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Immigration Quotes

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Immigration Quotes

“Being misplaced, even by choice, is so very difficult on our body and soul. In my case, I still long for what, once, I took for granted— That immediacy of culture and belonging. And for those who did not choose — So many are forced to be misplaced in our world today! Some are misplaced even in the lands that they were born on, striped away by cultural warfare, greed and ignorance. I wish for us to know this void in each other— To witness it for one another so we would be able to imagine a new, WHOLE, body.”

ImmigrationDislocationMisplaceBeloning
Book:Spiritual Misfits: Collaboration and Belonging in a Divisive World
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“Il nous appartient de veiller tous ensemble à ce que notre société reste une société dont nous soyons fiers : pas cette société des sans-papiers, des expulsions, des soupçons à l'égard des immigrés, pas cette société où l'on remet en cause les retraites, les acquis de la Sécurité sociale, pas cette société où les médias sont entre les mains des nantis, toutes choses que nous aurions refusé de cautionner si nous avions été les véritables héritiers du Conseil National de la Résistance.”

ImmigrationSociété
Book:Indignez-vous !
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“A new awareness of the integral role that social networks play in long-distance migration goes beyond traditional ‘rational-choice and decision-making models’ drawn from classical economics that content themselves with explaining migration as the outcome of a ‘cost-benefit analysis of the most favorable destination.’ According to recent theory, something more than the push and pull of differential labor markets, hunger, or the search for religious freedom sends people into long-distance emigration. Voluntary migrations do not depend merely on autonomous individuals weighing the costs and benefits of uprooting themselves. Rather, social networks and relationships bind uprooted people on to another like the links in a chain. ‘Chain migration’ is sustained from within, and indeed ‘can become self-perpetuating,’ as ‘each act of migration itself creates the social structure needed to sustain’ further migration. News of another’s good fortune in a distance place, information about unforeseen opportunities, invitations to follow in another’s migratory footsteps, or a familial obligation to do so—the long reach of social relations such as these are the incentive that draws people into exile in other lands and accounts for the enormous scale of some systems of international migration.”

SlaveryImmigrationSocial RelationsChain MigrationVoluntary Migration
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them. Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.”

FeminismImmigrationWoman S Rights
Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“I am a patchwork American, strung together by DNA strands from distant places. Meant to exist in the margins. These are my labels, my unshakeable question marks. Belonging to no one, with nowhere to belong. I am still struggling to understand where I fall, where I fit. Am I invasive?”

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Book:Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South
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“After all, the vine is still wrapped around the outside of her home, rows of large sheets of arresting leaves embracing the columns of her front porch, both spilling inside and trailing out to the waiting world beyond her doorstep.”

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Book:Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South
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“Judge Appleton White criticized the New England elite for not helping these new immigrants. He thought we should be educating them. These immigrants, like any new wave of immigrants, I believe, represent the values of hard work and self-reliance that founded this country. From White’s memoir, I made the connection in my lecture to the scapegoating that Latin American immigrants face today. This is an old, cyclical story in which people make it here and then they decide to close the doors behind them. The story is repeated whether you’re English, Irish, Jewish, or Latin American immigrants. But these new immigrants, whoever they are, should remind those already here, what it took to make it in America, what desire burned in these immigrants to never give up, and what kind of hope these newcomers had, despite the dangers. These are the best American values. I wanted to write about the new pilgrims of this country — nobody’s children. These people—like Turi, Molly, and Arnulfo—who represent the best values of this country. The values of trying to make it on your own. The values of fighting for your place. The values of helping each other. These are the basic values that started this country and served as its foundation. But too often we have forgotten them, and where these values came from. And this working to become American, to find your place, instead of assuming your privileged place, this is Aristotle through and through. For Aristotle, you need to work and to act to find meaning in the idea of the good. An American who is growing fat and happy in Dallas, or anywhere else, will not have that practical, in-the-trenches Aristotelian understanding of what it takes to belong after a long struggle, like a new immigrant.”

