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“If our state is illustrative of anything, it’s that
illegal immigration is seriously out of control and consider these
statistics that the California Department of Justice has provided: 98
percent of all illegal immigrants who are deported for committing felonies
in California will eventually return to the state, and of that number, 40
percent will commit crimes again.”
—Representative John Doolittle (R-Ca.)
in: “Alien Nation?” March
26, 1996, transcript,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/immigrant_benefits1_3-26.html
“Remember, remember
always, that all of us... are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
“What, then, is this new
man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French,
Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now
called Americans, have arisen.”
—J. Hector St. Josh de
Crevecouer
“In times of shrinking
expectations,... everyone feels like a victim and pushes away outsiders to
defend his own corner.”
—Oscar Handlin
“Remember that when you
say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not
like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that
word.”
—Stephen Vincent Benet
“Give me your tired, your
poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of
your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift
my lamp beside the golden door.”
—Emma Larzarus
(This is also the
inscription on the Statue of Liberty at Ellis Island. Ellis Island was a
major immigration station for the United States from 1892 to 1943 and an
immigrant detention station until 1954. Since 1965, it has been part of the
Statue of Liberty National Monument.)
“Everywhere immigrants
have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.”
—John F. Kennedy
“Today a wide-open door
is an invitation to national disaster.”
—FAIR (The Federation for American Immigration
Reform,
http://www.fairus.org)
“The inscription at the base of the Statue of
Liberty was written before welfare…. People [back then] came to this country
to work.”
—Representative Clay Shaw (R-Fla.) in: “Down
on the Downtrodden,” Time, Dec. 19, 1994. |