Juan Felipe Herrera Quotes

The twenty-first century will be characterized by the mass movement of people being pushed and pulled within and beyond their borders by conflict, calamity, or opportunity.

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

People only attempt perilous journeys like crossing the Channel because they are desperate. It is deeply concerning that men, women, and children feel they have no choice but to put their lives at risk in their search for a safe place to live.

Why are all these refugees rushing to the beauty and strength of Europe and to the United States and not rushing to their own capitals or the capitals of the Muslim world? We ought to be pushing back. We ought to be putting people back on these boats and putting them back into the places where they came from and telling these leaders in the Arab world, "You have a responsibility as well."

Our world is facing a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Second World War. This presents us with great challenges and many hard decisions.

...in the midst of migrants in search of a better life there are people in need of protection: refugees and asylum-seekers, women and children victims of trafficking...Many move simply to avoid dying of hunger. When leaving is not an option but a necessity, this is more than poverty.

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.

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

Migrants are essentially escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.

There should be a global commitment to try and get rid of UNHCR refugee camps and long-term people in those camps.

Abject poverty, political instability, torture, and other abuses push thousands across our border. There is not a deterrent imaginable that equals the conditions that force their migration.

The global movement of displaced people, many of whom end up in detention without hope, is one of the most pressing issues of our times.

We live in a world where over 160 million people are displaced because of climate change or war, and they have no rights and no protection, and not enough countries or people around the world are helping them.

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.

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

We all have to accept accusations that we ignored the refugee crisis for far too long. The first time that I referred to the Mediterranean Sea as Europe's cemetery was in October 2013, when hundreds of people drowned off Lampedusa. Italians, Maltese, Greeks and Spaniards have been pleading for help for years. But nobody cared.

I hope that something can be done in our piece that reflects on the attention that needs to be paid to the most vulnerable people, like refugees in the world right now, that have to not be politicized, but saved, literally.

The migrants are not a temporary crisis. The crisis is mounting.

I simply don't understand the refugee crisis. The history of humanity can be told through a story of migration and settlement. If I can't protect my family, I'm coming to where you are; I'm just coming. It's a round world, and we've all got to get on with it and move on.

Bashar Assad is a major cause of the refugees which are now flooding Europe and causing such consternation in the United States.

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death.

Angela [Merkel] and I also agreed the need for a comprehensive and humane response to the devastating humanitarian crisis in Syria and for the influx of migrants and refugees from around the world. We need to build on the progress achieved at the U.N. Refugee Summit, which yielded new commitments from some 50 nations and organizations.

In 2013 we had never faced a crisis like the Syrian refugee crisis now. Up until that point, a refugee meant someone fleeing oppression, fleeing Communism like it is in my community.

The flow of people into the United States into slavery, it follows the other types of immigration into the United States, so people who are trying to build new lives, trying to build a better life.