immigrants

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.

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.

Doomed to Hell. Every last one of you.

People floating like pollen in search of more fertile soil.

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity _ of background, race, ethnicity, belief _ and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, __ll of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before._ Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions--from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate--are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.

Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.

It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.

We of alien looks or words must stick together.

What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déj_ vu.

For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.

I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.

Donald Trump is a champion for legal immigrants.

I love the new legal immigrants they want their kids to be safe just like I do.

There are a lot of Latinos who believe that allowing illegal immigrants to cut in front of the line ahead of those pursuing the legal path sends the wrong signal. The GOP needs to articulate that message respectfully but boldly.

If we want to set and enforce a limit on immigration, we have to be willing to say no to would-be immigrants who look a lot like our own ancestors, not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because admitting them would exceed our legal limit.