in the sky every once in a while.

Denis Leary

#27. 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

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

Larry Flynt

#29. [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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Muslim immigrants like himself encounter prejudice here [in U.S.] but also find political and religious freedom.

Tom Gjelten

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

Gary Shteyngart

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

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

Michael Gove

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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