International Migrants Day 2013 is an opportunity to celebrate and recognize the struggles of the many people around the world who have left their homeland in search of a brighter future. First initiated by the United Nations in 2000, the declaration "recognized the important contribution of migration to development [and] respect the human rights of migrants." As such, Latin Times has compiled 10 inspirational quotes from politicians, poets and writers which recognize the struggles as well as the contributions of the world's many migrants.
"All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one's home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession -- to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership -- is a joke."
- Neal Ascherson
"Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me."
- Carlos Fuentes
"He doesn't like my name ... Of course we couldn't all come over on the Mayflower ... But I got here as soon as I could, and I never wanted to go back, because to me it is a great privilege to be an American citizen." - Anton Cermak, Czech-born Chicago mayoral candidate, 1931
"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-tost to me / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" - Poet Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," 1883, inscribed beneath the Statue of Liberty in 1903
"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"If we say we believe in equality for all then we must fight for equality for all, not betray our immigrant sisters."
- Christine Pelosi
"We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better."
- Mitt Romney
"The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples."
- Lyndon B. Johnson
"God's love for others does not stop at the border; neither should ours."
- Dillon Burroughs
"Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it."
- Junot Diaz
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