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Migration Quotes

Browse 240 quotes about Migration.

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Migration Quotes

“Notably, during this era, the notion of illegal immigration did not conjure the same political and legal consequences that it would after 1965 [...] The southern border of the United States was not militarized or guarded in the manner it would become in the late twentieth century, and seasonal, uncapped migration from Mexico was an accepted and expected labor reality.”

LaborMexicoMigrationMigrantBorder CrossingMigrant Laborers
Book:The New Immigration Federalism
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“Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided”

WaterSurvivalIndiaTrainPakistanMigrationPartitionDelhiRiotsJhelum
Book:Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
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“There's something that happens to the newly displaced. Whatever power or choice that was stripped away in the process of reluctantly leaving one's homeland is fervently reclaimed in other situations, and honing in on the best spot to sit and enjoy a meal, be it at a restaurant or a lakeside, takes on the utmost importance. . . . If nothing else, we were always prepared for any and all circumstances and with plenty of provisions to see us through.”

ImmigrationIranIranianAssimilationMigrationPersianDiaspora
Book:Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories
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“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

ImmigrationMigrationDeportationMigrant Crisis
Author:Pope Francis
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“Perhaps I should go back a few years earlier. My parents, who travelled from Odessa, the Russian city on the Black Sea, shortly before the 1914 war, were part of a vast migration of Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression to the dream of America that obsessed poor men all over Europe. The tailors thought of it as a place where people had, maybe, three, four different suits to wear. Glaziers grew dizzy with excitement reckoning up the number of windows in even one little skyscraper. Cobblers counted twelve million feet, a shoe on each. There was gold in the streets for all trades; a meat dinner every single day. And Freedom. That was not something to be sneezed at, either. But my parents never got to America.”

MigrationShtetl
Book:Journey through a Small Planet
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“A bracing wind swirls about the boy and alights gently upon his shoulder to gape frightfully at droplets of fate joined infirmly to a sweep of atmospheric and lunar forces far beyond their capabilities to resist. He takes a long, deep breath of air—cleansed through its migration—and he closes his eyes. Scattered waves roll back in to the sea.”

DestinyFateOceanBreatheMigrationAtmosphericLunarDon T Forget To Breathe
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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“There are an estimated 258 million migrants around the world, and many of us are migrating to countries that previously colonized and imperialized us. We have a human right to move, and governments should serve that right, not limit it. The unprecedented movement of people - what some call a "global migration crisis" - is, in reality, a natural progression of history. Yes, we are here because we believe in the promise of the American Dream - the search for a better life, the challenge of dreaming big. But we are also here because you were there - the cost of American imperialism and globalization, the impact of economic policies and political decisions.”

ColonialismImperialismGlobalizationMigrationColonizationMigrantsMigrant CrisisGlobal MigrateGlobal Migration
Book:Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
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“Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while. “What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked him. “You mean the afterlife?” “No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go black, like a phone screen turning off? Or do you slip into something strange in the middle, like when you’re falling asleep, and you’re both here and there?” Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw Nadia seeing him, so intent on his answer, and he said, “I think it would be like falling asleep. You’d dream before you were gone.”

Magical RealismMigrationPostcolonial Literature
Book:Exit West
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“De toename van het aantal niet-westerse vreemdelingen – meer specifiek van de moslims onder hen – leidt in heel Europa tot de wijd verspreide perceptie dat het er veel meer zijn dan er in werkelijkheid zijn. Het onderzoeksbureau Ipsos Mori publiceert jaarlijks de zogenaamde Index of Ignorance. Daaruit blijkt dat mensen behoorlijk last hebben om een aantal fenomenen die typisch zijn voor de postmoderniteit correct in te schatten. Op de vraag hoeveel immigranten er in hun land zijn antwoorden Italianen dat het om 30 procent gaat, terwijl het er slechts 7 procent zijn. (Met “migranten” bedoelen de onderzoekers personen met een vreemde nationaliteit, niet de etnische afkomst.) De Amerikanen zitten er 19 procent naast: ze denken dat het om 32 procent gaat terwijl het er in werkelijkheid slechts 13 procent zijn. Van de ondervraagden uit 14 landen zitten de Belgen er als derde het verst naast. In België hadden op 1 januari 2015 1,26 miljoen of 11,20 procent van de bevolking een vreemde nationaliteit (dus niet verwarren met de etnische herkomst, want dan gaat het om 1,8 miljoen of 16 procent van de bevolking). De ondervraagde Belgen dachten dat het om 29 procent ging en zaten er dus bijna 18 procent naast. Australiërs en Zweden zaten het minst fout, maar toch ook met een overschatting van 7 procent. Op de vraag hoeveel procent moslims er in hun land zijn zaten de Belgen er het verst naast. Ze dachten dat het om 29 procent ging, terwijl het er in werkelijkheid net geen 5 procent zijn, een fout van 24 procent. De Fransen maakten een fout van 23 procent, de Britten en Italianen van 16 procent, de Amerikanen van 14 procent. Minst slecht scoorden de Polen met een overschatting van 5 procent en de Japanners met een overschatting van 4 procent. De onderzoekers concludeerden: “People (…) massively overestimate the proportion of Muslims.”

