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Immigration Quotes

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Immigration Quotes

“Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he's just a fresh face on a Taliban creed - the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.”

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Author:Maureen Dowd
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“You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. 'But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?' 'Oh, no,' they'll say, 'We couldn't possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We'd be driven down to a bare subsistence level.'”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“If you have free immigration, in the way we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited. The people who came benefited. Because nobody would come unless he, or his family, thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And, the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit.”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“But on the other hand, if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled to a pro-rata share of the pot, to take an extreme example, or even to a low level of the pie, than the effect of that situation is that free immigration, would mean a reduction of everybody to the same, uniform level. Of course, I'm exaggerating, it wouldn't go quite that far, but it would go in that direction. And it is that perception, that leads people to adopt what at first seems like inconsistent values.”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It's a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It's a good thing for the United States. It's a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it's only good so long as its illegal....”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“That's an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it's no good. Why? Because as long as it's illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don't qualify for social security, they don't qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don't qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They're hard workers, they're good workers, and they are clearly better off.”

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Author:Milton Friedman
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“We're not going to deputize a whole bunch of American citizens to start grabbing people or turning them in, in part because the ordinary American citizen may not know whether or not this person is illegal or not. But, you know, the notion that we're going to criminalize priests, for example, or doctors who are providing services to individuals, and throw them in jail for doing what their calling asks them to do, which is to provide help and service to people in need, I think that is a mistake. I think that's out of America's character.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“But I also want to give them a pathway so that they can earn citizenship, earn a legal status, start learning English, pay a significant fine, go to the back of the line, but they can then stay here and they can have the ability to enforce a minimum wage that they're paid, make sure the worker safety laws are available, make sure that they can join a union.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“If immigration reform passes, it'll be a big victory for sanity - nobody really believes it's healthy for a country to have millions and millions of undocumented noncitizens living in the shadows. But it'll also be a sign that the Republican Party has gotten tired of letting the Tea Party push it around.”

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Author:Gail Collins
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“Now it would be foolish and impossible to try and prevent the manufacture of films containing Canadian snow scenes; but there is no vestige of a doubt that when exhibited overseas they have a detrimental effect of immigration . . . Everything that can be done should be done, to encourage the circulation of screen pictures that demonstrate that snow scenes and dog-trains are but a minor phase in Canadian life.”

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Author:Charles Paul
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“The word conservative means discriminatory practically. It's a form of political discrimination. What do the Republicans run on? Against gay marriage and for a war that makes no sense. A war that was based on faulty intelligence. That's all they ever talk about. That and immigration. Another discriminatory argument for political gain.”

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Author:Charles Barkley
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“I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate: I'm a woman; I'll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate; I am an immigrant; I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, 'Yes, but are you gay?' and I said, 'Nobody's perfect.'”

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Author:Mazie Hirono
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“I could have sworn that they were originally Americans who maybe fled. Maybe they were illegal immigrants or something who got here, come here with an entitlement mentality, didn't like it, fled the scene because Republicans drove them out of the country in the last election, so they went over to Somalia and started pirating things. Because they have the attitude of entitlement just like a lot of American citizens do.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“So you have the ownership of the Phoenix Suns, the Los Suns, and whoever - "We don't want to offend the portion of our fan base. We want to appear to be politically correct. We want to appear to be all-inclusive" and so forth. Well, fine and dandy, but what happens when that contributes to the overall deterioration of the culture of this society?”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“Once the law, properly enacted, is routinely ignored, and ignored with the blessing and the promotion of the political class, then you have a breakdown of organized society. And there is nothing compassionate about what's happening to the people of Arizona. There is nothing compassionate about the violation of private property rights. There is nothing compassionate about the abuse of the taxpayer. There is nothing compassionate about the closing of schools and hospitals. Nothing at all compassionate about increased drug trafficking and crime. Nothing compassionate about that at all.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“We are specifically keeping the best and brightest out. It is the dumb and dumbest that we are letting in. Let me rephrase that: It is the ill-educated and the uneducated that we are letting in. The VCs, college graduates, PhDs, you name it, from all over the world, they are limited. The number of people of that caliber - severely limited and tightly controlled.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“You've got Hezbollah in Arizona. You've got Mexican drug cartels operating in Arizona. You've got the steady stream of illegals over the border, and you've got people being killed now in Arizona. They are at their wits' end. Enforcing the law is the overall thing, and if there are some civil rights violations, so be it. That's how desperate the situation is. They want the law anyway.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“Too rich to be relevant to the world's poor, [Europe] attracts immigration but cannot encourage imitation. Too passive regarding international security. Too self-satisfied, it acts as if its central political goal is to become the worlds most comfortable retirement home. Too set in its ways, it fears multicultural diversity”

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Book:Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power
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“But now, we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated - free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.”

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Book:The Post-American World: And The Rise Of The Rest
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“Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards - why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!”

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Author:Ann Coulter
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“I mean, these are kids that are getting on rail cars, riding the top of rail cars all the way up through Mexico. I mean, the danger that they're put in, the sexual assaults that are occurring - I mean, all of this is a great consternation, I think, for any of us. But when they come here and then they're dumped on our cities and our counties and our state is expected to pick up the costs, there's a point in time where you say, 'Quit giving these individuals incentives to come up and then be resettled in the United States'. That's the real issue for me.”

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Author:Rick Perry
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“[T]his is another reason why the children of illegals are sought for public schools: They'll put up with it. The children of illegals will put up with these dilapidated schools because for them, it is a huge step up. And these schools become little indoctrination centers for the children of illegal immigrants, as they are brainwashed and programmed to become Democrats as adults.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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