507 Quotes About Immigration

All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.

Illegal immigrants are to immigration what shoplifters are to shopping.

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.

Unless US citizens acknowledge and understand their country's imperial past, they will not be able to understand its present or future. Much of the recent and current Hispanic resettlement of parts of the United States is a consequence of empire.... Countercolonization follows colonization, and the waves of migrants always flow back like returning tides.

He was home. In an environment where he felt loved and comfortable in a way not possible in the United States. And yet, he no longer fit in. He loved living in America, but knew that there, too, he didn't quite fit. It was the classic immigrant dilemma.

At Harvard, the strong and savvy and confident thrived, while the nice or shy or quaintly moral were just bit players. In Ysleta, you believed in God because you were poor and needed something to hold on to. At Harvard, you believed in your good luck or bad luck, in all-nighters, in your political savvy.

He had put them [his family] first by coming home [to India] and the irony was that they had put him first by arranging this marriage. He had walked into it with his eyes open. But his eyes had been open too long in the West and by the time he adjusted his vision to India, it was too late.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell?