Quotes on Immigrants

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.

Mum used to hide love letters from my boyfriends and put me down. Now I understand that she was a Polish immigrant forced to settle in Chicago. She was jealous of the freedom life gave me.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

For all the noise and anger that too often surrounds the immigration debate, America has nothing to fear from today's immigrants. They have come here for the same reason that families have always come here-for the hope that in America, they could build a better life for themselves and their families. Like the waves of immigrants that came before them and the Hispanic Americans whose families have been here for generations, the recent arrival of Latino immigrants will only enrich our country.

As legal residents, immigrants would contribute more in taxes, spend more at our businesses, start companies of their own and create more jobs. Immigration is not a problem for us to solve but an opportunity for America to seize.

We can either be governed by fear - fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, call the press the enemy of the people, tear kids away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border - or we can be governed by our ambitions and our aspirations and our desire to make the most out of all of us. And that's America at its best.

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

Immigrants have been coming to our shores for generations to live the dream that is America. They wanted better for their children than for themselves. That remains the dream of all of us, and in this country, we have seen time and again that that dream is achievable.

We focus so much on how immigrants can change America that we forget that America has always changed immigrants even more.

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.

The U.S. immigration laws are bad - really, really bad. I'd say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government's name.

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

Immigrants provide skills that we simply cannot afford to do without. They have contributed hugely to Britain's success.

Immigration, a lexicon. You're a 'migrant' when you're very poor; 'immigrant' when you're not so poor; and 'expat' when you're rich.

When I was 10 years old, my neighbor died in front of me of an asthma attack, because he and his family were undocumented immigrants and his grandmother was afraid of what would happen if they called an ambulance for help.

I'm an entrepreneur trying to let the American people know that it's not immigrants that are causing economic problems, it is the fact that our economy is advancing in ways that is making human labor less and less essential.

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

Where we are as a nation is due to having an openness to the people of the world. It's incredibly important. I firmly believe that we cannot shut our borders to immigrants. I think a fair and just immigration policy is good for our country and good for our society.