Migrants Quotes

“mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“In the past, one would have been arrested for wanting to leave. Now that nobody was stopping us from emigrating, we were no longer welcome on the other side. The only thing that had changed was the color of the police uniforms. We risked being arrested not in the name of our own government but in the name of other states, those same governments who had urged us to break free. The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated as criminals.

Perhaps freedom of movement had never really mattered. It was easy to defend it when someone else was doing the dirty work of imprisonment. But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out? The border guards, the patrol boats, the detention and repression of immigrants that were pioneered in southern Europe for the first time in those years [1990s] would become standard practice over the coming decades. The West, initially unprepared for the arrival of thousands of people wanting a different future, would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable and attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to "protect our way of life." And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from posing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“For a start, people who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers”
― Patrick Kingsley

“Isn't content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating; it's enmeshed.

That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.

Nationalism is on the rise, I say.

He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“I believe the Law of the Land should allow migrants three months on benefits and then the benefits cease”
― Karl Wiggins, 100 Common Sense Policies to make BRITAIN GREAT again

“You, who are so-called Illegal Aliens, must know that nooo human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful. They can be fat or skinny. They can be right or wrong. But illegal? How can a human being be illegal?”
― Ellie Wiesel

“One day, my sister said, Bri, who is really good with machines and tech, is going to invent a technology that eats all the data that exists about people online so people can be free of being made to be what data says they are.

I am? I said.

Yeah, and then you're going to invent a technology that means you can stop surveillance following people who are travelling from one place to another, because that surveillance isn't anything to do with the real journeys people have to make in the world. And we're going to call that technology Campervan.

Yep, I said. And we'll call the tech that eats all the saved data Colon.

Colon and Campervan, my sister said. They're the future. We're the future. It is this simple.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he'd been a hobo from '37 to '39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. "Killers," he called them. And said it again, "Killers.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Road to Yuba City: A Journey into the Juan Corona Murders

“And it's a little difficult, but it's very valuable to be forced to move from one place to another and deal with another set of situations and to accept that this is going to be -- in fact, it is -- your life.”
― James Baldwin, A Dialogue

“What is the ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged sliver of global society decides, in large enough numbers, that a sufficient number of children have been murdered to warrant choosing a different brand of couscous? That enough migrants have been caged or drowned to make a particular vacation spot unappealing? That the well-being of Congolese children outranks the desire for ever more powerful smartphones?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In a world fractured by turmoil, there's much to learn from the profound human experience shared by the uprooted and displaced.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“There are many lessons to be learned from refugees and migrants that can contribute to the understanding needed to navigate the global tectonics to bring people together, not drive them into flight.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them—hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I'm attending a monthly meeting at Colectiva Por Fin on my first night on Staten Island. The room is small but as more men come in, it seems to double and triple in size. On the wall, migrants are celebrated through art that strikes me as deeply annoying, mostly the word "migrant" reconfigured as butterflies. I fucking hate thinking of migrants as butterflies. Butterflies can't fuck a bitch up.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The first hour of the prayer session consists of the group of faithful men and women on their knees beating their chests and crying out to god for forgiveness. I look at them intently. Some of them seem for real but overall it's super performative. I do not pray to god for forgiveness, because I believe I have nothing to apologize for and he might have to explain a couple of things to me, so I just sit there, moping, angry, but still trying to radiate positive vibes because I'm not going to be the person who is ruining faithful migrants' experience of community. I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only in the lives of people who suffer.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“A bamboo seed was swept by the wind, Away, into the land of stones.
Stones did not like it, One could hear the groans.

"Go away," they told the seed, "You don't belong here.”
Now, there is no land of stones, Only bamboos, and bamboos everywhere.”
― Shon Mehta

“These exiles seemed to have become prisoners of their memory of idyllic origin—they sat together with other prisoners of the past and spoke about the old country, and ate their traditional food while some of their folk music played in the background. They continuously ran counterfactuals
in their minds, generating alternative scenarios that could have happened and prevented these historical ruptures, such as "if the Shah had not named this incompetent man as prime minister, we would still be there." It was as if the historical rupture had a specific cause, and that the catastrophe could have been averted by removing that specific cause. So I
pumped every displaced person I could find for information on their behavior
during exile. Almost all act in the same way.

There was, of course, some wishful thinking in all of these forecasting errors, the blindness of hope, but there was a knowledge problem as well. The dynamics of the Lebanese conflict had been patently unpredictable, yet people's reasoning as they examined the events showed a constant: almost all those who cared seemed convinced that they understood what was going on. Every single day brought occurrences that lay completely outside their forecast, but they could not figure out that they had not forecast them. Much of what took place would have been deemed completely crazy with respect to the past. Yet it did not seem that crazy after the events.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Mass deportation is human trafficking.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Who is here on the shore? Who is watching this shipwreck from the mainland? Is it really just me, no one else? That would suit everyone, but don’t you believe it: I am not here alone on the shore; I’m not alone watching this unending ‘drama at sea’ from a safe distance, night after night.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“You have terror and I have tears.
In this cruel way, we are for each other.

We are at war. You always win.
But I do not go away.

You shoot me again. Again, I do not go away.
You shoot with bullets, but you have nothing else.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“You win. You have always won.
All I can do is not go away.

Not go away is my name.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“These are immigrant times
And the lines are long,

The signs for jobs few,
The songs sadder, the air meaner.

Everyone is hungry.
Everyone is willing.

Jobs are not jobs but lives lived
Hard at the work of being human.

These are immigrant times,
And the lines are long again.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“notice: how they bend in the fires no one sees
notice: their ecstatic colors & their knotted shirts
notice: where they cash
their tiny & wrinkled checks & pay stubs:
stand in that small-town desert sundries store
then walk out they do & stall for a moment they do
underneath this colossal tree with its condor-wings
shedding solace for a second or two notice:
how they touch the earth — for you”
― Juan Felipe Herrera, Every Day We Get More Illegal

“this is not a poor-boy story
this is a pioneer story
this is your story
America are you listening”
― Juan Felipe Herrera, Every Day We Get More Illegal

“Now why do they all come here
Yeah yeah high salaries
I know I know
What if you want a new life I say
for you for your kids Yeah hmmm he says chews his cheek”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“They should all learn English

They do I say they do
some are better at it than others
they struggle hard all day
all day like my students at Oakland Community College
working shifts working three jobs working at grammar
late into the night so they can go to college rush to class eyes red
become doctors lawyers engineers

Yeah he says”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“We crossed the border
Hours before dawn
Through a hole
Dug under a fence.

We crossed
Dressed as soldiers,
Faces painted
Mud green.

The coyotes
That promised
We’d make it, gave us
A straw broom

To drag behind,
Erasing our tracks.
They gave us meat
Drugged for the dogs.

Farther off,
There were engines,
Voices, a light
That swept the ground.

We crossed
On our bellies.
I wonder
If we’ll ever stand up.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question