Immigration

Immigration is the movement of people from one nation-state to another. While human migration has existed throughout human history, immigration implies long-term permanent residence (and often eventual citizenship) by the immigrants.

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• If you should turn back from this land to Europe the foreign ministers of the Gospel, and the foreign attorneys, and the foreign merchants, and the foreign philanthropists, what a robbery of our pulpits, our court rooms, our storehouses, and our beneficent institutions, and what a putting back of every monetary, merciful, moral, and religious interest of the land! This commingling here of all nationalities under the blessing of God will produce in seventy-five or one hundred years the most magnificent style of man and woman the world ever saw. They will have the wit of one race, the eloquence of another race, the kindness of another, the generosity of another, the æsthetic taste of another, the high moral character of another, and when that man and woman step forth, their brain and nerve and muscle an intertwining of the fibres of all nationalities, nothing but the new electric photographic apparatus, that can see clear through body and mind and soul, can take of them an adequate picture.
  • T. DeWitt Talmage was an American Presbyterian preacher.

• There are two movements in the history of colonization: invasion and immigration. Emigration is a reaction to the invasion of a nation. Because they have been invaded—they will emigrate. This is about changing perspective from the point of view of the colonizer to the point of view of the colonized. The colonizer organizes the invasion but doesn’t prepare for the counter-invasion. The colonized moves from the land of the invaded to the land of his invader with the same adventurous spirit of the conqueror—not to avenge with arms but to reap the spoils of war—to infiltrate that new culture and to conquer it with his own culture.
  • Giannina Braschi, Latin American novelist and poet, "United States of Banana".

• I am a piggybank. Immigrants talk to me about their feelings. They feel like piggybanks. But if you feel your brain is a piggybank—for God’s sake—in God we trust—work harder until you become a cash-machine. Your salary will increase and so will your social status when you print a business card that states your name and your new title. From Assistant Piggybank to Associate Cash-Machine. Progress in this society has to do with the profession of money.
  • Giannina Braschi, Latin American novelist and poet, "United States of Banana".