Assimilation Challenges Quotes

If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?

The unifying characteristics that make us Americans are becoming more and more diluted now because new immigrants want to set up ethnic enclaves to retain their culture and language.

Assimilation is really a psychological process where you come to identify with a new country as yours. The ease of overseas travel and information access interferes with that.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

It is often not even wise to try to make an American of the best of aliens.

My parents were immigrants. And the place for all immigrants was the factories. They were the source of cheap labor.

As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

That those tribes [the Sac and Fox Indians] cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizensis certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.

I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

I didn't fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive, I created this 'ideal America.' Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, 'Oh, I don't belong here, either.'

Much of what we now consider to be problems concerning immigration and assimilation really concern Mexican immigration and assimilation.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

I've been to so many parties in England and in America that's exactly like that, where you're kind of, like, seen as Other. When you're just living your life, and you have to adopt the Other in order to understand and navigate the society.

If they (Muslim women) wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries.

For so many of my characters, they were political in their own countries and they risked their lives for certain political beliefs that they had, only to be brought to America where they're not treated like Americans - they're just not really treated like anything.

Government doesn't do much for the new Americans. The assumption is that they'll take care of themselves if they work hard enough.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.

As America is transformed from a 90 percent European American nation, as it was in the 1960s, to one where we will soon be a minority, should we not ask some pertinent questions. Is this racial diversity enriching, or will it be damaging to our social fabric?

[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.

A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him.

My family is first-generation Nigerian, and we grew up in a very small, suburban town in New England, Massachusetts. So I do understand what it feels like to be an 'only' in that regard.

We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.

I came to the US as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the brief time we spent on welfare, and the difficult task of assimilating into a new culture.