507 Quotes About Immigration

Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.

As a tool for offsetting the drag on growth caused by population aging, a modest amount of additional immigration is the best bet.

I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world---whatever its features---was catastrophic.

The strategy of the Germans and their French police cohort was stealthy, predictable, and almost successful. Until mid-1942, when anti-Jewish operations became more violent and the rumors of a Nazi Final Solution had finally reached Paris, most well meaning and generous Parisians were aware in general of the laws restricting the lives of their Jewish co-habitants, but had convinced themselves that the government was only trying to control immigration and terrorism.

Nationality isn’t much more than a lease to an apartment, ” I said. “If you don’t like the apartment anymore, you break the lease and get out.

There's a saying: those who do not swimdeep in the waters from which they camecannot arrive in the oceans they hope to go.My parents began an ocean awayand arrived in a land of lakes and snow.I've been back to their waters (is it mine, too?)but, wasn't a good swimmer.Everyone spoke underwater; I could onlyhold my breath to listen for so long.I did learn the water carries its own song.

The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.

In times of stress, it is the familiar that soothes and comforts. As we try to find our place in a landscape that is at once recognizable and unfamiliar, it is natural that we gravitate towards others undergoing the same transition.

The voice was full of satisfaction with the things we had achieved, sadness for the life we had left behind, and hope for the unknown future. I could feel my heart beating strong and fast under my right hand. I wondered if anyone else could hear the beating of my heart. It felt like the integrated pulse of many hearts beating steadily together in this room at that very moment.