Immigrant Story Quotes

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

We arrived the way most emigrant families did. My father came first, and the rest of us - my mother, my sister and me - followed a year later.

My father was a rags-to-riches businessman who came over in the Sixties with no money. On my mother's side, I am the grandson of a High Court judge and celebrated intelligence officer, so it's quite an unusual combination.

When you look at what's written under the Statue of Liberty, it's the immigrant story. It's about 'bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' It's not about 'only bring me only your rich, your wealthy, your smart.'

When I was a young child, my parents came to America in search of a better life for them and their family.

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago.

I'm the grandson of immigrants who came across rivers and oceans to get here, some without documentation.

My grandmother didn't live to see us begin our lives in public service. But she probably would have thought it extraordinary that just two generations after she arrived in San Antonio, one grandson would be the mayor and the other would be on his way - the good people of San Antonio willing- to the United States Congress.

My being in America and being adopted from the Philippines have given me motivation and drive as an artist.

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

My grandfather was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived in Northern Ireland and apparently when he sang in the synagogue he made everyone cry.

I've always said that Miguel Pinero's story is a quintessential American tale. An immigrant who comes to this country, is immediately marginalized to the lowest economic level and persecuted because of his skin color and, in spite of all the obstacles put in his way, he becomes a huge popular success.

My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn't around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.

I reflect back on my mom's journey, someone who was an immigrant to Canada and came not knowing anything and figured it out tremendously. I reflect back on that a lot.

I came in as a legal immigrant. My dad came first. We had to wait about a year.

I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.

I know that when my grandfather crossed the Rio Grande, somebody was there to support him and to fight for him. I know when my dad was discriminated against because he was a Hispanic, somebody opened doors for him, and that's why he opened doors for others. That's what we do as Americans.

I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it's one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.

My mother raised 14 kids, with little means, from our humble house in Southwest Detroit - and now her daughter, who started school not speaking English, is going to be a congresswoman. It was so important for her to know her strength got me here, and that I'm going to fight every day with her spirit inside me.

My fellow Americans, this is an amazing moment for me. To think that a once-scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of the state of California and then stand here... then stand here in Madison Square Garden and speak on behalf of the president of the United States - that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream.

On my father's side, I'm descended from immigrants, one of whom was a Syrian refugee from the Armenian genocide, and my mother was an immigrant from Germany whose visa had expired and, for a year and change, was undocumented here in the U.S.

DiMaggio was never a rube. He was very smart and very urban. Coming out of the Great Depression, he was the immigrant boy who made it big. Coming back from World War II, he had all the wealth and power that New York aspired to. When New York saw itself as the center of the world, he was its paragon of class.

My family were from Jamaica.

Estiven Rodriguez couldn't speak a word of English when he moved to New York City at age nine. But last month, thanks to the support of great teachers and an innovative tutoring program, he led a march of his classmates - through a crowd of cheering parents and neighbors - from their high school to the post office, where they mailed off their college applications. And this son of a factory worker just found out he's going to college this fall.

My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.