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This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto QUOTES

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto QUOTES

1 " Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else's border. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

2 " The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story. Of the arduous journey here, the snow on the streets, the rude immigration agent or the kindly social worker; the lights of the Eiffel Tower or the cold reception from the cousins with whom he’s staying. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

3 " Europeans extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labour from African slaves between 1619 and 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that’s worth $97 trillion – more than the entire global GDP. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

4 " All told, in the colonial period, Europeans increased their share of global GDP from 20 to 60 per cent, Hickel points out. ‘Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.’ The Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sums it up: ‘We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

5 " A friend of mine was working with an international NGO in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in 2017 when she noticed something odd: there were children older than five and younger than two, but very few two- to five-year-olds. It was, she discovered, because when the Rohingya fled from the army and the militias, children of that generation couldn’t run as fast as the older ones and were too heavy to be held by their parents. They fell behind, and the soldiers advanced on them with machetes. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

6 " The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn't money; it's a story. Of the arduous journey here, the snow on the streets, the rude immigration agent or the kindly social worker; the lights of the Eiffel Tower or the cold reception from the cousins with whom he's staying. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

7 " Migrants are the creators of some of the biggest and most liquid capital flows anywhere. They send back some $600 billion in remittances every year,6 which amounts to three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers, four times more than all foreign aid, and 100 times the amount of all debt relief. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

8 " The whole system of visas and borders is less than a hundred years old; it only came into force in most places after World War II. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

9 " Today, the eight richest individuals on earth, all men, own more than does half the planet,6 or 3.7 billion people, combined. The top 1 per cent have more wealth than the bottom 99 per cent combined. There are 1,542 billionaires today, whose fortunes rose by a fifth in 2017,7 to $6 trillion – equivalent to the GDP of the UK and Germany combined. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

10 " The immigration divide is also an urban–rural divide.4 In country after country, rural voters elect xenophobes. The majority of people who voted for Brexit lived in the British countryside; multicultural London was the Tower of Babel for them. The areas that have the fewest immigrants are the ones most afraid of them. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

11 " In 2016, 83 percent of the winners in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair were children of immigrants. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

12 " Countries like Canada realize this, and have seen the burgeoning American resistance to immigration as something to be exploited. “If you guys cannot figure out your immigration system, we’re going to invite the best and brightest to come north of the border,” said Jason Kenney, Canada’s immigration minister for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, before a 2013 trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

13 " In 1770, the British East India Company – the world’s first multinational corporation – increased the taxes it forcibly collected on crops, and ten million people, a third of Bengal, starved to death. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

14 " The greatest sorrow, said Dante, was to recall in misery the time when we were happy. The sadness of a lost happy time. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

15 " One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “Why are you here?” the man demanded. “Why are you in my country?” “Because we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

16 " Developing countries lose three times as much to tax havens as the $125 billion in aid that they receive.8 There are some sixty tax havens in the world, most of them controlled by the West. Money being smuggled out of sub-Saharan Africa and into them is growing by 20 per cent a year.9 In 2011, tax havens held $4.4 trillion of the wealth of developing countries. This is wealth that should be used to grow crops, educate children and develop cities in the poor countries. Instead, it’s sitting in Luxembourg and the City of London. "

― Suketu Mehta , This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto