Migrants Quotes

The library (in the migrant community) I grew up in was my only link to the outside world.

It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.

I have issues with inheritance tax, particularly coming from a migrant family. My dad has worked incredibly hard all his life, so it seems odd to me that someone who has gone through that experience and has managed to save then gets taxed for dying.

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity. They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more

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.

Most incredibly, because to me this is unbelievable, we have no idea who illegal migrants are, where they come from. I always say Trojan horse. Watch what's going to happen, folks. It's not going to be pretty.

What we need to do first is to find out how big the migration problem is and what the economic consequences of it are for the United States and Mexico. We hear a lot of extravagant numbers and claims made, but very few hard facts. We don't really know what, if any, burdens illegal migrants impose on the US economy or the social welfare apparatus, and those issues must be clarified.

The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.

Above all I ask leaders and legislators and the entire international community above all to confront the reality of those who have been displaced by force, with effective projects and new approaches in order to protect their dignity, to improve the quality of their life and to face the challenges that are emerging from modern forms of persecution, oppression and slavery.

There is great potential and deep fragility [in Malaysia] that can be used by any group that stresses on religion, pushing towards Islam, rejecting people and alienating migrants - anything can be used to win the next elections. So these are the signs of fragility that is very much there.

Europeans are dying out. Don't you understand that? And same-sex marriages don't produce children. Do you want to survive by drawing migrants? But society cannot adapt so many migrants.

The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.

People are talking about immigration like it is a disease. In fact migrants pay more in than they get out.

Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning.

Both my parents were migrant workers who came to the U.K. in the Fifties to better themselves. The culture I grew up in was to work hard, save hard and to look after your family.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly.

Instead of confronting its real and difficult problems and grappling honestly with a dark past, Hungary embraced a reactionary government and a self-pitying image of itself as the victimized nation, and went looking for scapegoats in the Roma, Jews, and, most recently, Syrian migrants.

In late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?

I think that Canada is one of the most impressive countries in the world, the way it has managed a diverse population, a migrant economy. The natural beauty of Canada is extraordinary. Obviously there is enormous kinship between the United States and Canada, and the ties that bind our two countries together are things that are very important to us.

If you believe Jesus ever had a good word for war or torture or tax cuts for the rich, or raping the earth, or refusing water to dying migrants, then you might as well believe bunnies lay painted eggs.

We are called to reach out to those who find themselves in the existential peripheries of our societies and to show particular solidarity with the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters: the poor, the disabled, the unborn and the sick, migrants and refugees, the elderly and the young who lack employment.

All the evidence here, for example, in Britain, is that migrants, particularly from the rest of Europe, who come here contribute far more in taxes.

In Italy there are 5 million legal migrants. They're integrated, and they're welcome. The problem of the Muslim presence is increasingly worrying. There are more and more clashes, more and more demands. And I doubt the compatibility of Italian law with Muslim law, because it's not just a religion but a law. And problems can be seen in Great Britain as well as in Germany, so reassessing our coexistence is fundamental.

Even if not one migrant turns out to vote, this was a historic debt that Mexico owed its compatriots abroad. This represents a new political space for our migrants, an opportunity to bridge the gap between two societies, those living in Mexico and those living abroad.

[Pope Francis] symbolically took the migrant south-north route to the United States by going to Cuidad Juarez on the border with Texas, and there he spoke of the human dignity of immigrants.

You have a huge number of people who spend their time writing papers which show that migrants pay more to the country than they take out in benefits, and they say, "Why don't you approve of migration? Why don't you open up borders?" They're not able to empathize with how people feel about migration.

I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important - a very important - part of this.

In terms of protecting ourselves, the main issues are around how do we protect our borders [from illegal migrants and livestock and plant diseases], how do we protect our fisheries?

Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa - previously people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe', and this is exactly what happened.

Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa - previously people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by [Muammar] Gaddafi: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.

Like a prisoner awaiting his release, like a schoolboy when the end of term is near, like a migrant bird ready to fly south ... I long to be gone.

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

I just wanted to show the migrants as complex humans with flaws and weakness, with good and bad things, and show that they're parents and family men. I wanted to show them with everything, as they are.

And a united Europe will also manage to send hundreds of thousands of migrants, who don't have the right to asylum, back to their homelands. Though that, given the number of flights necessary, would be of a scale reminiscent of the Berlin Airlift.

It is ridiculous to believe that Greece might be taking in one million migrants, registering them, then giving refuge to those who have a right to asylum and sending everyone back that does not. Greece is not doing that. We can blame the Greeks for that, but at the same time we should change the Dublin Regulation. When we insist on this unrealistic procedure, it means nothing more than that we are defending Dublin while renouncing Schengen.

I found it really astonishing that undocumented migrants were kidnapped so routinely, that it was such a commonplace part of the journey for people trying to reach the US, and that we hear almost nothing about it here.

We cannot treat people with a right to asylum the same way as people from a safe country. They need to be sent back. That is, from our perspective, completely clear. On the other hand, we should scrutinize the now completely outdated principle that only the migrants' first country of arrival should be burdened with their registration as well as with the process of sorting out who has the right to asylum and who needs to be deported.

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.

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

When I see the migrant workers broken bodies and eyes without hope, I want to embrace and wipe away their fears. It makes me angry and helps me to keep fighting the oppressive system.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.

In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American.

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

We should be the pro-legal immigration party. A party that has a positive platform and agenda on how we can create a legal immigration system that works for immigrants and works for America.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Dear friends, let us not forget the flesh of Christ which is in the flesh of refugees: their flesh is the flesh of Christ. It is also your task to direct all the institutions working in the area of forced migration to new forms of co-responsibility. This phenomenon is unfortunately constantly spreading. Hence your task is increasingly demanding in order to promote tangible responses of closeness, journeying with people, taking into account the different local backgrounds.

[Pope Francis] continued to focus on migrants. He visited the Greek island of Lesbos, which was the front line of the European migrant crisis. And a month later, he accepted a prestigious European Union prize, but he scolded Europe for its treatment of migrants. And in a speech echoing Martin Luther King, he said I have a dream of a Europe where being a migrant is not a crime. So, yeah, he showed he can be quite outspoken on political issues.