Migration History Quotes

My mother was born in Sinaloa, and she moved to Los Angeles when she was three years old. My father was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and moved here when he was 19. They met at the Palladium in Hollywood, and they've been together from that moment on.

The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.

Both my parents came into the United States from Mexico.

I was born on April 1, 1933, in Constantine, Algeria, which was then part of France. My family, originally from Tangier, settled in Tunisia and then in Algeria in the 16th century after having fled Spain during the Inquisition.

Indians are immigrants like everyone else, they just came earlier

In the United States, if you're African-American, it can be assumed that your family has been here for generations. In Europe, colonialism is much more alive, and it's assumed you're from Nigeria or Senegal.

I was always taught that Latin, Caribbean people were cousins to me, as well as blues was a cousin to me, as well as Africans were direct relatives to me. It was all a part of my language.

To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.

We are, of course, a nation of immigrants, but some of us too often forget that fact. Sometimes we forget that the question isn't when we came here, but why we came here.

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.

They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a Native American, that number is more like 300 million.

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.

I was born in Boston, and when I was two and a half, my parents moved to Minneapolis. And then from there, when I was five, we moved back to Portugal. But before that, a lot of family members had come to visit us, and we had been back to Portugal many times because my whole family lived there.

My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.

In the United States everyone is an illegal immigrant - everyone except the people in Indian Reservations. This is an immigrant society.

Americans are a nation of immigrants.

My grandfather was originally from the south of China before he emigrated to Malaysia pre-World War II. And I wanted to learn more about the history of the country of my ancestors. I knew I wanted a narrative set in contemporary Beijing. I was really interested in the effect of the rapid social and economic change on ordinary citizens in China.

My father came to England from India in 1957, and my mum came in 1960.

Nearly all Americans have ancestors who braved the oceans - liberty-loving risk takers in search of an ideal - the largest voluntary migrations in recorded history... Immigration is not just a link to America's past; it's also a bridge to America's future.

We have no information, not even a tradition, concerning the first migration of the human race into Italy. It was the universal belief of antiquity that in Italy, as well as elsewhere, the first population had sprung from the soil.

Mum told me stories about her time in the Women's Royal Navy, and about her dad, who had died before I was born - he'd been sent to Australia as a child, then joined the Australian Army in the First World War and fought at Gallipoli.

I was born on 7 September 1917 at Sydney in Australia. My father was English-born and a graduate of Oxford; my mother, born Hilda Eipper, was descended from a German minister of religion who settled in New South Wales in 1832. I was the second of four children.

I would not call my family 'traditional Chinese.' We were more what I would term the Colonial Chinese.

My ancestors come from a part of southern China where most villages can trace their roots back at least a thousand years or even more. However, as a typical American, I have lived in four cities and moved at least seven times.

I was born in Eastern Europe, in Latvia, and I'm fluent in Russian.