Quotes & Sayings About Immigrants Rights

As immigrants, we understand better than most that to be an American is a privilege that conveys not just rights but responsibilities. — Jose Andres

Edwidge Danticat's prose has a Chekhovian simplicity
an ability to state the most urgent truths in a measured and patiently plain style that gathers a luminous energy as it moves inexorably forward. In this book she makes a strong case that art, for immigrants from countries where human rights and even survival are often in jeopardy, must be a vocation to witness if it is not to be an idle luxury. — Madison Smartt Bell

There are still states that have not evolved so much as California, that still skimp on recognition and, even worse, the rights of immigrants. — Enrique Pena Nieto

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

Scheffer said a new ethnic underclass of immigrants had formed, and it was much too insular, rejecting the values that knit together Dutch society and creating new, damaging social divisions. There wasn't enough insistence on immigrants adapting; teachers even questioned the relevance of teaching immigrant children Dutch history, and a whole generation of these children were being written off under a pretence of tolerance. Scheffer said there was no place in Holland for a culture that rejected the separation of church and state and denied rights to women and homosexuals. He foresaw social unrest. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them
like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist. — Aviva Chomsky

We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens. — Jay Parini

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came. — Terry Hayes

But we can't ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women's freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people. — Bret Easton Ellis

Over the following years, the concept of "person" was changed by the courts in two ways. One way was to broaden it to include corporations, legal fictions established and sustained by the state. In fact, these "persons" later became the management of corporations, according to the court decisions. So the management of corporations became "persons." It was also narrowed to exclude undocumented immigrants. They had to be excluded from the category of "persons." And that's happening right now. So the legislations that you're talking about, they go two ways. They broaden the category of persons to include corporate entities, which now have rights way beyond human beings, given by the trade agreements and others, and they exclude the people who flee from Central America where the U.S. devastated their homelands, and flee from Mexico because they can't compete with the highly-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. — Noam Chomsky

Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it's more than a set of rights. — Eric Liu

The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as "nominal Christians," and those they brand with the curse of "secular humanist," are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice. — Chris Hedges

So more than a century ago, everyone agreed: No more indentured servitude. But today's employers have conspired to bring it back with H-1B visas, then they strut around like they're Martin Luther King by invoking the magical word "immigration." Immigration covers a multitude of sins because we have all agreed to pretend mass immigration from the Third World is the same thing as black civil rights. In the 1960s, leftists were at least self-destructive: They wanted to damage the country in ways that would hurt them, their parents, and their kids. The New Left has found a way to be self-righteous only after checking to make sure they've completely exempted themselves from the destruction they're wreaking. Liberals will pull every string imaginable to prevent their own kids from having to compete with immigrants - and then demand cheap employees for themselves. The middle class and lower class take it in the shorts - and the elites get to feel noble. — Ann Coulter

Let us leave the EEC, abolish human rights laws, take TV sets, pool tables and phones out of prisons, bring back corporal and capital punishment, slash benefits and put single mothers into hostels instead of giving them council flats. Finally, if we chucked out all the illegal immigrants and asylum seekers there would be enough jobs for everyone. — Ken Bates

The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans. — Betty Smith