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.
I never, ever, had a person who could come up with the name of a person who could not get a job because an illegal immigrant had stepped in front of them, because it was either a job that person didn't want to do or didn't exist.
I've often felt like an outsider, not necessarily because I'm Korean, an immigrant, or female. I think writers are odd people.
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 knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.
I'm not an immigrant - I was born and raised in New York. My parents are Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S., for the people that don't know. So my whole life, I've identified as an American. There are times when I've gone to Puerto Rico, and there, I'm seen as the American cousin.
I see myself as a transient, not an immigrant.
I came to America, and I made good. It's an old story, but it hasn't been told in a long time. Usually, it's, 'I'm an immigrant, I came here and got persecuted.' My story is I came here, I worked hard, and it worked out all right. So it's still available.
Step one of the initial process of getting a non-immigrant visa is tough, renewing it is tough, and then transferring from the status of non-immigrant to immigrant or green card is tough. The only process which is easy is the last part of transferring from green card to citizenship, but getting there is quite a journey.
I was very heartened by Rupert Murdoch's passionate interest in immigration reform. He is an immigrant himself. He understands from a business perspective how important immigration reform would be to our economy.
We help immigrants because we are an immigrant nation, and we are an immigrant church. We've always done that; this is nothing new to us. This is not a new venture for us. It's who we are and have been from the very beginning of the history of the Catholic Church in this country.
Ben Carson was appointed to be the HUD secretary. He knows nothing about the mission of HUD. He doesn't care about people in public housing. He believes that if you are poor, it is your own fault. And he doesn't know the difference between an immigrant and a slave.
I was the daughter of an immigrant, raised to feel that I needed to get excellent, flawless grades and a full scholarship and a graduate degree and a good job - all the stepping stones to conventional success.
Mr. Trump of course feels sorry for what the Khan family has gone through, just, frankly, as he felt sorry for the victims that spoke before the Republican Convention who lost loved ones from illegal immigrant criminals coming in and being able to travel the country freely.
It is actually costlier to hire an immigrant. And yet the farm worker is almost invariably an immigrant. You can't pay an American to pick blueberries.
You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.
What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American - and sacrosanct - cultural institution: the NFL.
For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.
My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the 'elite.' If so, I damned well earned it.
As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.
I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
I'm a huge supporter of animal rights - and I've been an outspoken critic of the cruelties routinely inflicted on livestock at factory farms. But it really bothers me that the mistreatment of pigs and chickens and cows seems to attract a lot more attention and spark a lot more outrage than the abuse of immigrant workers.