Randolph Bourne Quotes

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

I'm first generation in the country - my family's Mexican.

When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.

I'm such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I've got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.

America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

There was no question of the racial superiority of northwestern Europeans or of the racial inferiority of southeastern Europeans. It was simply a question as to which of these two groups of aliens is, as a whole, best fitted by tradition, political background, customs, education, and habits of thought to adjust itself to American institutions and to American social and economic conditions--to become, in short, an adaptable, homogeneous and helpful element in American national life.

I am first-generation American, so I didn't grow up in the South or have any relatives who were slaves. My forefathers were colonized.

I live in the U.S., but I'm from Brazil.

In the past a lot of Italians emigrated to Argentina, and now us Argentinians, and in my case, us footballers, are returning to Italy. We always try to keep our identity.

I'm Korean-American. Not Colombian. My parents are first-generation, and I'm like... in-between, because I moved over here when I was four or five.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

Australia has an increasingly multicultural society.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

My mom came to the U.S. very young, and then she married very young. But she was never American. She was always Scottish and would make sure that I knew that I was, too.

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.

The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of 'giving themselves without reservation' to the new country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune in a new land.

I'm a Chinese American.

My grandfather on my dad's side was the first in our family to settle in the U.K. He came from Pakistan on his own in the '60s and worked in a cotton mill in Bolton, earning enough to bring over the rest of his family. My dad, Shah, was only about eight when he came to this country. Like most immigrants, he has a fierce work ethic.

There's so many Chinese or Asian Americans that were either born in another country like I was and raised in America or born in America and raised in America. They're normal Americans, and they just happen to have a different heritage.

I was born in Canada, but both my parents are Syrian - they moved to Canada in the '70s, and I was born in a 100-percent-Arab house.

I grow up in the States, in Miami, but I was born in Guatemala, and my father's Cuban, and in 'Body of Lies,' I played an Iraqi.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally 'homogeneous' and have little experience with immigration.