#migrant

Will you keep this?" he asked, holding up the pendant. "Please. Don't show it to your folks. But keep it, please. I'm not asking for anything else. You're going away. God knows when I'll see you again. I can accept what you say about your feelings for me. I have to. But what harm will it do if you take this, and then at least, I'll know that something I got for you is with you. ↗

— Howard Fast

#the-immigrants #family

The dignity is in the worker, not in the job. ↗

— Howard Fast

#the-immigrants #family

I suppose I have cause you grief and misery at times, but I have never intentionally caused you embarrassment and discomfort. ↗

— Howard Fast

#the-immigrants #family

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism. ↗

— Abraham Verghese

#consciousness #immigrants #new-york #intelligence

The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic. ↗

— Dominic Chianese

#background #both #comes #explosive #father

The Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal immigrants cost the United States taxpayer about $10.4 billion a year. A large part of that expense stems from the babies born each year to illegal immigrants. ↗

— Nathan Deal

#babies #billion #born #center #cost

Somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the food you eat has been touched by immigrant hands, and it is fair to say some of them are not here as they should be here. But if you didn't have these folks, you would be spending a lot more - three, four or five times more - for food, or we would have to import food and have all the food security risks. ↗

— Tom Vilsack

#between #eat #fair #five #folks

My grandfather was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived in Northern Ireland and apparently when he sang in the synagogue he made everyone cry. ↗

— Jessie Ware

#cry #everyone #grandfather #immigrant #ireland

I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama! ↗

— Kerry Washington

#afforded #african-american #college #could #ellis

Uncertainty and fear and ignorance about immigrants, about people who are different, has a history as old as our Nation. ↗

— Luis Gutierrez

#different #fear #history #ignorance #immigrants