These migrant quotes will inspire you. Migrant is a person who moves from one place to another, especially in order to find work or better living conditions.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging migrant quotes, migrant sayings, and migrant proverbs.
Best Migrant Quotes
- “Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity. They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more” ~ Pope Francis
- “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.” ~ Donald Trump
- “Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “One of the most important improvements in the No Child Left Behind Act for migrant students was the requirement for electronic transfer of migrant student records.” ~ Ruben Hinojosa
- “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
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“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Above all I ask leaders and legislators and the entire international community above all to confront the reality of those who have been displaced by force, with effective projects and new approaches in order to protect their dignity, to improve the quality of their life and to face the challenges that are emerging from modern forms of persecution, oppression and slavery.” ~ Pope Francis
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“In Illinois, community, migrant, homeless and public housing health centers operate 268 primary care sites and serve close to 1 million patients every year.” ~ Jan Schakowsky
- “Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.” ~ Ruth First
- “It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.” ~ Richard Leakey
- “Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly.” ~ Anton Chekhov
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“Isn’t it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?” ~ Amin Maalouf
- “The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.” ~ Bill Gates
- “We should be the pro-legal immigration party. A party that has a positive platform and agenda on how we can create a legal immigration system that works for immigrants and works for America.” ~ Marco Rubio
- “The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They’re not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They’re not small farmers, they’re not market gardeners, they’re just temporary – uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.” ~ Wendell Berry
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“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “The migrants are not a temporary crisis. The crisis is mounting.” ~ Vivienne Westwood
- “We are called to reach out to those who find themselves in the existential peripheries of our societies and to show particular solidarity with the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters: the poor, the disabled, the unborn and the sick, migrants and refugees, the elderly and the young who lack employment.” ~ Pope Francis
- “…in the midst of migrants in search of a better life there are people in need of protection: refugees and asylum-seekers, women and children victims of trafficking…Many move simply to avoid dying of hunger. When leaving is not an option but a necessity, this is more than poverty.” ~ Antonio Guterres
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“[Refugees] cannot be stopped, but they can and must be managed better, more humanely, protecting migrants’ human rights whilst accepting states’ rights to control their borders.” ~ Kofi Annan
- “I just wanted to show the migrants as complex humans with flaws and weakness, with good and bad things, and show that they’re parents and family men. I wanted to show them with everything, as they are.” ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
- “Given that the label “immigrant literature” is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.” ~ Sasa Stanisic
- “Given that the label “immigrant literature” is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.” ~ Sasa Stanisic
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“The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.” ~ John Steinbeck
- “The truth is, however rich people get, they hate paying tax. Some live abroad for a year, or years at a time just to avoid it. Bizarre really – desperate economic migrants are driven to leave their homeland because of poverty; tax exiles are driven overseas by their wealth.” ~ Clint Black
- “How do geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within if only we would listen to it, that tells us certainly when to go forth into the unknown.” ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- “You’ve got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society.” ~ Stephen Harper
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“As long as they are working, they should be legalized. I admire so much each and every migrant. They are the most loyal workers in the U.S. economy. They build the homes of those who are attacking them.” ~ Vicente Fox
- “In Holland, pensions were cut. The public health services for elderly people were cut. Enormous asocial tough measures. And at the same time people saw while the government has these enormous austerity measures, that the government spent billions of euros on asylum seekers who really weren’t asylum seekers but migrants looking for a better life.” ~ Geert Wilders
- “We cannot treat people with a right to asylum the same way as people from a safe country. They need to be sent back. That is, from our perspective, completely clear. On the other hand, we should scrutinize the now completely outdated principle that only the migrants’ first country of arrival should be burdened with their registration as well as with the process of sorting out who has the right to asylum and who needs to be deported.” ~ Paolo Gentiloni
- “Although, my guess is that what Donald Trump will do tonight is to try to thread that needle by kind of softening his policy position or maybe just the questions about what you do with those 11 million, while getting tough on criminal migrants.” ~ Michelle Goldberg
