Immigrant Struggle Quotes

My family comes from Panama, and I grew up in a single parent household with my mother, who barely spoke English. She couldn't get a good job, yet there were four of us for her to raise.

I am a refugee: my parents fled Chile under Pinochet in 1976 when I was 9 months old, and my parents were able to start from nothing and make lives for themselves in the United States.

Mexico is a Latin powerhouse. And Mexicans, they're known as hard workers. Here in the U.S., not everybody wants to do those kinds of jobs. I've lived. I know what it feels like and what they go through and how families suffer.

When I originally came to the U.S., my mother came with a couple hundred dollars to her name. I didn't know we were struggling because she hid that from me. But it was definitely a struggle to get through life and get through school.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

'Heaven's Gate' was based on a true story about the cattle people: the people who had the money turned on the settlers who were in the area. And it was mainly a defense of their behavior. And the cattlemen's association had just about declared war on these people who were poaching cattle, and because they were mainly immigrants.

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe.

As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.

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

My dad is an amazing human being. He - just a hard worker. Just that thing you think about with, like, just anyone who comes this country - that's my dad. He can do anything. Not just at work - comes home, he can cook, he can clean, fix the toilet, fix the car. He learned all these jobs just so he'd never have to pay another man.

When Chinese get together - what's buried stays buried. We don't even discuss our embarrassing early days struggling in Chicago.

The difference between me and American-born actors is that I came here with the expectation of not being treated fairly.

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.

My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion - 24 hours a day for years.

[My father] came over as an immigrant and didn't know any English. He went to work at a sweat shop in Baltimore. He told me later that this guy was coming around, and the guy seemed to be for the workers, so he signed up. It turned out that guy was an IWW organizer . My father didn't regret signing up; he just really didn't know what was going on.

The Bronx, I remember, was a very poor neighborhood, but that was all that immigrants could afford at that time. Life was tough. I grew up - my father didn't have a job, but there weren't too many people who did have jobs.

Every refugee finds his American dream on the backs of the nightmare of Black suffering in America.

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.

It was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.

I'm very inspired by him-it was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.

I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

What inspired me to work so hard and to maintain my determination was seeing my mother. She was an immigrant and was struggling in America to make it by; that inspired me to work hard.

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

Because the truth is, today's immigrants, as they have for generation after generation, work the longest hours at the hardest jobs for the lowest pay, jobs that are just about impossible to fill.