#immigrant

I wonder if my father, given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he just had one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends that they met in church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near. ↗

— Chang-rae Lee

#korean #change

Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#freedom-of-thought #hispanic #identity #immigrant-experience #latino-americans

The gaping hole in her heart is amplified when she catches a glimpse of the strands of silver hair framing her once young face in the mirror. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#rocio #self-image #stressed #experience

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#crime #fear #immigrants #increase #more

Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#inspiration #home

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room. ↗

— Eric Liu

#became #become #citizens #citizenship #conference

If the Republican Party works with the Hispanic community, the immigrant community, they're natural allies. People who came to this country are more freedom-loving and more American than people who just happened to be born here. ↗

— Grover Norquist

#american #born #came #community #country

In 2007, when I was governor of New York, I proposed that our state once again permit undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver's license. To say the proposal lit a firestorm in the political arena is an understatement. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#arena #driver #governor #i #immigrants

President Obama is doing the right thing by offering young immigrants, most often in this country through no action of their own, a chance to live and work openly, free from the fear of deportation. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#chance #country #deportation #doing #doing the right thing

The wise decision by President Obama to grant some undocumented immigrants the right to remain in the United States for two years without the threat of deportation is already benefitting the country. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#country #decision #deportation #grant #immigrants