ImmigrationImmigrantsTexasNovelsDystopiaEl Paso TexasNobody S Pilgrims
Book:Nobody's Pilgrims
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“Men stumbled away toward illusions in the brutal light. Men thought they were home, walking into their front doors, hugging their wives, making love. Still they walked. Men were swimming. Men were killing Mendez. Men were on the beach, collecting shells and watching their children splash. Their women stood naked before them, soft bellies, hands on ribs, breasts. Men hid their faces from a furious God. And they walked. A voice was heard in the light-shatter, saying “He’s going to die. Lay him down here and let him die. Keep walking.” The desert, out of focus and suddenly terribly sharp, burst white and yellow in their eyes. It tilted. Elongated. It was at an impossible angle! It tipped up towards the sun, and if they didn’t crawl, they would slide right off it and fall forever. It made noise: there were engines beneath the desert. It made evil grinding noises, mechanical humming. No, it was insectile, the screech of hunger and derision. The devils were under the rocks, spitting insults. The black head laughed. I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth. No, it did not fucking laugh—- it was silent as a graveyard out there. Just the crunch and slide, crunch and slide, of endless hopeless footsteps. Hundreds of footsteps.”

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Book:The Devil's Highway: A True Story
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“What is important about immigration is how immigrants arrived and what the individual immigrants do with their lives after arriving. Do they open a restaurant or other business, do they provide for their family, do they integrate into the larger community - in essence, do they become proud Americans? Or do they try their hardest to stay "economic migrants" or "hyphenated-Americans"? Or, at worst, do they attempt to convert America into the countries from which they escaped?”

ImmigrationImmigrantsAmericansImmigrant ExperienceBalkanizationHyphenated IdentitiesEconomic Migrants
Author:Mike Klepper
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“[...] the "explosion" of Mexicans crossing the border without permission was entirely predictable. It was the inevitable consequence of of policies that slashed opportunities to migrate legally without addressing the forces pushing and pulling people across the line. People who had lived their lives across two countries legally and peacefully for decades were suddenly redefined as invaders and threats. The "Illegal immigrant" was thus invented in Washington, D.C., conjured out of contradiction.”

PoliticsUnited StatesImmigrationBordersMexicoImmigration Issues
Book:The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story
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“Certains penseurs qui ne sont pas tous de droite, soutiennent que, lorsque les inégalités économiques ont pour origine des choix judicieux, le talent naturel, l'effort ou le mérite personnel, elles ne sont pas moralement injustifiées. Ils distinguent les personnes qui sont pauvres parce qu'elles sont victimes de la pure malchance, et celles qui le deviennent en raison de leurs choix de vie défectueux. D'après eux, les secondes devraient, en toute justice, assumer personnellement les conséquences de leurs choix au lieu d'en faire porter le poids sur la «société». Bref, ils glorifient la responsabilité individuelle quand ils s'attaquent aux prétendus «assistés». Cependant, ce sont souvent les mêmes qui, à droite comme à gauche, refusent l'ouverture des frontières et contestent le droit de chacun d'aller s'installer là où les chances d'avoir une vie meilleure sont plus élevées. Ces prises de position restrictives sont en contradiction totale avec les grands principes avancés pour blâmer les «assistés»: glorification de l'esprit d'initiative et du désir de s'en sortir, insistance sur la responsabilité individuelle dans la situation économique.”

ImmigrationéConomiePauvretéInégalités
Book:L'État nous rend-il meilleurs ?
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“I had the foolish idea that we should test for desirable and useful traits so that we could assemble ideally balanced teams to the colonies. [...] It's like those foolish attempts to control immigration to America based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically is "descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there.”

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Book:Ender in Exile
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“Hardin, G. (1982). "Discriminating Altruisms". Zygon. 17 (2): 163–186. "Universalism" is altruism practiced "without discrimination" of kinship, acquaintanceship, shared values, or propinquity in time or space… To people who accept the idea of biological evolution from amoeba to man, the vision of social evolution from egoism to universalism may seem plausible. In fact, however, the last step is impossible… Let us see why. In imagination, picture a world in which social evolution has gone no further than egoism or individualism. When familialism appears on the scene, what accounts for its persistence? It must be that the costs of the sacrifices individuals make for their relatives are more than paid for by the gains realized through family solidarity... The argument that accounts for the step to familialism serves equally well for each succeeding step--except for the last. Why the difference? Because the One World created by universalism has--by definition--no competitive base to support it… [Universalism] cannot survive in competition with discrimination." … "[W]e must not forget that for three billion years; biological evolution has been powered by discrimination. Even mere survival in the absence of evolutionary change depends on discrimination. If universalists now have their way, discrimination will be abandoned. Even the most modest impulse toward conservatism should cause us to question the wisdom of abandoning a principle that has worked so well for billions of years. It is a tragic irony that discrimination has produced a species (homo sapiens) that now proposes to abandon the principle responsible for its rise to greatness." It is to the advantage of non-Europeans, virtually all of whom retain their cohesion as distinctive, discriminating groups, to exploit the economic wealth and social order of the West, benefits many demonstrably cannot create for themselves. When this cohesive drive is placed in competition with self-sacrificing Western altruism, there can be only one outcome. In the near term, Europeans will be displaced by groups acting in their own self-interest. In the long run, biological destruction awaits us. Since those who displace us do not, by definition, maintain our moral standards -- for if they did, they would not be replacing us -- our flawed moral system will vanish with us.”

