Rafael Palmeiro Quotes

I hate the Chinese government. If you do not want to embrace North Korean defectors in your country, I understand. But we have a country where we can seek asylum. So please, let us freely pass through. Why are you doing your best to try and catch defectors?

We have a human rights interest. Then there is the immigration problem. The human-rights violations have caused people to take to boats and flood not only the United States, but other countries in the region, creating great instability.

Migration is as natural as breathing, as eating, as sleeping. It is part of life, part of nature. So we have to find a way of establishing a proper kind of scenario for modern migration to exist. And when I say 'we,' I mean the world. We need to find ways of making that migration not forced.

It shouldn't be the asylum seekers wondering which country they want go to. It should be Europe telling them where to be, be it Lithuania, Sweden, or wherever.

I am one of the lucky North Koreans who made it out of China. North Korean defectors in the country are terrified of trying to leave because they are often caught at the borders as they attempt to cross into Mongolia or Laos.

In Greece, refugees are being waved through to the heart of Europe. That is simply unacceptable in the long run. The European Union cannot act like a human trafficker.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.

I wish we didn't have to own up to a policy deliberately designed to inflict suffering on people who have already been traumatised in the countries from which they've fled.

I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to stand up for those citizens of the world who cannot stand up for themselves, and I am proud to have authored the bill signed into law today that continues to put significant pressure on the brutal Burmese military junta.

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.

Sooner of later, universal human rights will include the right not to be killed by the government.

Displacement is very tough on the people who are displaced and for the country that is hosting them.

In the global world, we have an unprecedented mobility of peoples, we are aware of the needs of refugees and asylees, and not to speak of the 30 million displaced persons as a result of civil wars within their own countries. And yet the map that we navigate literally is the map of the nation state, and so we have no way as a world community of addressing this problem of border movement and trans-border justice, except through the categories of nation state.

The President of Iran is a genocidal maniac.

We seem to have an obligation to protect if a dictator is going to rapidly kill many of his people on CNN. We do not seem to have the same obligation if he will kill his people slowly and not on CNN.

The Syrian people deserve much more than complicit silence, or timid criticism from those who have failed to refer the regime to the International Criminal Court despite acknowledgement if its crimes.

There are millions of people all over the world, right now, who are looking to the United Nations for protection and redress against the violation of their rights and deprivation of their freedoms.

… all governments have the moral duty to do everything possible to ensure humanitarian assistance to those suffering because of … conflict, both within and beyond the country’s borders.

I didn't plan that there'd be this awful situation in which our European governments, just to start the story off, breaking the Geneva conventions on the protection on the human rights of refugees.

Does the global Left - as well as the Israeli Left - truly not care about the horrific Taliban regime, the terrible oppression of women in Gulf states, and the mass hanging festivals in Iran?

Our world faces many grave challenges: Widening conflicts and inequality. Extreme weather and deadly intolerance. Security threats - including nuclear weapons. We have the tools and wealth to overcome these challenges. All we need is the will.

And so border security is not simply preventing people from getting in, but very often preventing somebody from leaving for the wrong reasons.

We need not to just kill the boat-smuggling business model: we also need to get rid of this asylum-shopping in the European Union.

No level of border security, no wall, doubling the size of the border patrol, all these things will not stop the illegal migration from countries as long as a 7-year-old is desperate enough to flee on her own and travel the entire length of Mexico because of the poverty and the violence in her country.

We tend to think of World War II and all the atrocities that happened, and people say, 'Never again.' But these things are still happening. The Amnesty International files are big.