Jason DeParle Quotes

• “What the journalist Alex Massie wrote in The Spectator offers a warning beyond Britain: If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people that they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river . . . that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place something or someone is going to snap.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “One way to do that is to be wary of seeing the issue in absolutist terms. Immigration is generally good for America. But that doesn’t mean it’s good at every level and in all varieties. America’s absorptive capacity is great but not unlimited, and not every migrant is as easily absorbed as Rosalie. There’s a place for principled compromise. Legal status for the Dreamers is crucial;”

  Jason DeParle

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• “Emet had lived a hard life without growing hardened—a mixed blessing given the indignities of his poverty.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “One way to do that is to be wary of seeing the issue in absolutist terms. Immigration is generally good for America. But that doesn’t mean it’s good at every level and in all varieties. America’s absorptive capacity is great but not unlimited, and not every migrant is as easily absorbed as Rosalie. There’s a place for principled compromise. Legal status for the Dreamers is crucial; the diversity lottery is not.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “There is no magic number of immigrants, just as there is no perfect mix of high-skilled, low-skilled, relatives, and refugees. What is essential is that America welcome those who are here and remain receptive to the gifts others can bring, whether they come with distinguished degrees or calloused hands.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “Every reporter who sets off across the borders of class and culture should find such kind, candid, and wise guides.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “A good provider is one who leaves.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “took time from their demanding lives to offer encouragement and ideas. Ann Hulbert has been an especially steadfast friend.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “Since 2008, the United States has attracted more Asians than Latin Americans, and nearly half of the newcomers, like Rosalie, have college degrees. Every corner of America has an immigrant like her.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “placing family needs above individual desires,”

  Jason DeParle

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• “was able to finish my studies, to help my family members, to have a good job. . . . Now everything is complete. . . . It’s more than happiness. It’s joy.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “The last time I thanked my wife, Nancy-Ann, for enduring the tribulations of being a book writer’s spouse, I kept it simple, noting only that she was the best thing that had ever happened to me. She still is.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “When Filipinos want to express deep appreciation, they say they have an utang na loob—a debt of gratitude.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “Education, a force meant to erode class barriers, now fortifies them.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “My utangs extend to Chris Villanueva for years of gracious welcomes and kind assistance”

  Jason DeParle

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• “The biggest controversy in immigrant education involves students with limited English, who account for about 10 percent of the K–12 population. About three-quarters are Latino, and most are low income.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “But the bigger point is that most non-English speakers are in weak schools no matter the language of instruction. Nationally, English-language learners drop out at about twice the average rate.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “The tiny Emirates has more than eight million migrants—more than Canada, France, Australia, or Spain. A rags-to-riches story on a nation-state scale, it was a sleepy patch of desert until the 1960s, when it discovered it held 9 percent of the world’s oil.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “No country relies on migrants more than the United Arab Emirates, where 88 percent of the population and nearly the entire private workforce is foreign-born.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “The earlier immigrants were virtually all poor, whereas nearly a third of today’s are college graduates like Rosalie. More than one in eight has a graduate degree—slightly more than natives.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “It was more like an encounter with grace. Tita faced crushing poverty without being crushed. As a reporter in the States, I had tried to understand what kept people from seizing opportunity in a society of plenty. As a reporter in Leveriza, I tried to understand how people seized opportunity where it scarcely existed.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “In describing their search for the sublime, Celtic pilgrims talk of “thin places” where the distance between heaven and earth narrows and the presence of God is more readily felt. Rosalie, the almost nun, worked in a thin place.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “I am sad because they’re in a far place,” Tita said. Emet was especially susceptible to nostalgia for the bad old days in the slums. “I was happier then, because I was with my children.” One reason Rosalie had left Lara behind was that she felt her parents needed children to love.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “Migration had brought development, to a degree that no one had imagined. And development brought more migration.”

  Jason DeParle

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• “Chris will not talk,” she said. “He will keep everything in his heart, and later it will burst.”

  Jason DeParle

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