This is a land of immigrants, and most come here for opportunity, a second chance.

I'm sick of seeing the immigrants in the hotels and the Italians who sleep in cars. This is the racist country.

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

America isn't Congress. America isn't Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

The U.S. tries to provide immigrants who grow up here with a world-class education and imbue them with the can-do attitude that has long defined American innovation.

The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

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

My father was the son of immigrants and he grew up bilingual but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.

It's not surprising then they get bitter they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

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.

I'm an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.

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

Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.

I love the new legal immigrants they want their kids to be safe just like I do.

It is simply a fact that the birth rate of our illegal immigrants exceeds that of our legal residents.

Instead California is one of only 10 states that provides in-state college and university tuition to illegal immigrants. That's grossly unfair to a legal high school student who moves out of California for a year then returns to attend college.

Therefore if we are a Nation of laws and a Nation of immigrants immigration should occur within a legal framework not through the machinations of illegal schemes and scams that threaten our national security.

I have written about the dispossessed immigrants the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

In Psalm 72 Solomon prays for power and fame but he says the purpose of influence is to speak up for others and one is the immigrant. He doesn't delineate between legal and illegal.

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.

As Congress continues to debate ways to address illegal immigration we must remember the many hard-working legal immigrants that contribute so much to our nation's economy and culture.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.