I'm the daughter of refugees. The immigrant mentality is to work hard, be brave, and never give up in your pursuit of achieving the American dream.

It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.

It's happening: Lou Dobbs' dream come true and Silicon Valley's worst nightmare. We're already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their U.S. educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.

My name, my origins, my background and my experiences are what leveraged my success. The angle of the immigrant, through which I examined the reality in France, distinguished me.

Immigrants provide skills that we simply cannot afford to do without. They have contributed hugely to Britain's success.

My foundation now has some 120 football pitches laid out for children, a lot of them immigrants. We live in a multicultural society.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act... about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.

If you got up this morning and had fruits for breakfast, it was probably picked by the bent back of an immigrant worker. If you slept in a hotel or motel of the nation, you probably had your room done by an immigrant worker.

I am not a woman on Monday, an immigrant on Tuesday, a worker on Wednesday, and a mom on Thursday, I am all of those things all of the time, and I am going to fight for all of those things all of the time.

What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.

Yes, we become stronger when men and women, young and old, gay and straight, native-born and immigrant fight together to create the kind of country we all know we can become.

My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.

We are a country of immigrants who have built this great nation, but it is legal immigration that we should be recognizing and encouraging.

I came in as a legal immigrant. My dad came first. We had to wait about a year.

Legal immigrants deserve respect for following the laws of our nation and completing the process. This is not an extreme concept. It is a matter of simply protecting our nation's sovereignty and knowing who is coming into our nation.

I'm an immigrant, a legal immigrant to the United States. I only became a citizen five years ago. Every day, for seven months, I pinched myself as I was walking in and out of the West Wing, so it's only in America, right? Only in America.

Many of the concessions that leading Democrats seem willing to make - from cutting diversity visas to chipping away at family visas - would be made on the backs of black immigrants, people from Africa and the Caribbean who deserve these policies to remain intact as some of the few legal tools they have to immigrate to this country.

As an immigrant justice advocate, I, of course, want legal status for everyone trying to make it in this country.

Legal immigrants have been an engine of economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship on this continent for longer than we have been a nation.

In order to create real, long-lasting reform, we must create a pathway to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants who have made lives for themselves and their families in the United States.