IslamMigrationJean Pierre Van RossemMigratieMigrantenVreemdelingenMoslim MigrantenMoslimsVluchtelingenIslamitische Migranten
Author:Jean Pierre Van Rossem
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“Always, from the first time he went there to see Eros and the lights, that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is beginning and the ending of the world. Every time he go there, he have the same feeling like when he see it the first night, drink coca-cola, any time is guinness time, bovril and the fireworks, a million flashing lights, gay laughter, the wide doors of theatres, the huge posters, everready batteries, rich people going into tall hotels, people going to the theatre, people sitting and standing and walking and talking and laughing and buses and cars and Galahad Esquire, in all this, standing there in the big city, in London. Oh Lord.”

OverwhelmedMigrationLove Of LifePiccadilly CircusLove Of London
Book:The Lonely Londoners
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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.”

ImmigrationIranAirportsMigrationPersianDiasporaDiaspora Minority
Book:Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories
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“Gradually the idea for a book began to take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of 'Anatomy of Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a room. The argument, roughly, was as follows: that in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central nervous system; and, that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, all the great teachers - Buddha, Lao-tse, St Francis - had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.”

MigrationNomadismHuman Essence
Book:Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989
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“The gyrfalcon Dan flew that day was a bird of the year who was just learning to hunt. When he brought her out, I shook my head at the size of her. She was massive; Dan had aptly named her Jabba the Hut. As with all falcons, female gyrfalcons are a third larger than the males. ... She thought that she was a person and treated Dan as her mate.This gave new meaning to the term "henpecked.”

NatureIdentityMigrationExistential AngstBirds Of PreyFalcons
Book:The Rites of Autumn
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“After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment. The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds. They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.”

HateRacismPrejudiceSouthAfrican AmericansBlacksMigrationNorthGreat Migration
Book:Letter to My Daughter
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“Gilbert sucked on his teeth to return this man’s scorn. “You know what your trouble is, man?” he said. “Your white skin. You think it makes you better than me. You think it give you the right to lord it over a black man. But you know what it make you? You wan’ know what your white skin make you, man? It make you white. That is all, man. White. […] listen to me, man, we both just finish fighting a war—a bloody war—for the better world we wan’ see. And on the same side—you and me. […] But still, after all that we suffer together, you wan’ tell me I am worthless and you are not.”

HateRacismPrejudiceDiscriminationMigration
Book:Small Island
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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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“I have often been reminded of the wild duck that came down on migration into a barnyard and liked it so well that he stayed there. In the fall his erstwhile companions passed overhead and his first impulse was to rise and join them, but he had fed too well and could rise no higher than the eaves of the barn. The day came when his old fellow travelers could pass overhead without his even hearing their call. I have seen men and women who once mounted up with wings like eagles but are now content to live in the barnyard of this world.”

MenWorldFirstsWellsChristianFallThis WorldHigherMen And WomenFellowsWingsHearingChristian InspirationalImpulseFedsCompanionDucksTravelerEaglesMigrationOverheadBarnsFellow Travelers
Author:Vance Havner
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“If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems.”

IfsProblemWaterNaturalLandSecurityHabitConflictMajorsMassResourcesNegativeCrisisClimateClimate ChangeProductionsFarmsRefugeeRecipesScarceNatural ResourcesDisruptionMigrationRefugee CrisisFood ProductionScarce Resources
Author:Michael Franti
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“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”

LyingMemoriesForgetSilenceGenerationsSpecialDangerFlowHolesStorytellingOccasionsDaily LifeTapeGrandparentGrandchildrenExileCasualMigrationDiasporaSpecial Occasion
Book:What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)
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