Immigrant Struggles Quotes

I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.

Coming from an immigrant background, where a lot of parents don't want their kids to be comedians, success was just showing my mom that I could make a living. I was like, if I can get my mom off my back, that was my success.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

Most immigrants couldn’t give a hoot about their welfare. These people risk their lives. They want to work.

My whole family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country.

Especially for Haitian immigrant parents, being a musician is not a job.

This first-generation narrative keeps happening over and over and over again, whether it was Irish or Jewish or our community, South Asians, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. We've all gone through this sort of bridge, and it will continue to happen.

My father was desperately trying to be a legal contributor to this society.

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

In the public debate, while commentators and critics have targeted immigrants with blame and bullying, our nation's immigrants have simply kept on working, kept on contributing, and kept on hoping for a solution.

The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?

We must work to change in our hearts and minds what it looks like to be undocumented. It is the high schooler dreaming of college who isn't aware of his status. It is the single mother working grueling hours in a warehouse just to provide for her children. It is the family that sits next to you in church. It is your neighbor.

Our good intentions have gotten in our own way and it's bad for immigrants.

[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.

I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.

The first years of my life in the U.S. were very difficult.

We sure didn't feel like refugees, but in hindsight, I guess we were - my father and mother left everything behind to come here - to be safe and give their boys a chance to rebuild a life.

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

When you're undocumented, you're supposed to keep your head down and be quiet and pay taxes, social security - even though people don't know that we do those things - and not say anything.

There are so many immigrant-led success stories in the United States, and the fact that it's gotten so much harder for educated folks to stay here is really unfortunate.

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 never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' also speaks urgently to today's concerns: the cratered trail of dreams for Mexican immigrants seeking a promised land in the Western [United States]; the perfidy of banks in foreclosing on poor people's homes; and the insurgent urge of the book's protagonist, Tom Joad, to speak truth to police power. 'Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy,' Tom promises, 'I'll be there.' In Salinas, Calif., Ferguson, Mo., or Staten Island, N.Y., Tom's truth goes marching on.