Pope Francis Quotes

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.

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.

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity

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.

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

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.

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.

How many migrants, how many immigrants, how many migrants and refugees fleeing war-torn areas in the Middle East are permitted into the Vatican? I'm not kidding. I think I saw a story where they're going to take ... two. It's obviously symbolic. They will take two at the Vatican, thereby setting an example and showing how it's done.

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

Yes, and Syrians. There is a horrible crisis there and the United States has admitted virtually none of the refugees.

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.

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.

Through both our admissions policies and, equally importantly, through our support for international protection and assistance, the United States leads the world in responding to refugee and related humanitarian crises.

The refugee crisis shows we can't be isolated from the world's geopolitical troubles.

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.

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

European leaders cannot afford to be afraid. The refugee crisis is not one from which they can opt out. No magic wand will empower leaders to transport more than a million people back across the Aegean and the Bosphorus to Mosul and Aleppo, or across the Mediterranean to Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan.

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.

There two other areas that are personally deeply important to me, that I hope the Homeland show can attend to in some way - one, being the refugee crisis. These are the most vulnerable people among us in the world. There are over 60 million refugees displaced by war, over 21 million that go to a third country. The numbers are climbing, and there are no legal options for these people. These are the victims of the real world's crises that the Homeland world reflects on, and almost takes a Polaroid of these days, versus a fictional tale of it.

According to the international organization for migration, more than 1 million migrants have arrived in Europe this year, the most since World War II. Half of them were Syrian.

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."

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.