Immigrant Advocacy Quotes

Being in the immigrant rights space, I've heard a lot of transactional talk with questions like, 'When will black people show up for immigrants?'

The DREAMers are the safe ones, right? It's okay to advocate for the DREAMers because they're the English-speaking, college-educated ones, right? It's so interesting that I set out to document DREAMers, but what I ended up doing was actually documenting the experience of, the reality and truth of, the moms and the parents.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

Here in Minnesota, we don't only welcome immigrants; we send them to Washington.

Los Angeles is the strongest defender of immigrants perhaps of any city in this country.

California is many things, and it is a harbinger of what this country will become if illegal immigration isn't stopped. You're gonna have a very rich, very powerful minority of elites - very, very tiny - and they're gonna live in a very few, small, gated enclaves.

There is no more an enthusiastic advocate of legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am, and that is a message that resonates powerfully in the Hispanic community.

Giving people like me a green card, a passport, and a driver's license? That's not going to be the end of the immigration conversation and debate in this country. It's like saying we elected Barack Obama president, so all of the racial problems are done. Right? I mean in some ways, the immigration conversation is just starting. Which is why when we started this campaign, we didn't call it Define Immigrant, we called it Define American. That's the question. That's what's at stake.

I said to one young activist who herself was the daughter of an undocumented worker, and so could speak from a very personal and legitimate perspective - I remember saying to her: I agree with you, from a moral perspective, that a child from Honduras is worth the same as my daughter. God is not a respecter of boundaries; he's not saying that American kids deserve a better life than Honduran kids. But I'm the president of the United States, and the nation-state by definition means that boundaries mean something and borders mean something.

We've got to do everything we can to speak to and protect our immigrant communities.

As an immigrant justice advocate, I, of course, want legal status for everyone trying to make it in this country.

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

As you know, today was Don't Take Your Illegal Immigrant To Work Day here in Los Angeles. No, all across the nation they had a Day Without Immigrants, is what they call it. Or, as Native Americans call it, the good ol' days.

I have experienced power as a journalist. On three different occasions, when I wrote about individual immigrants or refugees, the article - or, in one case, my presence in the courtroom - appeared to positively change the outcome of their cases.

Immigration is not an issue that I read about in the newspaper or watch a documentary on PBS or CNN. It's an issues I've lived around my whole life. My family are immigrants. My wife's family are immigrants. All of my neighbors are immigrants.

Thousands of legal and illegal immigrants staged what they called a Day Without Immigrants. Or, as it's known in Utah, Monday.

There is this kind of sense in the immigrant community, first we were going to do immigration reform, but then 9/11 happened.

We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.

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

Of all my travels in America, nothing has affected me more, nothing even close I have to tell you, than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our borders, which we can solve, we have to solve it!