Quotessence
Home / Topics / Immigrants Quotes

Immigrants Quotes

Browse 1022 quotes about Immigrants.

Related topics

ImmigrationPeopleIllegalCountryIllegal ImmigrantsAmericaIfsThinkingNationsKnowsStatesWorldYearsChildrenWayMillionsShouldTrumpUnitedUnited StatesFirstsParentHas BeensWantLawCultureNeedsCommunityBordersKindUndocumented ImmigrantsCitiesGenerationsOpportunityDifferentFatherGovernmentJobsWellsCitizensKidsMadePolicyBornDoeHardPoorStoriesCitizenshipLongPoliticalPopulationSaidStillsWould BeFactsMotherNew YorkNumbersProblemRefugeeWhiteEuropeHelpingLittlesLooksRepublicanCareDreamGroupsImmigration ReformLanguageSpeakWarYoungBigsBlackGivingHomeImportantJewMovingNativeSchoolSonTodayTwoWorkersBenefitsClassCostEconomicFeelsIdeasIllegal ImmigrationMexicoWritingAliensBelieveBookmore

Immigrants Quotes

“Vote for the ones without voter i.d. In jails or in districts without parity. Vote for the idlers and despairers who wouldn't. Vote for the women and slaves who just couldn't. Vote for your immigrant ancestors all; They're pleading that you hear democracy's call. Bring friends! Cast your ballots! Just get out and vote! Let's keep our two-century-old-country afloat. We all must stand strong, and we all must make clear: "We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!”

WomenDemocracyStrengthCommitmentVoteVotingImmigrantsSlavesGet Out The Vote
Author:Shellen Lubin
Create image

“Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.”

AmericaLanguageDifferencesRaceUnited StatesHonestyCommunicationImmigrationImmigrantsNew York CityAmerican CultureNew YorkersEthnicityAmericansCultural DifferencesMelting PotImmigrant ExperienceChanging TimesShowing EmotionShowing The World Who You Are
Book:The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
Create image

“With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or Götterdämmerung), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.”

New YorkIndividualityImmigrantsConformity
Book:Rules of Civility
Create image

“Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.”

CompassionPovertyEthicsSocial JusticeImmigrantsVeganismFieldworkSlaughterhouse
Book:Animals and World Religions
Create image

“[Mexicali is] a town like an American town, like the American town just across the river, in fact, if you drained half the money out and let it sit awhile. See it in fast motion: Stores close, streets go dirty, entropy increases, dark moneymaking schemes multiply, people's dreams begin to be of leaving. This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops. If Mexico were as rich as we are, we'd only be getting their tourists.”

WealthTownsEqualityImmigrantsMexicoBorderMexicali
Book:The Braindead Megaphone
Create image

“Yes, and I totally forgot about the ottoman when we went to Iris's apartment. She didn't have the room for it, so she must've brought it here." Aunt Barb shook her head when they reached the ottoman. "An ottoman is a rich-people thing, when you think about it. It requires room. Space. I'm not rich by any means, but I have room for an ottoman. I assumed she did too." Aunt Barb sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking. I've been so insensitive, living in my own little world." "That's not true. You didn't know." "Maybe I didn't want to know, or maybe I should have known. Isn't that the height of insensitivity? That you just didn't know, because you couldn't imagine that people lived a different life from the one you do?" Aunt Bard kept shaking her head. "Isn't that the very definition of insensitivity? Of selfishness?”

WealthImmigrantsInsensitivity
Book:Betrayed
Create image

“The Dark Cloud Is the sadness and anger that you experience sometimes Is the number of friends you lost because of rape crimes Is the mood of women in Juarez, Mexico that are scared of walking down the street because they see the rapists around the corner Is the disrespect that you endured because you were a “foreigner”

WomenCrimeHuman RightsImmigrantsWomen S RightsRapeWomen S EmpowermentFemicideJuarezMexico Rape
Book:The Dark Cloud
Create image

“The reality is that most people of color learn early in America that we will have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and when we fail, no one will help us fall up. Immigrants, people of color, and women learn early that in order to make it in Amreeka you have to daft punk it through life. You have to do everything harder, better, faster, stronger, and smarter. Those are just the rules. The streets of Amreeka aren't paved with gold; they're paved with blood. As an immigrant, you'll take a beating but you'll be like Rick Ross and keep hustling. if Bob works eight hours a day, you work ten. If Samantha works late on Friday, then you work on Saturday. You go twenty feet just to get to ten feet.”

AmericaWomenHard WorkRacismInequalityImmigrantsEquityPeople Of Color
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
Create image

“Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I'm in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I'm the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home. Fine, my mother said, fine. But you must understand you are stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people. I looked away from her and a silence hung between us. I glanced down at my hands and weighed my mother’s words. Maybe you’re right, I replied, but stepping into a system doesn’t mean that the system becomes you. As I spoke, doubts flickered through my mind.”

