Immigration Quotes

“He could not understand how a person born in the United States who knew the English language and culture and was educated with at least a high school degree failed to provide for his own subsistence without government assistance.”
― Rafael Polo, Growing Up American

“I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in your ear saying--leave, run, now. I don't know what I've become.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, All for Australia

“The real question is not 'What does it mean to be Swedish in an age of migration?' but 'What does it mean to be white Swedish in an age of migration?' The Swedish state will adapt to any ethnic configuration, but this is much trickier for the Swedish ethnic majority. While Sweden can make citizens in an afternoon, immigrants can only become ethnic Swedes through a multi-generational process of intermarriage and secularization.”
― Eric Kaufmann

“Four times facing the very real fear that this could all end, this life I'm beginning to build for myself in the U.S., this country that doesn't want me, after growing up in a country that didn't want me. It's terrifying that this life I'm living could all be over because of the suspicions of a midlevel visa employee, a missed expiration date, or a government policy change. Four times facing these fears head-on and decades of feeling them in my body, burning on low in the back of my mind. This could all be taken away from you, Lamya. You could have to
leave.”
― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

“A policy on immigration helps to determine the unity as well as the size of the population. Should Australia so select its immigrants that the society is relatively unified? Or should it select immigrants who promote diversity? Should Australia continue to be dominated by Anglo-Celtic peoples and the English language and institutions? Or should it become the new Eurasia? In choosing immigrants and the pace at which they arrive, how far should we risk social and racial tensions?”
― Geoffrey Blainey, All for Australia

“Immigration is a form of social debt, offering small short-term financial benefits with long-term social costs to future generations, and the social effects are considerable. The economic argument is a red herring convenient for both sides, since liberals do not want to raise the clearly unpopular social implications of immigration, and conservatives cannot honestly discuss the issue without being accused of racism.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“All the arguments for multiculturalism — that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity — are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “white Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“An immigration policy that ignored an individual's (potential) group identity would ignore the effects it had on wider society; a colour-blind immigration policy certainly does not lead to a colour-blind society.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Economists, when it comes to immigration, routinely ignore the social costs; would they do the same when measuring, for example, the growth of the alcohol industry or, for that matter, fossil fuels? Open borders — especially while much of the world has high fertility rates — have enormous non-economic effects. So while big business might want an endless supply of foreign labour, since when were the interests of big business put above any potential social cost of their practices? When it involves diversity. And yet the social costs of immigration are a form of market failure, problems created by businesses which enjoyed the benefits but do not have to pay for the migrants' welfare, housing or schools once they are no longer needed.”
― Ed West, The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right

“Whites are already a minority in most major cities of North America. Together with New Zealand, North America is projected to be ‘majority minority’ by 2050, with Western Europe and Australia following suit later in the century. This shift is replacing the self-confidence of white majorities with an existential insecurity channelled by the lightning rod of immigration.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“It’s one thing to get by in a language. It’s another to absorb inferences babies learn while growing up. If you didn’t learn English that way, you can miss unspoken rules, especially when you’re caught in brawling American life, from which Xanthi was insulated when she lived with my suburban family outside Chicago. Incomplete acculturation can go very wrong.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Whether she knew it or not, Xanthi prepared me to fight for even my most damaged defendants...”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Xanthi came into my childhood in August of 1954, arriving at Union Station near the Chicago River, final stop in a transatlantic journey to help take care of me and my siblings in suburban Oak Park while Mom underwent treatment, such as it was in those days, for breast cancer metastases. Xanthi was a friend of my maternal grandmother’s, maybe even a distant relative. Didn’t matter to me as a four-year-old boy. Whoever she was related to, she left her home on the Peloponnesus to live with us for room and board and some money to send back home after a string of cataclysms bludgeoning Greece at the time.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“I was born a ‘Woolyback’, I was raised as a ‘Scouser’, I became a ‘Guiri’ and I am now a ‘Haole’.”
― Steven Magee

“Immigrants were also often Type T. You take a huge risk that alters the course of your life and the generations that come after. Whether you're running away or toward something, it takes cojones to leave your home and start from scratch.”
― Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, In the Shadow of the Mountain

“The double standard inherent in Bournian multiculturalism lauds subaltern ethnicity while decrying majority ethnicity. Völkish native authenticity is championed for aboriginal groups against European migrants to the New World but downplayed for aboriginal Europeans in countries receiving non-European immigrants.”
― Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

“Every American carries with them the story of an immigrant— undocumented and visionary.”
― William Castano-Bedoya, We the Other People: The Beggars of the Mercury Lights

“All labor proves ephemeral for immigrants, but the yearning endures. No tears allowed!”
― William Castano-Bedoya, We the Other People: The Beggars of the Mercury Lights

“Here is a secret Chang E knew, though her mother didn't.
Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.
At a certain point, this stops being sad - but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?”
― Zen Cho, The Four Generations of Chang E

“Believers love death. I would rather wonder, my friend, than believe.”
― Lorraine Adams, Harbor

“چشمهایم را میبندم و آرزو میکنم....شیوه ای ما را.....پرتاب کند ایران، میان آن همه نوازش و نیکویی.”
― نهال تجدد

“It’s hard to communicate the immigrant experience with those who don’t understand. We want to support and be with our families, and sometimes we sacrifice our mental health and our emotional well-being to do it.”
― Nisha Sharma, Dating Dr. Dil

“Where had these two men come from? No one gave much thought to the question because the area had plenty of outsiders who had moved in on top of each other over many decades; no one could claim to be an original inhabitant.”
― Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

“The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious?
Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?”
― Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency

“Repetition. That was my father’s philosophy on learning. It applied not only to the piano, but my studies too. Before every test, he made me write out every single word from the textbook chapter, twice.”
― Susie Luo, Paper Names: A Novel

“I like that TexMex border music. I guess because it comes out of two completely different places. One thing it don't come out of is the fear Mexicans and Texans feel towards each other. I've been an immigrant. I know about that.”
― Neil Ferguson, Bars of America

“We are to Mexico what Mexico is to the States.”
― Jenny Torres Sanchez, We Are Not From Here

“...If you are alone in this land,
on foot, in miles of coming snow, wind, and branches
and don't even know
in which direction you'd run

If from birth you've seen
what men with guns, knives,
and bombs are capable of doing
for reasons you never wanted to understand

If in this very same county's court of all-white
witnesses, counsel, judge, and jurors
it will forever be your word against theirs
because there was no forensic testimony
over who shot first
If, yes, sometimes you can hear voices,
not because you're insane, but
in your culture
you are a shaman, a spiritual healer,
though in this very different land
of goods and fears, your only true worth
seems to be as a delivery man and soldier

If, upon that first fateful exchange in these woods,
your instinct, pushing pin to
balloon, were to tell you it's now
either you and your fatherless family of fourteen,
or all of them

Would you set your rifle down;
hope the right, the decent,
the fair thing on this buried American soil
will happen?
Or would you stay low,
one knee cold, and do
precisely as your whole life
and history have trained?

And if you did,
would anyone even care
what really happened

that afternoon
eight bodies plummeted
to earth like deer?”
― Ed Bok Lee, Whorled

“It is believed that the ancestors of the American or Red Indian race began their migration to North America and then from North to South some 25,000 or less years ago. The probable road they took was from Asia across the Bering Isthmus that formerly existed where the present straits are situated. This isthmus became approachable only at the time the glaciers were receding; until that time the entire American continent had been almost unpopulated...”
― Mikhail Nesturkh, Ras-ras Umat Manusia