I'm the grandson of immigrants who came across rivers and oceans to get here, some without documentation.
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.
When I was at MIT I was a good model minority. But the concept of an Indian immigrant creating e-mail in Newark, N.J., blows the mind of certain people.
When I came to America in the '60s, it was the place to be. I wonder if I'd come here today.
Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is - it's not something that you see every day. It's not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it.
Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir.
In 2009, I edited, under the aegis of the Library of America, an anthology called 'Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today.' It featured immigrants from different backgrounds, from black slaves like Phillis Wheatley to Yiddish-language speakers like Henry Roth.
The typical immigrant of the present does not really live in America at all, but, from the point of view of nationality, in Italy, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, or some other foreign country.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky' by Lesley Nneka Arimah blew my mind.
I'm an immigrant myself. It was a tough road to come to America and work.
I ended up in the US for a month or so, before moving to Montreal with some Romanian friends.
I'm very interested in getting inside the heads of people society discards, people on the fringe, especially immigrant kids. We dismiss them without getting into details of who they are.
In our community here in Boston, we have had a tremendous influx of Russian Jews and Haitians. We call these people immigrants. But they come for the same reasons that William Bradford and William Brewster and John Carver came.
One of the things I think a lot about, I am perhaps a great example of the enlightened immigration policy of this country where I was able to come here to study and then stay back and work and build a life.
I wasn't aware that 'House on Mango Street' was so influenced by Spanish until after I finished.
I find that women... deal with immigration differently. And I'm interested in that.
Immigration is a system and a set of policies. And immigrants are the people behind those policies and behind that system, and the human stories.
Every single immigrant is part of a larger history that needs to be communicated in all its ambivalences and complexities.
My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.
Everybody has a different interpretation of immigration problems, and it's a highly personal experience. If anyone tells you there is a uniform solution to it, there isn't. As far as I'm concerned, it worked for me. And I don't know how to fix the problem.
As Latinos, we are so aware of what people go through in order to come to America. It's very interesting to do research on something that's been culturally a part of your existence.
We have a lot of comments on the news, we have a lot of rhetoric over what an immigrant is and what a deportee is, but you don't hear any real stories. I don't think we ever had the chance to really tell our side.