PeopleImmigrantsSystemsBorderBorder PatrolMexicans
Book:The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border
Create image

“My chances of returning to America were small, and I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. There were also many things about America with which I was less enchanted, but why be negative?”

AmericaUnited StatesOptimismImmigrantsVietnamVietnameseVietnamese Americans
Book:The Sympathizer
Create image

“If this isn't the essential American story, I don't know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.”

LifeAmericaWorkFamilyComfortSafetyImmigrantsAmerican DreamFamily LifeAmericans
Book:The Braindead Megaphone
Create image

“Immigrants are supposed to be grateful. The narrative arc of immigration, in which one flees their own failing society to come to a better place, a country that was under no obligation to accept them but did, demands perpetual gratitude. And it exists, this gratitude, but the narrative makes no room for the many shapes it comes in, its many less straightforward forms. I harbor no ill will toward the immigrant who waves the miniature flag on the sides of the Independence Day parade, who says honestly and plainly: I love this country. But nor do I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don't love this country, don't love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different kind of life than luck has given me; I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

NationsFearGratitudeSafetyImmigrationPatriotismImmigrantsCountriesLove Of Country
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“Here in Oklahoma, I understand why--why humans would sit behind a glass window and look in the faces of families running away from danger and dead sheep, and not feel anything. They think we're bad people who will come and take their stuff. Like when I won the tetherball tournament at recess against Trevor and I wouldn't have if I hadn't been there at all.”

FearImmigrantsRefugeesOklahomaNativismTetherball
Book:Everything Sad Is Untrue
Create image

“My mom comes home exhausted every night. I have never seen her not exhausted. And also, I have never seen her not working. People in Oklahoma think this must be how refugees are--never sitting, never sleeping, like they have no knees and no dreams. Maybe people think that's just the way my mom talks, kinda panicky and chipper at the same time, like someone scared who doesn't want you to think she's scared--even maybe like you're the one she's scared of.”

FearImmigrantsMothersWorkingExhaustionTirednessBeing Tired
Book:Everything Sad Is Untrue
Create image

“Njegov je otac Ivo Lisica došao u Beč kao mlad zanatlija pa je tu radom i trudom, svojstvenom Hrvatima samo kad su u dijaspori, stvorio uspješan obrt, promijenio ime u Johann Fuchs, bez želje da se ikad vrati u naš tvrd i nezahvalan kraj, pa se tako i on Josef, rodio kao Fuchs, a ne kao Lisica, iako je to zapravo jedno te isto jer lisica ime mijenja, ali rep nikada, govorio je njegov ćaća Johann rođeni Ivo.”

HumorHuman NatureImmigrants
Book:Mladenka kostonoga
Create image

“On earth we are immigrants from Africa - out in space we'd be immigrants from Earth - in a different galaxy, we'd be immigrants from Milkyway. To put simply, in exploration of space, both external and internal, terms like immigrant and indigenous are meaningless. It's the heart that makes us indigenous or immigrant, not blood.”

HumanityDiversityHuman RaceImmigrantsInclusionMulticulturalismIndigenousCultural IntegrationImmigrant
Book:Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth
Create image

“To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if it were you on a plane departing from America forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country, the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds you’d never see again, your address and phone number you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes, your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these. To love a country as if I was my mother last spring hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.”

HomeAmericaPoetryUnited StatesPoemImmigrationImmigrantsCountriesEmigration
Book:How to Love a Country
Create image

“However they arrive, asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees reach with outstretched hands toward safer, more promising shores. Welcoming these wayfarers rekindles our humanity and heals our broken parts. Only within the cords that bind us together do we find answers to age-old questions about despair and enmity, fear and alienation, justice and hope.”

InspirationalJusticeCompassionImmigrantsRefugeesHumanities
Book:How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted
Create image

“He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered.”

JudgmentPrejudiceImmigrants
Book:White Teeth
Create image

“Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches. So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?”

ChildrenBrainStressTraumaImmigrantsHormonesUndocumented ImmigrantsUndocumentedBrain Trauma
Book:The Undocumented Americans
Create image

“Growing up, those of us who had to put a hyphen before "American" got scoffed at for sending money home to cousins in the old country or supporting aging parents here on green cards. But you used to shake your head and tell me how, back home, nobody put their parents into nursing homes or let their kin go hungry. The same thing lives on among Sami's queer and trans friends of color, he tells me, crowdfunding for medical care and housing online, or in the group chats he tells me about where friends help one another escape abusive relationship or housing crises with safety planning and couches to sleep on. We take care of one another because no one else will, eh says. But every time is a gamble.”

