#migrant

I always heard that immigrants had a really hard life when they came to America. ↗

— Sofia Vergara

#america #came #had #hard #hard life

It has given me a global vantage point, being the daughter of immigrants from China, who had nothing when they came here. And now I am leading a company. It speaks to something deep in me, the concept that you don't have to start with anything. ↗

— Andrea Jung

#anything #being #came #china #company

Mum used to hide love letters from my boyfriends and put me down. Now I understand that she was a Polish immigrant forced to settle in Chicago. She was jealous of the freedom life gave me. ↗

— Ruby Wax

#down #forced #freedom #gave #hide

Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out. ↗

— Leslie T. Chang

#china #chinese #chuqu #city #factory

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

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#assertive #began #both #british #canada

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#country #english #every #five #here

It is not new or unusual for the real Americans, meaning those immigrants who came to America a little bit longer ago, to fear the outsiders, the pretenders, the newcomers. ↗

— Luis Gutierrez

#america #bit #came #fear #immigrants

A recent Pew Hispanic survey found that more than 70 percent of illegal immigrants from Mexico are interested in a guest-worker program and then returning home. ↗

— John Shadegg

#hispanic #home #illegal #illegal immigrants #immigrants

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