immigration

And I thought, y__now, I mean_this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It__ not, y__now, __urple mountain__ majesty_ or __ruited plains,_ whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn__ a place, it__ an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I__ the child of immigrants. My father__ lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he__ somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?

[America]'s higher education system is excellent, both in terms of quality and accessibility. Here anybody can go to college. Many countries simply can't accommodate many students. And by the way, most people who came here in the seventies came to get an education. They didn't wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to America to be free.' they said, 'I'll go there to get an education.' That's an important distinction. It was only after they were here for a while that they fully appreciated the freedoms we enjoy here.

I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.

The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren't the lords of the earth.

They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.

Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.

The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

My family came to this country to take advantage of opportunity, not to take advantage of America.

People who are driven by love will overcome hardships and hurdles in ways that people who are only driven by profit never can.

I believe that the victims and their families should start lodging civil actions for negligence against the politicians. Allowing treasonous murderers into our countries, at the tragic cost to our citizens is worthy of a court action. And as soon as the first judgment goes in favour of the plaintiff, that will change the immigration policies overnight, because, as we know, money is the only thing that talks.

When John Quincy Adams in the Netherlands was placed with elementary students and belittled because he did not speak Dutch, either the author or John Adams accuses school authorities of "littleness of soul".

I__l tell you what I don__ believe, Alwyn. I don__ believe there__ a pretty forest in the sky with castles and a white light and God and all his angels waiting to welcome all the good people in. And you and me standing there sick with nerves while they check us out to see if we__e made the grade. That sounds too much like immigrating to Australia.

I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.