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“When I see the migrant workers broken bodies and eyes without hope, I want to embrace and wipe away their fears. It makes me angry and helps me to keep fighting the oppressive system.” ~ Irene Fernandez
- “Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can’t stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.” ~ Marian Wright Edelman
- “To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence – we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child – we apologise, and we are sorry.” ~ Malcolm Turnbull
- “The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West…. And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, … a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.” ~ John Steinbeck
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“Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.” ~ Cormac McCarthy
- “Intellectual traditions emerging from populations that have always been the constitutive other in the development of the properly free citizen – indigenous people, populations labeled physically or mentally unfit, black people, migrants, women, prisoners – have always produced robust critiques of the what Dylan Rodriguez calls “white bourgeois freedom.”” ~ Dean Spade
- “Like a prisoner awaiting his release, like a schoolboy when the end of term is near, like a migrant bird ready to fly south … I long to be gone.” ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
- “We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker’s child to miss school in order to earn…just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.” ~ Barbara Jordan
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“The library (in the migrant community) I grew up in was my only link to the outside world.” ~ Luis Valdez
- “Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.” ~ Susan Faludi
- “I like talking about people who don’t have any power and it seems like some of the least powerful people in the United States are the migrant workers who come and do our work and don’t have any rights as a result. And yet we still invite them to come here, and at the same time ask them to leave.” ~ Stephen Colbert
- “All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.” ~ Salman Rushdie
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“Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.” ~ Michael Oppenheimer
- “It is ridiculous to believe that Greece might be taking in one million migrants, registering them, then giving refuge to those who have a right to asylum and sending everyone back that does not. Greece is not doing that. We can blame the Greeks for that, but at the same time we should change the Dublin Regulation. When we insist on this unrealistic procedure, it means nothing more than that we are defending Dublin while renouncing Schengen.” ~ Paolo Gentiloni
- “Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa – previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe’, and this is exactly what happened.” ~ Julian Assange
- “When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.” ~ Dallas Willard
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“Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning.” ~ Phil Gingrey
- “The U.K. needs a system for family migration underpinned by three simple principles. One: that those who come here should do so on the basis of a genuine relationship. Two: that migrants should be able to pay their way. And three: that they are able to integrate into British society.” ~ Theresa May
- “There is a significant moral difference between a person who commits a violent crime and a person who tries to cross a border illegally in order to put food on the family table. Such migrants my violate our laws against illicit entry, but if that’s all they do they are trespassers, not criminals. They deserve to have their dignity respected.” ~ Madeleine Albright
- “In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.” ~ Mary Catherine Bateson
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“My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez’s work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.” ~ Caitlin Flanagan
- “I think there’s a big misunderstanding on the value of migrants.” ~ Vicente Fox
- “What we need to do first is to find out how big the migration problem is and what the economic consequences of it are for the United States and Mexico. We hear a lot of extravagant numbers and claims made, but very few hard facts. We don’t really know what, if any, burdens illegal migrants impose on the US economy or the social welfare apparatus, and those issues must be clarified.” ~ Ernesto Zedillo
- “Mexico has become a robust democracy with a robust press and an active legislature. It has gone from being a sending country for migrants to a transit country, and increasingly a receiving country for migrants in its own right.” ~ Alan Bersin
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“Migrants are an asset to every country where they bring their labour. Let us give them the dignity they deserve as human beings and the respect they deserve as workers” ~ Juan Somavia
- “I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important – a very important – part of this.” ~ Ernesto Zedillo
- “I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it’s both. It seems like I’m always leaving my home. That’s part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.” ~ Junot Diaz
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“Everybody who comes to the EU as a migrant is basically coming illegally.” ~ Viktor Orban
- “In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.” ~ Mary Catherine Bateson
- “I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 percent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.” ~ Pauline Hanson
