#migrants

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

He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews-and be damned with the lot of them if he'd go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use. ↗

— Howard Fast

#the-immigrants #family

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

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

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

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

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

I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done. ↗

— John Fante

#american-literature #immigrant-experience #immigrants #art