ImmigrationAltruismKin SelectionGroup EvolutionGreat Replacement
Author:Garrett Hardin
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“The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. But the situation changed dramatically after1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate, while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate. To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to nonwhites. Certain minorities and their spokespersons—with long memories of disgraceful treatment by the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society—were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission, “our community is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or levelling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.” And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: “what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed.” During the twenty-six years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era. Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders—proud and protective of their claim to the moral high ground—may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at “outsiders,” “others,” or “people of color” as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.”

ImmigrationOverpopulationEthnic PoliticsZero Population Growth
Author:Roy Beck
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“Multiculturalism denies historical and scientific evidence that people differ in important biological and cultural ways that makes their assimilation into host countries problematic. It is also extreme in the viciousness with which it attacks those who differ on this issue. These attacks are accompanied by a very generalized and one-sided denigration of Western traditions and Western accomplishments, and claims that a collective guilt should be assumed by all Europeans (whites) for the sins of their forebears. In the semireligious formulation of this view, expiation of these sins can only come through an absolute benevolence toward the poor of the world whose suffering is claimed to be the result of the white race and its depredations. In practical terms this can only be accomplished through aid to Third World peoples and generous immigration policies that allow large numbers of people to escape the poverty of the Third World.”

ImmigrationMulticulturalismWestern CivilizationWhite RaceCollective Guilt
Book:The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature
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“I have a complicated relationship with airports. A space that once held promise, the gateway to summer vacations and adventure, now makes my heart race a little faster, beat a little harder. A seemingly random red strip of tape on the ground, a dated stamp and ink pad, a place of birth forever etched on a passport, and a somber uniformed officer determine our future, our lives.... I wonder what new family is anxiously pacing back there, sleep-deprived and confused, hoping for that stamp to hit the ink, hoping to step into a new life.”

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Book:Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories
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“Wikipedia: Reconquista (Mexico) A prominent advocate of Reconquista was the Chicano activist and adjunct professor Charles Truxillo (1953–2015) of the University of New Mexico (UNM). He envisioned a sovereign Hispanic nation, the República del Norte (Republic of the North), which would encompass Northern Mexico, Baja California, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He supported the secession of US Southwest to form an independent Chicano nation and argued that the Articles of Confederation gave individual states full sovereignty, uncluding the legal right to secede. Truxillo, who taught at UNM's Chicano Studies Program on a yearly contract, suggested in an interview, "Native-born American Hispanics feel like strangers in their own land." He said, "We remain subordinated. We have a negative image of our own culture, created by the media. Self-loathing is a terrible form of oppression. The long history of oppression and subordination has to end" and that on both sides of the US–Mexico border "there is a growing fusion, a reviving of connections.... Southwest Chicanos and Norteño Mexicanos are becoming one people again." Truxillo stated that Hispanics who achieved positions of power or otherwise were "enjoying the benefits of assimilation" are most likely to oppose a new nation and explained: There will be the negative reaction, the tortured response of someone who thinks, "Give me a break. I just want to go to Wal-Mart." But the idea will seep into their consciousness, and cause an internal crisis, a pain of conscience, an internal dialogue as they ask themselves: "Who am I in this system?" Truxillo believed that the República del Norte would be brought into existence by "any means necessary" but that it would be formed by probably not civil war but the electoral pressure of the region's future majority Hispanic population. Truxillo added that he believed it was his duty to help develop a "cadre of intellectuals" to think about how the new state could become a reality.”

