Leadership Quote by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Agency is the hinge in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's line: the country opens a door, but she insists on walking through it. The phrasing is deliberately transactional and asymmetrical. "They decided" places sovereignty with the state and, implicitly, with voters and institutions that police belonging. Then she flips the usual immigrant narrative of passive reception into a claim of earned membership: "they gave us a chance" is met by "I took it". The verb choice is quietly combative. A chance can be offered as charity; taking it turns charity into entitlement-by-action, a bid to be judged by participation rather than origin.

The subtext also draws a boundary. By foregrounding participation, she hints at a standard immigrants should meet: not merely arriving, but integrating, contributing, adopting civic norms. It's a moral argument disguised as gratitude. The "us" to "I" shift matters too. She begins within a group marked as outsiders, then narrows to the singular self as proof-of-concept. That move supports a larger political stance she has often advanced: immigration can be justified when it produces citizens who embrace liberal democratic values, and can be criticized when it doesn't.

Context sharpens the edge. Hirsi Ali's public life has been shaped by her migration story and her critique of religious authoritarianism and multicultural deference in Western Europe and the U.S. Read against polarized debates over asylum, integration, and national identity, the quote is less a thank-you note than a compact theory of belonging: admission is a policy choice; legitimacy is something the immigrant must seize, publicly, as a kind of civic performance.