Lawrence Osborne Quotes

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

It could be argued that, in Thailand, many foreigners have come and gone, and the number of people who are considered to be Thai have traveled abroad in a great number.

Migration is development.

Migration isn't a one-directional process; it's a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.

I don't really go around feeling very Irish at all. I don't go to Irish pubs. I've lived so many places, and I'm still so curious about the bigger world. It's grand to be alive in a time when mobility is so accessible.

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

I've done a lot of things away from my homeland.

According to a new survey, 40 percent of adults in Mexico say they would move to the United States if they got a chance. The number would have been higher, but the other 60 percent already live here.

We face a world where borders matter less and less.

People tend to migrate from the third world to the metropolises of the very countries that once dominated them. Algerians to Paris; Puerto Ricans to New York; Pakistanis to London.

… we shall have to accept, I think, that free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have to accept the immigrant's return for the same reason that we consider justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.

Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won't be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state.

People still say to me, 'What, you still live in Mexico?' I don't have to go to the United States simply to find work, and I don't have to stop what I'm doing. I mean, which Hollywood film beats 'The Motorcycle Diaries?'

We are open to the world; the world is at our doorstep. It washes in, not just through the windows, but we are immersed in it completely - through the Internet, through the media, through people traveling, coming here, as well as Singaporeans going abroad.

The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable.

Emigration is the great fact of Irish social history.

They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean.

Where have the Americans gone?

Asia is the continent of origination; Europe the continent of differentiation; and America the continent of reunions.

Invite colonists from all the other nations of Europe.

I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic.

We had people and we exported them faster than cattle, and like cattle, and while fathers, sons, and daughters cried all the way to the train and the bus and the ship, the flow back of emigrant cheques and money orders evaporated the maternal and wifely tears so that on the threshold of the Post Office or the Hibernian Bank below in main street you would make a little more with every passing week.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I'm a first-generation kid in this country. I so identify with America and its culture. I'm a citizen, I was born here. I'm American. At the same time, like most first-generation kids, I have this other identity to another country back home, which is India.

I'm pro-human. And I think recognizing the human nature of migration is very important.