Mohsin Hamid Quotes

The underpinning of immigration concerns is xenophobia and racism and nationalism.

We're living in an increasingly nationalistic, xenophobic time, and you can see it reflected in societies all over the world.

The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.

Traditionally, the ideology of the United States nationhood perpetuated the myth that immigrants would shed their particularistic ethnic identities and loyalties. Eventually these “strangers” would be assimilated into a homogeneous body politic that was based on the equality of individual rights.

Mexico for the Mexicans

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so.

Immigration has always been a concept that inflames passions.

I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else.’

Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements … Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us.

While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them.

We need to believe Donald Trump when he bullies and threatens to throw out every immigrant in the country.

There's a strong nativist tradition - saying, "we have to protect ourselves" - that comes from the founding of the country. If you read Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the United States and the most distinguished representative of the movement here, he actually advised that the newly founded republic should block Germans and Swedes because they were too "swarthy" - dark.

Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.

I don't believe in nationalism. I think it's a bunch of slogans. It's a bunch of poor attempts at creating pride. My problem with nationalism is that it becomes exclusionary. We start to exclude people.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

One thing we've learned is that there's not anything that Nigel Farage won't blame on foreigners.

I made some flippant remark about not wanting my son to grow up with an American accent, and the next thing I knew, there were people in America suggesting I head back to Britain if I was unhappy at such a prospect.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

This is nothing less than a national tragedy…. It is time to consider these refugees arriving from Poland and elsewhere purely on their merits as migrants and in an unsentimental light. In the last 50 years these people have swarmed all over Europe, coming principally from Armenia, Russia and the Balkans. We should remember that they are European neither by race, standards, nor culture. They are, in fact, an Eastern people. In 2000 years no one but Britain has been successfully able to absorb them, and for the most part they owe loyalty and allegiance to none.

Worries about misplaced sovereignty [at the UN] … appear to come primarily from people aggrieved to find the United Nations so full of foreigners.

Immigrants follow blindly leaders of their own race, are not moved by discussion, exercise no judgment of their own ... are not fit for the suffrage ... know nothing of the institutions of the country, of its statesmen, of its political issues.

Politicians have forced us into parallel societies by denying for so long that we existed and pretending for so long that we were going home.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.