My parents never understood why I didn't want to be a doctor or lawyer.

According to Adichie, this wasn´t just about experimentation or an active imagination, because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. “To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don't really belong to either.”, “Integrate well. How foolish he’d been to think either a choice. Rooted in the word 'history' is 'story.' The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can't be bothered to do their research. And we are so tired of that burden." By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home. We must fix our broken immigration system.

I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. I have spent years in a battle with my body, trying to make it compliant to the needs of others. “Every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.” - Theodore Roosevelt My dad's from that generation like a lot of immigrants where he feels like if you come to this country, you pay this thing like the American dream tax: like you're going to endure some racism, and if it doesn't cost you your life, well hey, you lucked out. It depends on whether Obama ate his Wheaties or not. It depends on what point people are trying to make, to advertise things, to sell you things, to make money.”, “Advertising companies, big corporations, banks and politicians need to maintain this, to control the division of people through racism and shade, throwing shade of difference and indifference, good immigrant and bad immigrant, refugee and benefit scrounger.”, “I see coming back to my village as significant, thanks to my privilege of being able to leave.
This is the racist country. Obama wants to raise the issue of immigration reform so that he can demonize Republicans as anti-Hispanic. But once the canned laughter dies down or the fashion shoot is done and dusted, and you stop and take a cold hard look at the root history of these jokes and stereotypes, it all comes from a shade so bleak and so ignorant, that it has a sub-human subtext to it –brown people for sale in a human pet shop window.”, “To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.”, “These themes are explored through fantasy figures such as wizards, giants and elves. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? The luxury of the arts was still a generation away.

Refresh and try again. Immigrants and so many people in the working class work so hard every day for nickels and pennies and scraps to just barely get by and then realize that this precious life has been completely drained out of us. “Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.” John F. Kennedy “He doesn’t like my name… Of course we couldn’t all come over on the Mayflower… But I got here as soon as I could, and I never wanted to go back, because to me it is a …
We're all born into whatever citizenship, circumstances, or class we happen to be born into. My father was a San Franciscan. How can I pay for a new car? How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. There are many, many different kinds of intersectional exclusions - not just black women but other women of color. We are a nation of immigrants. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America. Not just people of color, but people with disabilities. All Quotes Am I more welcome if I take up less space?”, “Our identities as people of color should not be defined solely by our struggles.

Who isn't?

It’s the only language I know well, yet it still denies me my freedom.”, “Half the time I want every single one of you as my kin, and half the time I want nothing to do with you. Structural racism can divide a community that would be stronger together, by keeping individual groups entrenched in their own class —in this case, caste discrimination.”, “As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder, it’s taken off you and swapped out for another. There’s so much love in my race. (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”, “Musa Okwonga, the poet, journalist and essayist whose powerful ‘The Ungrateful Country’ closes the book, once said to me that the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants – job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees – until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants. Explore 645 Immigrants Quotes by authors including Thomas Sowell, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates at BrainyQuote. Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.

Just like we have for centuries. I don't like it when I see a racist comedian go up and say, 'What are we gonna do about all these immigrants?'

They gave us a chance to participate in this country's life and I took it. The illegal immigrants are like termites. Immigrants provide skills that we simply cannot afford to do without. But, as we are perpetually made to feel like others in this country, that’s how we are taught to understand ourselves. That's why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: 'cause it's life or death for real. Welcome back. Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? We fine-tune the ability to find the nuances funny, deflecting the crushing weight of displacement and diaspora drama that becomes part of our everyday.”, “We’ve never really been split, never been cut in half, we’ve just been silent about how we’ve been empowered because we haven’t always felt it, have been too busy being good immigrants, not making a fuss, and quieting down when people felt uncomfortable.”, “Respectability politics is the dogged belief that if black people just shape up, dress better and act right, racists would suddenly have a dramatic change of heart, and stop their racist ways. I'm sick of seeing the immigrants in the hotels and the Italians who sleep in cars. Move upwards in society. I think, 'Well that's not a joke. We are like love bombs planted in the minefield of black and white. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. The fetishisation of the Asian female body is highly problematic. “My mother is deeply pragmatic by nature. Bread bread.”, “It is there in the white men and women who do not understand, to the point of frustration, why we still walk with the noose of our ancestors around our necks, as we cannot comprehend how they do not carry the indignity of their ancestors tying it there.”, “It’s a tree falling in a forest conundrum: if a white kid raps all the lyrics to ‘Gold Digger’ and there isn’t a black person around to hear it, is it still racist?”, “There is no ‘Aum’ without Indian dharmas, as there is no ‘Allah’ without Islam, nor ‘Pull-up!’ without UK Garage, or two hands coming together to form a W without Wu Tang. Move upwards in society. I’ve been trying to think of my race as a site of joy.

Respectability politics puts all of its faith in racist gatekeepers (telling us that we must change to appeal to their inherent, good-natured humanity), and puts none if its faith in black people living under the weight of poverty and discrimination, scrabbling, trying to make a life anyway they can.”, “If cultures were to survive in England it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation”, “In 2013, 2.4 million heterosexual interactions on the Facebook dating app ‘Are You Interested?’ were analysed and showed that ‘all men except Asians9 preferred Asian women’. I was quietly being written out of the narrative of humanity in my immediate surroundings.”, “Who knew that after WWII, some 2,000 Chinese seamen in Liverpool who had helped in the war effort were deported ‘home’ without warning? and they get a round the applause. Because they know what it means to miss someone who will love your disembodied voice on a dodgy connection, when she doesn’t have the luxury of loving the real thing.”, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America. Bread bread.”, “Put Iranian-American refugee in your Twitter profile, the way all the other refugees are doing. (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”, “Racism in society often works through a divide and conquer strategy, more often than not it is also intertwined with classism as well as other forms of oppression. Immigrants.

In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival. “Some children are born to fathers,” she types. Perhaps you had to be, as an immigrant. We’d love your help. The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can't be bothered to do their research. I think a fair and just immigration policy is good for our country and good for our society. LGBTQ people. Bob Marley was mixed, Jamaican and Celtic, same as me, his shade looks pale in some photos, sometimes much darker. All Quotes They decided to let immigrants in and I am an immigrant. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. They're Cuban immigrants who wanted to give their children the American dream, and, to them, that was more of what 'the dream' entailed.

Mr. Speaker, our Nation depends on immigrants' labor, and I hope we can create an immigration system as dependable as they are. If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right? My parents are Jamaican immigrants and both have a multiracial background. Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it's no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create - in one generation - closing the gap. Learn to respect more than resent those parallel planes of living and the rendering of living.”, “The Good Daughter considers what else her father has given his heart to and kept his heart from, the causes and regrets. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. “You say goodbye to your country, your people, your home, your friends, your family. I think it's really important to realize that small businesses are often the portal for immigrants into the New York City economy. It's amazing. Refresh and try again. “The fetishisation of the sexuality of black people comes from centuries of dirty dark shade. Chai tea means tea tea. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. Obama believes that some Americans who join Islamist groups are citizens, while others are not. When an older South Asian woman I’ve never met calls me bayti and she transforms into my auntie.”, “Where are you from?” usually bothers me, but tonight I note his brown skin, and I know it’s not the same thing as a white American asking me the same question. Whomever the executive branch deems an American.