CareSupportImmigrantsHealthcare
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
Create image

“Yabancı Yarim (Sonnet 2701) Yabancı olarak doğmak ayıp değil, ama yabancı olarak ölmek en büyük lanettir. To be born as foreigner is normal, but to die as foreigner is animal. To salute the flag is just as animal as burning a flag, to obey the scripture blind is just as savage as burning a scripture. Delegational democracy is just as undignified as autocracy, blind abidance of law is just as primitive as anarchy. I look after the world as family, so the world may look after my family, when I'm not there - that's the kind of blind faith that actually makes a difference. To curse is animal, to console, human. If you must be blind, be blind in tolerance.”

DiversityEmpathyEqualityToleranceCivil RightsImmigrantsIntoleranceIntegrationPersecutionMulticulturalism
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
Create image

“The average colored person is ten times smarter, wiser, braver, and stronger, than most white people, not because we are genetically superior, but because, when an entire planet is rigged in favor of white colonials over the black, the brown, the latino, arab, indian, chinese, turk, and what not, we have to be exceptional to survive.”

GeniusDiversityEqualityCivil RightsInequalityImmigrantsWhite SupremacyEqual RightsWhite Privilege
Book:Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper
Create image

“If immigrants ain't real Americans, Neither is our revered Lady Liberty. She too came from a distant land, Yet today she is the American epitome... Though I belong to the whole wide world, Land of Lady Liberty is my home country. A nation's character isn't defined by rigidity, It is defined by a hearty unity in diversity.”

DiversityImmigrantsInclusionAmerican DreamPursuit Of HappinessAmericansNation BuildingCultural DiversityLand Of LibertyBuild Back Better
Book:Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World
Create image

“I'm about as American as chicken korma, apple pie, and chai, but even after forty years I'm still told to "go back." Where, exactly? In America, who (and what) are you when you're both "us" and "them"? When I'm a native but seen as a foreigner? When I'm a citizen but also seen as a perpetual suspect? When I'm your neighbor but also seen as an invader? When I'm a cultural creator but also seen as an eraser of white identity and European civilization?”

AmericaUnited StatesDiversityRacismImmigrantsDifferenceNativism
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
Create image

“The "model minority" myth is a dangerous drug manufactured and promoted by the Whiteness. It ignores all of our diverse experiences and narratives, eliminates all nuances, and lumps us with a convenient stereotype that always renders us as foreigners. It overlooks the discrimination, bias, and hate experienced by our communities and, perhaps worst of all, uses us, Asian and South Asian immigrants in particular, to launder systemic racism and discrimination against poor Black and Latino communities. Why can't they be "models" like us? Because they are lazy freeloaders who don't take personal responsibility, whine about racism, and refuse to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! The system turns us into enforcers and defenders of Whiteness, promising success and safety in exchange for loyalty and obedience. But it's an abusive, toxic relationship, in which the system has always betrayed us on a whim, without remorse or hesitation. Being a "model minority" doesn't live up to the hype.”

DiversityMinoritiesImmigrantsBlacksRace RelationsStereotypesWhitesAsiansSouth AsiansModel Minorities
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
Create image

“Home Country (The Sonnet) If immigrants ain't real Americans, Neither is our revered Lady Liberty. She too came from a distant land, Yet today she is the American epitome. If even this doesn't broaden your heart, What about the founders of our history! All of them were textbook immigrants, What white supremacists cuss as refugee. Any land that holds potential for ascension, Draws the repressed souls of humanity. Though I belong to the whole wide world, Land of Lady Liberty is my home country. A nation's character isn't defined by rigidity, It is defined by a hearty unity in diversity.”

DiversityImmigrantsInclusionPursuit Of HappinessSonnetAmericansNation BuildingCultural DiversityBook Of PoemsLand Of Liberty
Book:Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World
Create image

“As the nation diversifies, the homogeneous communities that people seem to prefer become increasingly fine grained. When immigrants become landlords, many rent only to people from their own country. Apartment buildings can become entirely Korean, Salvadoran, or Guatemalan, for example. Immigrant landlords are often unaware of non-discrimination laws, and do not hesitate to tell others they are not welcome. A lawyer for Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles noted that some managers rent only to people from a particular state of Mexico, adding, 'Our fair housing laws haven't even anticipated that.”

IdentityDiversityImmigrantsHomogeneity
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
Create image

“As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.”

TravelDiversityImmigrantsMulticulturalismGlobalizationRace RelationsMigrationDemographicsInternational CommunityMulticulturalismoCosmopolitanismEthnographyDemographyEmigrantsConfronting FearsConfronting ProblemsAcquisition Of KnowledgeConfronting ChangeLearning About The WorldConfronting Xenophobia
Book:The State of the World Atlas
Create image