Top 1200 Immigrant Parents Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

In real life, there are right-wingers, there are anti-immigrant activists who want to overturn this constitutional right that we have to become Americans when we're born in this country. There's lots of people who believe that this has led to the phenomenon of the anchor babies. I am an anchor baby. My parents were able to receive their residency and citizenship because, I, a U.S. citizen child of theirs, was born in Los Angeles.

I both loved and hated South Pasadena. On the one hand, it was so diverse - all my closest friends were immigrants or had immigrant parents. On the other hand, it was a bit conservative - in a sort of wholesome, Midwestern, small-town sense. I never met a single writer until I moved to New York City for college.

So I've got mates I've known since I was five years old. Their children know my children. There's something really lovely about it. When you're an immigrant - my parents were immigrants, their brothers and sisters lived all over the world, Florida, Jamaica, some in Europe - it's a grounding thing. That community is critical.

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.

Conversations about money, culture, power, class - it's at the center of my identity. I think it's a combination of being born to immigrant parents, growing up relatively poor, and really living in a world where formal institutions, like banks and anywhere that you had to sign a contract, was really feared and avoided at all costs.

Every unskilled illegal immigrant who enters the United States for work drives up healthcare costs for every American. And, every illegal immigrant we turn a blind eye toward weakens the rule of law our country is founded on.

I love Europe, but we are still struggling with that kind of development. First of all, we don't have a smart conversation about the difference between an immigrant and a refugee. A refugee can't go back. An immigrant is someone - I chose to move to America. And I also have the option of saying hey, didn't work out, I can move back. That's a completely different story than someone who is locked in.

I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen.

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal, and it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

I'm actually not making fun of my real parents. I've taken stereotypical traits of my real parents, my aunts, my uncles and parents of every race and put them into these two characters, who are just over-the-top ridiculous and super-alpha parents about everything.

As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world.

Just classic immigrant story - I mean, child of immigrant story - did not grow up with cable and so felt constantly like I was being spoken to in a foreign language when I would go to school. And people would be like, did you watch this? Did you watch that? I'd be like, no, but I did watch 'SNL.'

I try to keep a balance. I actually believe that children want normal parents, they don't want celebrities or important parents or anything different from all the other parents.

Parents do the best they can. But my parents are better grandparents than they were parents.

There are all sorts of parents I hate - super-keen parents, PTA parents, and fat parents on a bus.

Children do not need superhuman, perfect parents. They have always managed with good enough parents: the parents they happened to have.

I think I was always informally thinking about choice from when I was a very young child because I was born to Sikh immigrant parents, so I was constantly going back and forth between a Sikh household and an American outside world, so I was going back and forth between a very traditional Sikh home in which you had to follow the Five K's.

We see systematically taught in our high schools today that kids not have to hear their parents, that they can make their own rules, and not even live by what their parents, so there's no guidance from the parents. And there's a concerted effort why - government must be their God.

If I had the opportunity to speak to a young immigrant girl that just arrived to the U.S. the advice I would have for her would be: ask, speak, search; because there are opportunities out there. And, know that you aren't the only immigrant or the last to come to this country. Many that have come before you have succeeded. It is possible.

I was raised, myself, by extremely strict but also extremely loving Chinese immigrant parents. To this day, I believe that their having high expectations for me, coupled with love, was the greatest gift that anyone's ever given me. And so that's why, even though my husband is not Chinese, I try to raise my own two daughters the same way.

My parents were pretty open about a lot of things, especially my mom. And any kind of little crazy thing I was into, she was very supportive of. You know, whether it was BMX bike racing or being in the Boy Scouts or surfing or anything else, she always seemed to sort of support it. And I think it's because she was an immigrant and that idea of sort of having her kids be able to have access to their dreams and whatever they wanted to follow was very important to her.

Women are the majority of immigrants yet the minority of immigrant employment visas; immigrant and native born women who work in the service arena - such as domestic workers - are not valued for their work, making pennies on the dollar compared to male counterparts; and, women are disproportionately affected by family reunification policies.

My parents come from that immigrant culture that places a lot of emphasis on doing well scholastically. Being a comedian or an actor is such an American thing. The Iranian culture is not about dreaming. It's about taking over your father's business, falling into line.

America is a country formed by diverse communities from different countries. Overall, the country is very hospitable and gives opportunities to grow. Saying that, I'd also say I'm not a 'white' immigrant; a South Asian's experience is different than, say, a European immigrant's.

I'm the only child of immigrant parents, you know? So all the pressure is just kind of on me: You have to make it. And I was like, 'Well, let me make it in music.' They were like, 'Nah, you gotta go to school.'

You are never going to have, in a country as rich as ours [the USA], that borders a country as poor as Mexico, an end to immigration. You just won't. The question is, if you make it humane and if you make it regulated. It's much better for an American worker to compete against a regulated immigrant inside labor standards, than it is to ever to compete against an illegal immigrant.

The immigrant's heart marches to the beat of two quite different drums, one from the old homeland and the other from the new. The immigrant has to bridge these two worlds, living comfortably in the new and bringing the best of his or her ancient identity and heritage to bear on life in an adopted homeland.

I'm not an immigrant - I was born and raised in New York. My parents are Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S., for the people that don't know. So my whole life, I've identified as an American. There are times when I've gone to Puerto Rico, and there, I'm seen as the American cousin.

