Quotes about Immigration

As often as I listen to the worries about China eating the jobs of the West, I hear the concern about the influence of the American way of life in the East. The question is: "Does globalization mean Americanization?" My short answer is no. In measuring globalization, we can count telephone calls, currency flows, trade sums, and so on, but the spread of culture and ideas cannot be so easily measured. Embedded in the present is the unrecognized paradox that culturally, America itself is changing more dramatically than America is changing the world. It is the world that is changing the world. Immigration is reshaping America more profoundly than America's influence around the world.

Several years ago when lecturing in Tokyo, I was talking about how immigration was constantly replenishing America's talent pool and later noted that it wasn't by chance that the United States had more than 300 Nobel Prize winners and Japan only had four. A guy in the second row said, "Yeah, but most of those Nobel winners moved to the U.S. from other countries." "Thanks," I answered, "for making my point."