Migration Story Quotes

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.

I'm a Muslim Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. I grew up in Kuwait until the first Gulf War, when my family relocated to the United Arab Emirates. As an adult, I studied and lived in the U.K. before moving to Boston.

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.

No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

My parents were immigrants.

I was born in Russia in 1901 of Jewish parents and came to the United States in 1922 to join my father, who left Russia for the United States before World War I.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

I grew up in Kansas City. I got here when I just turned 21.

My parents came here from Colombia during a time of great instability there. Escaping a dire economic situation at home, they moved to New Jersey, where they had friends and family, seeking a better life, and then moved to Boston after I was born.

Shortly after I was born he emigrated to Durban, where members of my mother's family had settled at the turn of the century, and the rest of the family followed soon thereafter.

I'm a member of the African diaspora: my parents left the Caribbean and came to London for a better life.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

My mom always wanted to go to Maryland to live there. Baltimore, actually. She had a best friend who lived there. She kept saying that she was going to move there and make that her home, but she only made it halfway across the country and got stuck in Iowa.

As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.

My grandfather was an undocumented immigrant. My great-grandmother, my bisabuela, carried him over the border in her arms.

When I came to Philadelphia in the late '80s, it was going through a very difficult time.

My parents were among the first families from their area to leave Nigeria and come to America, the land of the free.

My parents moved to San Francisco from India when I was a year old.

My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

I came to America when I was 7.

I was in the U.S. about 15 years. Especially in New York. And then I came back to Japan.

I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called 'vegetarian,' experience of migration. It involved planes and trains - the actual compartments of passenger trains - and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.

God tipped the country and all the fruits and nuts rolled west.

The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'