Henry Bonilla Quotes

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

The beauty of America is that I don't have to deny my past to affirm my present. No one does. We can love this nation like a parent and still embrace our ancestral home like cherished grandparents.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year... a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other countries. So they really don't forget.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

The United States has never had a neat, painless way to add newcomers. But our most shameful moments have involved the exclusion of groups, often those that do our hardest labor: Indians, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics. America has stood proudest when it dared to stretch the definition of who “we” are.

America must be kept American

I'm very proud being Puerto Rican. I'm American. That is what America is made of - people from different lands.

Our country is made up of groups of immigrants who came here hoping for a better life. They created America. It's a sad thing to have so many people not remember that, including Trump.

I believe in the American dream. I don't want anyone to take advantage of it, and I don't want anyone to ruin it, especially people who are not grateful to be here, who seemingly hate us and call us racists.

In other countries, being from somewhere else is celebrated. But not in America.

Canada has this really cool way - specifically Toronto - of encouraging you to wave both flags: if you've been born there, like, wave your flag and then wave your parent's flag, too, and be proud of it.

We need to remain a nation that doesn't just welcome but that celebrates legal immigrants who come here seeking to pursue the American Dream.

I'm proud to be an American. I'm proud to be an African American in America. I've had some interesting experiences: some great, some not so great, but I love it here.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

I think there is a problem in France that anyone who is not European, you want to know where they come from and why do they come from somewhere or why they speak English or why they are human. That's the big barrier for all of us that are coming from some far, far away countries. But at the end of the day, we are all artists.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

I've been marching in every single ethnic nationality parade all throughout the City of New York. We're all Americans first and foremost, but people understand their heritage and it's good to see.

Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting.

Advance Australia

We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland.

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.