ImmigrationHispanicsAztlanReconquistaIrredentism
Author:Charles Truxillo
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“Wikipedia: Plan of San Diego The Plan of San Diego (Spanish: Plan de San Diego) was drafted in San Diego, Texas, in 1915 by a group of unidentified Mexican and Tejano rebels who hoped to secede Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Texas from the United States and create a racial utopia for Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans. The plan called for the execution of all white men over the age of sixteen. The goal of the plan is debated. The plan stated a supposed "attempt to overthrow the government in the Southern United States." However, some theories state that the true goal of the plan was to create the conditions to force the US to support one of the factions of the Mexican Revolution, as eventually occurred. The plan called for the killing of all adult white American men in the Southwestern states and the "return of land to Mexicans." It was, however, exposed before it could be fully executed. Although there was no uprising, there were raids into Texas that began in July 1915. The raids were countered by Texas Rangers, the U.S. Army and local self-defense groups. In total, 30 raids into Texas destroyed large amounts of property and killed 21 Americans. It is not known who was responsible for drafting the Plan of San Diego, but there are theories that Mexican revolutionary leaders helped to sponsor it.”

ImmigrationSecessionHispanicsAztlanMexican Irredentism
Author:Wikipedia Contributors
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“The Civil War was ABOUT something. It was fought FOR something. And—let us never for a moment forget it—it WON something. Under everything else, the war was about Negro slavery. It was fought for freedom—and if ever anything was worth fighting a war for, freedom was and is the cause. . . . And that is why the Civil War is worth remembering. It gave us a broader freedom, and it laid upon us the obligation to live up to that freedom and to make it unlimited, for everybody. Freedom is indivisible. Winning it for the Negro, we won it also for all of the people who then were or ever would become Americans—for the man who has fled from oppression, misery and discrimination overseas as well as for the fugitive from the American slave pen and auction block. We can never have, permanently, a second-class citizenship in this country; because of the Civil War, we are no longer that kind of country. We might just as well stop trying to find a comfortable middle ground between the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. There simply isn't any such place.”

FreedomImmigrationAmerican Civil WarRefugeesSecond Class Citizen
Book:The Meaning of the Civil War: An Address Delivered at the Chicago Historical Society, April 12, 1961
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“The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.”

PeopleValuesCultureImmigrationIntegrationAnti Immigration
Author:Enoch Powell
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“Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. [Quoting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s remarks at the signing ceremony of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island in New York.]”

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Book:One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965
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“Refugees are not a monolith. Each journey is unique. Some arrive with dreams and aspirations; others carry the heavy burdens of trauma they long to escape. Refugees share the same ambitions, fears, and flaws as anyone else. Yet, when we label them, we strip away their humanity.”

Inspirational QuotesMotivational QuotesTraumaImmigrationImmigrantsHope QuotesHumanity QuotesStruggles QuotesRefugeesHardship Quotes
Book:Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled
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“All white nations now have sub-replacement fertility and almost all are receiving large numbers of non-white immigrants. Many say this should not be a cause for concern. Charles A. Price, Australia’s senior demographer, described in 2000 the change his country was going through: “Some people think that a steady replacement of Anglo-Celts by other ethnic groups is highly desirable. . . . Personally, [replacement] does not worry me . . . .” Jozef Ritzen, Dutch Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, explained that “this is the trend worldwide. The white race will in the long term become extinct. . . . Apparently we are happy with this development.” Tim Wise is a white person who has lectured on the evils of racism on more than 600 college campuses, and the Utne Reader named him one of “25 visionaries who are changing your world.” In an open letter to white American conservatives, he looked forward to the day when whites will be outnumbered by other races: 'We just have to be patient. And wait for your hearts to stop beating. And stop they will. And for some of you, real damned soon truth be told. Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of your demise is beautiful.”

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Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“Building bridges takes us further than building walls.”

ReligionHateRaceRacismHatredPrejudiceToleranceImmigrationDiscriminationLgbtBigotryBiasLgbtqRace RelationsRacism In AmericaGay RightsRace And Racism In AmericaBiasedLgbtqiaRacism QuotesBiasesReligion SpiritualityPrejudicesReligion And PhilosophyReligious ToleranceLgbt QuotesLgbt RightsDiscrimination QuotesBigotTolerance QuotesRacism QuoteBuilding BridgesDiscriminatingBigotedPrejudicedBuilding Bridges QuotesBuilding Bridges Not Walls
Author:DaShanne Stokes
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“More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.”

PeaceDemocracyProsperityImmigrationImmigrantsInternational RelationsMigrationRefugeesMigrants
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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