Mohsin Hamid Quotes

I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

There are many war refugees and three times as many climate refugees. All of them are people who can no longer live where they were born. I hope we face reality in time to save ourselves. We will all be migrants soon.

If there are more and more environmental refugees, they are going to end up on your doorstep too.

A refugee in the traditional vision is someone who flees from country to another because of persecution or conflict. But what we're witnessing now more and more is a certain number of mega-trends interacting with one another: population growth, urbanization, food insecurity, water scarcity, climate change, and conflict.

We now know that climate change is a driver of migration, and is expected to increase the displacement of populations.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

Climate change, in some regions, has aggravated conflict over scarce land, and could well trigger large-scale migration in the decades ahead. And rising sea levels put at risk the very survival of all small island states. These and other implications for peace and security have implications for the United Nations itself.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

Inequality, climate change, and conflict are evicting millions from their homes. But these perils are being met with 'anti-answers' such as nationalism, closed borders, lies, and hatred.

Everybody is always talking about droughts and sea level rise, but when human civilization, with more crowding and greater resource depletion, is under that much stress, it translates into wars and huge displaced populations. The Syrian refugee crisis is just a first taste of what it's going to be like. I don't want my kids growing up in that kind of world.

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.

There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.

If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.

Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering.

British authorities in Haifa have formed the impression that total evacuation is being urged on the Haifa Arabs from higher Arab quarters and that the townsfolk themselves are against it.

It has been decided to evacuate three million mothers and children tomorrow from the menaced areas. It is rather grim…. It is odd to feel that the world as I knew it has only a few hours more to run.

They [the Mormons] have plundered or robbed and burned every house in Gallatin, our county seat, among the rest our Post Office, have driven almost every individual from the county, who are now flying before them with their families, many of whom have been forced out without necessary clothing, their wives and little children wading in many instances through the snow without a shoe. When the miserable families are then forced out, their houses are plundered and then burned. They are making this universal throughout the county. They have burned for me two houses and, sir, think this not exaggeration, for all is not told. And for the truth of all and every statement here made, I pledge the honor of an officer & gentleman.

Land degradation, rising sea levels, famine, and conflict will continue to drive people from their homes and towards cities, with megacities like Mexico City and Lagos becoming increasingly common in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Mass migrations of climate refugees erode borders and nations, creating a global playground for terrorists and traffickers.

I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living.