Vivienne Westwood Quotes

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.

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.

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity

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 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.

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

Between the summer of 2015 and spring 2016, Austria became one of the European countries most affected by the migration and refugee crisis.

...the Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless--' 'Huddled masses,' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' ... Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass,' and they all wanna come over.

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.

I watched a documentary about the immigrant crisis around the world. And it does make me blush at all the times I've stood up on the stage and given your speech about the healing power of fiction.

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

Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open.

The poor economic health of Europe contributed to the migrant crisis. All the migrants wanted to flood to the few healthy countries—–like Germany and the U.K.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

Migrants are essentially escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.

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.

Migrants don't come to the United States because, as Ambassador Aponte argued in her press conference, of 'lies' told by smugglers that, once here, you can't get deported. They come because their countries have been destroyed by U.S. policy.

I fear that the migratory crisis signals the beginning of the end of women's rights.

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.

In 2015, the majority of refugees and migrants reached the European Union through Greece. Greek authorities were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people arriving at their shores. But they did not stay there. They were waved through to Central Europe at an increasing pace.

Soros wants to fill Italy and Europe with migrants.

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.

If anyone in the E.U. thinks Italy should keep being a landing point and refugee camp, they have misunderstood.

Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed.

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.