Mohsin Hamid Quotes

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

I think humans are migratory animals.

Movement of people is taking place on an immense scale, and from a European perspective, the number of potential future immigrants seems limitless.

We emigrated to South Africa and later to Canada so I went to school in several places.

The number of people who left for the United states and Canada increased with every year.

Migration is development.

...the Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless--' 'Huddled masses,' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' ... Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass,' and they all wanna come over.

Immigration is the ultimate entrepreneurship.

I'm very proud to be Canadian, but I would move to New York in a heartbeat.

My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there, and then we moved to New York. I'm not very familiar with Mississippi.

I decided to go to Latin America because many of my students in Washington emigrated from this region and inspired me to learn more about their home countries.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

'Globalization' has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it's nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology - either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.

My father's from Australia and my mother was born in India, but she's actually Tibetan. I was born in Katmandu, lived there until I was eight, and then moved to Australia with my mother and father. So yeah, I'm very mixed up, been to many different schools.

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.

Emigration is the great fact of Irish social history.

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 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.

Migrants are essentially escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.

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.

Immigrants everywhere have been a wonderful bonus for the host countries. Sometimes it amazes me how anti-immigration feelings arise in Europe or the United States, when immigration has been wonderful for business.

The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about.

I grew up in the States and Canada for a while because my mum came over in the 1970s. We lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and then moved to Canada for a few more.

I am from L.A., my siblings are from L.A., but both my parents are from Guatemala, and I have a lot of family members from Mexico.