Antonio Guterres Quotes

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

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.

Can you really send back people to where they are fleeing from?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

While the war in Iraq was raging, I spent some time in neighbouring Jordan, meeting with Iraqi refugees who fled their country to try to find some place of safety. I interviewed many families about what had happened to them and what they did as a result.

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

Countries around the world have their own immigration laws and methods of dealing with a recurring theme: desperate people searching for peace from volatile parts of the world. And nations everywhere thrive and prosper from the contributions of immigrants and the children of immigrants - including right here in the U.S.

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

But last year there were 540,000 people, roughly, detained coming across the border illegally. Forty-five thousand of them came from countries other than Mexico, demonstrating the fact that Mexico itself now is a pathway into the United States for people all around the world, and we don't know what their intentions are.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

Stateless people are hidden. During the 2011 refugee crises, it was obvious that people were fleeing Somalia and Libya - there was a lot of international attention. Statelessness goes undetected because stateless people are in legal limbo and are afraid to show up.

Instead of people thinking, 'Oh God, look at this terrible refugee crisis; we must do our bit', there's a lot of people thinking, 'How can we get out of doing our bit and find reasons not to provide sanctuary for these people?'

I can't understand why someone wouldn't have a degree of sympathy for people that had to flee their country, travel to try and find their home somewhere, and nobody wants them. How could you not be a little bit sympathetic?

People end up fleeing countries who adopt economic policies based on these flawed principles. And more often than not, they come here.