Immigrant Life Quotes

For the first year I lived in New York, I never ate out. I literally just ate lentils and brown rice at home. Sometimes I'd treat myself to this half chicken from Chinatown that cost $3.50.

I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.

I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.

I remember what it was like when my parents couldn't help me with my homework because they couldn't speak the language, or being a translator for my parents. I did that a lot.

My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.

[Everybody Loves Somebody] was a different take on that immigrant sort of life.

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.

We left my birthplace, Brooklyn, New York, in 1939 when I was 13. I enjoyed the ethnic variety and the interesting students in my public school, P.S. 134. The kids in my neighborhood were only competitive in games, although unfriendly gangs tended to define the limits of our neighborhood.

When I came to America, I had some surprises at first, but I could soon adjust.

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

I grew up in Florida, and I have a lot of friends, close friends, who are Cuban-Americans, and I have heard the stories of their families escaping, and some of them didn't even make it to come to the United States for a better life to get away from the Castros.

I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. We just knew the rule was you're going to have to work twice as hard.

Your stereotypical L.A. Persian kids were not working at Sbarro pizza in the mall, but I was.

My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion - 24 hours a day for years.

I understood from a very young age that school was important and that my parents were making great sacrifices for me. Every morning I saw my father get up and go to a job that he didn't really like. They came to France for the same reasons all immigrants move to another country - so their kids could have a better way of life.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

I learned at a very young age that my parents were undocumented.

I'm a different immigrant. My life is so lucky compared to so many.

I have been disgusted to find that those people (immigrants) can live where a decent man would die; they can live on ... food that other men would not touch.

The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.

I grew up in Venezuela, and when I was 14-years-old, my parents decided to sell everything and come to America. Five of us lived in a two bedroom house. It wasn't a sad truth, it was just the way it was [at the time]. That feeling is so universal for every immigrant.

The Bronx, I remember, was a very poor neighborhood, but that was all that immigrants could afford at that time. Life was tough. I grew up - my father didn't have a job, but there weren't too many people who did have jobs.

I've been going through immigration all my life, and I've been stopped for traffic violations by cops, and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.

I have no problem living in Liverpool, but I think my wife and daughters deserve to enjoy every day to the full and live their lives - but they have to be at home all day. My wife doesn't speak a word of English, so she depends 100% on me. I live here with them. That's my world, that's my life.

A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.