My family was very engaged in the world around us. My father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and an immigrant from Panama. He was deeply involved in civil rights causes, which scared my mother - she was also an immigrant, from Barbados, who had her hands full with six kids, and she worried that my father would get deported. But because of his passion for politics and civil rights, we paid close attention to current events. We would watch political conventions together - for fun!

As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

There were so many different influences in my life: being half Mexican and half Irish, growing up an only child of immigrant parents, being bullied in school, feeling alienated and lonely, this undertone of darkness. All that culminated and came out in my music and made it different.

There was a glamorous Nick-and-Nora element to my parents. If you remove one from the other, you're left with neither. But parents are parents.

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

I feel like I have so many amazing opportunities because of my immigrant mother, my immigrant grandparents. There are so many of us who do come from immigrants - even some people who support Trump's travel ban. I think we need to take a step back and realize what the real issues are - it's not being from different places or being different.

Let's ask their parents. And will those children point to their parents and tell us you really need to enforce the law against my parents? Because they know what they were doing when they caused me to break the law. I don't think we've thought through this very well. But there's a reason why in the president's DACA programs he didn't grant his unconstitutional executive amnesty to the parents of dreamers.

My parents played by parents, in the second season [of Suits]. We had a Skype scene and they were my real parents. My parents are cartoons. When they come up and visit, they're hilarious. My mother somehow finds a way to get in the way of everything.

I simply wish my parents would have taught me about speciesism and how it was just as evil as racism, sexism and heterosexism. Sadly, my parents were lied to by their parents who were lied to by their parents and so on.

Race doesn't mean what it used to in America anymore. It just doesn't. Obama's black, but he's not black the way people used to define that. Is black your experience or the color of your skin? My experience is as a Mexican immigrant, more so than someone like George Lopez. He's from California. But he'll be treated as an immigrant. I am an outsider. My abuelita, my grandmother, didn't speak English. My whole family on my dad's side is in Mexico. I won't ever be called that or treated that way, but it was my experience.

People are an asset, not a liability. The United States is the most immigrant-friendly nation in the world and the richest country in the world. This is not a coincidence. Those voices that would make us less immigrant-friendly would make us less successful, less prosperous and certainly less American.

I'm very privileged to have great parents, caring parents, parents that dedicate a lot of their time and energy to their children, and we're very thankful for that.

You can't disrespect my parents. They stopped visiting me because whenever they came, they would be disrespected. It came to a point where I had to choose between my parents and Shweta. I chose my parents.

Individual children are separated from their parents only when those parents cross the border illegally and are arrested. We can't have children with parents who are in incarceration.

In our country, being from immigrant parents, growing up black in the South, coming out at 16 years old, being a teen parent... you would assume that my life would amount to nothing. And here I stand today. So, if I can do it... you can, too!

Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.

First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected.

"Immigrant" has become a dirty word. It is not a bad word. It's not a curse or a swear word. It's not a dirty word and it's nothing to be ashamed about. I am proud to be a second generation immigrant. I am proud of my heritage. We are all immigrants and we need to start owning the concept.

I think it's true about people now being closer to their parents, since the '60s, really. The parents are no longer from a different planet, the 1950s ideas of American family. We could be friends with our parents. After the '60s, it wasn't like a person smoking pot was what the parents would be appalled at.

...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

The problem with much of the debate over this issue is that we confuse two separate matters: immigration policy (how many people we admit) and immigrant policy (how we treat people who are already here). What our nation needs is a pro-immigrant policy of low immigration. A pro-immigrant policy of low immigration can reconcile America's traditional welcome for newcomers with the troubling consequences of today's mass immigration. It would enable us to be faithful and wise stewards of America's interests while also showing immigrants the respect they deserve as future Americans.

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one.

If it's racist, it's racist. If it's anti-Semitic, it's anti-Semitic. If it's anti-women, it's anti-women. If it's anti-immigrant, it's anti-immigrant, and we need to really strengthen our language, so that it is clear and not mushy.

Coming from a large immigrant family, my parents didn't encourage a lot of 'play' when I was growing up. It was hard to get my Dad to even sit down to watch television with us (he'd watch it standing up, always ready to go do something more productive). Downtime was discouraged, as was any college degree that wasn't law, medicine or business.

Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut - a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.

I feel like kids are the perfect psychic investigators of their parents, and kids understand their parents' unconscious better than the parents ever do.

I'm an immigrant, a legal immigrant to the United States. I only became a citizen five years ago. Every day, for seven months, I pinched myself as I was walking in and out of the West Wing, so it's only in America, right? Only in America.

Ours is the first society in history in which parents expect to learn from their children, rather than the other way around. Such a topsy-turvy situation has come about at least in part because, unlike the rest of the world, we are an immigrant society, and for immigrants the only hope is in the kids.

If you are conscious and really want change in this world, and you don't vote, then what was all the fighting for? All the things our parents and our parents' parents fought for?

I was raised to give back. I was born to immigrant parents and was fortunate to become successful at an early age. I've always felt a strong sense of national service to my country, and I may have been able to provide leadership in the political arena. I don't regret the decision not to enter politics, I just wonder sometimes if I could have changed anything.

My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that's what we did as kids.