Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm the child of immigrants, and there was always a garage filled with food, just in case, and you kept money under the mattress. You were always prepared, because you couldn't trust that you were being taken care of. So that translated into my life into a lot of opportunity hoarding.
Where I grew up, in Aldgate, east London, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, I saw lots that was real - the bankers with their briefcases, the man next door with five wives, the illegal immigrants in Flat 5. I'm from a world you rarely see on screen, and I want to show it off.
Trump is more performance artist than zealot. But he's finding enemies everywhere, whether they are judges of Mexican ancestry, parents of those killed in war, the current president, or children of immigrants. Whether or not he has a sense of decency, he is in grave danger of losing it.
When I was a kid, my grandparents were Greek immigrants on my father's side. My grandfather used to read me Greek myths, in which there are a great many goddesses and stories of strong women. And I was entranced by them. Then I started reading science fiction very young, and I loved it.
I mean, we must act with intelligence. We must work on this framework, so that immigration becomes an asset to both nations. Believe me, what - just the Mayor Bloomberg said here in New York, that this city would be stopped, totally stopped if it were not by the immigrants working here.
I know firsthand that immigrants make enormous contributions to our nation, but I also know that we need to secure our borders and make sure that those who came here illegally wait their turn, pay a fine and any unpaid taxes, and pass a criminal background check before becoming citizens.
Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination on a platform of 'self-deportation' for illegal immigrants - and the Obama team never let Hispanics forget it. The Obama campaign also branded Republicans with Romney's ill-chosen words about 47 percent of Americans as the party of uncaring millionaires.
I believe it could very well be unconstitutional to ban people. We are a country of immigrants, but we have to know who's coming in. They need to come in legally. And we need to be sure that we have been able to have them satisfy the criteria that we set for them to come into our country.
We have over 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. And we simply cannot sustain it. It costs us a tremendous amount of money of course in health care, in education, and then, on top of it all, in incarceration. And the federal government doesn't reimburse us on any of these things.
The vast majority of immigrants - regardless of the conditions of war and poverty that may wrack their home countries - come and contribute to their new home country: building our roads, caring for our homes, children, and elders, and serving as doctors, lawyers, employers, and innovators.
We understand what President Trump means when he talks about taking the country back. He does not see America as a country of people from diverse backgrounds united around values of freedom and respect. In his 'American carnage' version of our country, immigrants and refugees are a threat.
The story of undocumented immigrants in this country is not just about undocumented immigrants. It's about the country as a whole, and it's about us being able to tell the truth about where we are with this issue because we haven't been telling the truth about where we are with this issue.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
We must enforce the laws we have on the books, secure our borders, and deny special benefits to illegal immigrants such as in-state tuition rates. This approach is best for American citizens and is fair to those who have taken the time and effort to go through the legal immigration process.
There will always be frictions when you have a foreign worker population or immigrant population in the country, and we have to manage that, and that requires good behaviour and adjustment both on the part of the foreign workers and the immigrants as well as on the part of the Singaporeans.
We are a city that is a sanctuary city. We have immigrants from all over the world who call Chicago their home. They'll continue to do that, and we're going to continue to make sure that this is truly a welcoming community for those immigrants and we want them to come to the city of Chicago.
If an immigrant comes here, and they're willing to create jobs, and they're willing to contribute to our economy, we have to make it easier for the kinds of immigrants we want, because that is the past of America; that's our greatness, and that will continue to be our greatness in the future.
I do believe that people hire immigrants, legal and illegal immigrants, to do certain jobs that maybe possibly could go to American citizens, and that's unfortunate. If they're here legally, I think it's OK. If they're here illegally, then they ought not be taking jobs from American citizens.
Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.
One nice thing about the benefit of long experience with la frontera is that we in Texas don't have to run around getting all hysterical about immigrants. The border is porous. When you want cheap labor, you open it up; when you don't, you shut it down. It works to our benefit - it always has.
When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.
We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.
In 2009, I edited, under the aegis of the Library of America, an anthology called 'Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today.' It featured immigrants from different backgrounds, from black slaves like Phillis Wheatley to Yiddish-language speakers like Henry Roth.
Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.
To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.
For the undocumented immigrants, the big priority is just to get out from the shadows, be able to get a driver's license, buy an airplane ticket and stop worrying about sudden deportation. But for the country as a whole, it's crucial that everybody have a citizen's stake in the nation's welfare.
Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children.
I think we've learned that the S.B.A. plays a critical role in providing access and opportunity when the market is not providing that access. We help banks get that money out into the hands of important and viable businesses, particularly those owned by minorities, women, immigrants and veterans.
With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn't feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.
Doing difficult things like passing marriage equality, passing the Dream Act, doing common sense things that allow new American immigrants to fully participate, pay their taxes, play by the rules and take care of their families. That's the inclusive America that I believe all of us want to move to.
The U.S. has long characterized Haitian immigrants as criminals. This tradition began in 1963 when the first boat of Haitians seeking political asylum was summarily rejected by U.S. immigration officials, while at the same time the U.S. admitted thousands of Cubans as refugees and political asylees.
Vice President Joe Biden believes that illegal immigrants are citizens. Obama believes that some Americans who join Islamist groups are citizens, while others are not. Who is an American? Whomever the executive branch deems an American. Who isn't? It depends on whether Obama ate his Wheaties or not.
I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.
The only way that we can disincentivize Central American immigrants from illegally entering our country is if we change our policies, tweak our laws, cut the bureaucratic red tape and immediately send them back to their countries of origin. Until then, this self-imposed crisis will continue to worsen.
Our country's history is a generation-spanning journey to effectuate the notion that 'all men are created equal' for the members of our ever-expanding national family: women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, gays and lesbians, the disabled, immigrants, and refugees.
Plenty of people are intrigued by their family history. Growing up as the son of West Indian immigrants who moved to London in the 1950s and 60s, I was especially fascinated by anecdotes about the lives of my Guyanese relatives, which seemed a million miles away from Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate.
We're all born into whatever citizenship, circumstances, or class we happen to be born into. Immigrants and so many people in the working class work so hard every day for nickels and pennies and scraps to just barely get by and then realize that this precious life has been completely drained out of us.
Obama has a strong record on immigration enforcement, outdoing both Republican and Democratic predecessors. He has deported over 1 million immigrants, focusing on those with criminal records. As documented by many nonpartisan sources, by 2011, Obama had reduced illegal immigration crossings to net zero.
There's no neutral language about travel. Either travel is described in ways that make it sound kind of shallow or just glossy or silly or a way for rich people to spend their time; or else travel is often described in quite derogatory ways, you know, like immigrants swarming across borders, for instance.
Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed one of the finest personal libraries in New England.
All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.
Trump, of course, has been very wrong in the past about important issues such as President Barack Obama's place of birth and Mexican immigrants, but the Republican frontrunner is correct in saying that former Republican President George W. Bush did not keep the country safe during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
There's a big difference between France and the U.S. In the U.S., immigrants must work to live. In France, they're taken care of by public finances. In France, there are millions of unemployed people already. We cannot house them, give them health care, education... finance people who keep coming and coming.
So, where are the robots? We've been told for 40 years already that they're coming soon. Very soon they'll be doing everything for us. They'll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren't here. Meanwhile, we have illegal immigrants doing all the work, but we don't have any robots.
My understanding, when I think of immigration, is like... you know, this country was built on immigrants: the German, the Polish, the Italian, the Jewish, the Russians, the Eastern Europeans. So, all these people came in, and I don't know who decided like, 'No, that's it! There's a cap on it! No more people.'
Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate - and above all there was song.
The IIP had to be folded up by the Harper Conservatives after it became clear - and as it took the 'South China Morning Post's Ian Young to reveal - that Canada's ragged refugee-class immigrants had contributed more to Revenue Canada than the IIP's big-spender immigrant investors did over the life of the program.
We are surrounded by people with accents because America is a nation of immigrants. Beyond that, the people who made your iPhone and the shirt on your back are probably Asians, and we're really not that disconnected from each other; we have very intimate relationships with the world, whether or not we realize it.
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.
America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.