29 Quotes by Roberto Suro

What we see from the survey is people understood they had the right to vote, they just didn't know how to go about it.

There is a big demographic wave of Hispanic kids who are native born who will be turning 18 in even greater numbers over the next three, four and five election cycles.

Those places all tend to be metro areas where the overall population is growing fast and where the economies are vibrant. That kind of rapid economic growth and expansion creates a demand, particularly for recently arrived immigrant workers.

You end up, after a point, trying to balance our fundamental traditions, the need for order, law and security with a need for openness. Immigration policy, writ large, has always been partly a matter of national identity. It becomes a values-laden debate. Congress is having a hard time with it.

Contrary to what people might expect, the inclination to migrate isn't contained among Mexicans who are poor or poorly educated or with limited economic prospects. They're distributed across the whole breadth of Mexican society.

Contrary to what people might expect, the desire to immigrate is not restricted to the poor.

There's kind of a cosmopolitan feel among these kids, which could end up being something very distinctive. It's a mishmash of stuff, and it's all just sort of thrown together, which is very much what this generation is like: a mixture of what they take from their families . . . and purely American kids.

There's one very clear finding and that's that unemployment per se is not a very large factor in determining whether people migrate or not. This is not a flow of people without jobs. Unemployment is not pushing people out. . . .

Right now, we're seeing to some extent the political response to the demography. And even though the legislative proposals are seemingly technical and narrow, they touch these nerves about how we think of ourselves as a people.