Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.
The person in New York City is showing too little empathy for the Trump voter. The Trump voter is showing too little empathy for the person who's very worried about the refugee ban. They're not spending enough time with each other to have a meaningful conversation.
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.
While much attention was focused on Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa entered the continent at the behest of Angela Merkel, the country that admitted the most migrants per capita was Sweden.
'The Odyssey' is a great poem to refugee-dom... Odysseus is not entirely a refugee... he's somebody who's blown off course. The entire book is an exploration of that theme... I reread it every year... That's not as surprising as it sounds, because it's a rip-roaring book.
Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.
I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.
My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.
My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wife's grandfather bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United States.
I know I got to do something that's one in a million, to escape a refugee camp, to come to this country and have so many doors open for me. So I want to go back and make a difference and give motivation or hope to all the kids that never got to leave or have the privilege that I did.
If you live close to an International Rescue Committee office in the United States, find out how you can assist a refugee family as they transition to American life. Invite a newly arrived family to your home for a welcoming meal. Listen to their hopes and dreams, and share your own.
Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up playing on another really good song.
Mass migration and the refugee crisis is one of the biggest problems facing the world. In this country we assume that everyone just wants to come to the U.K. - but it's an issue in Germany, Greece, Sweden, all across the E.U. Why should we be the first to turn our backs on the problem?
In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants.
If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems.
It was less in pity than in anger that the world was moved by the photograph of little Alan Kurdi, that dead three-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose name we're all remembering now on the first anniversary of his drowning, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehanna.
I spent time in refugee camps in Southeast Asia, and in the projects of Chicago. I've been to State dinners with Presidents. I met the Queen of England on a beach in Anguilla. No one is any more valuable or important than you are. No one is more important than your family and your friends.
I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.
Like other conflict-affected regions, Africa continues to see religious, ethnic, and politically motivated conflicts. Extremist violence is now entrenched in several parts of the world. Armed conflicts are leading to protracted refugee crises to the scale that has not been seen since World War II.
My grandmother on my father's side, a nightclub singer, was a Jewish refugee from Prussia who ended up in Jerusalem, where she met my grandfather - a British army officer. I remember as a child having bowls of chicken soup made by her. There were lots of interesting components, like feet and necks.
I spent over 10 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, serving overseas, serving in the Middle East. And let me tell you, if you're a terrorist and you want to come to the United States, the worst possible way to do it is as a refugee. You'll go through a year and a half to two years of vetting.
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.
I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly 'legitimate' state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals.
I think so many people have taken biblical scriptures out of context on this, to say stuff like, 'Well, Jesus was a refugee.' And yes, he did live in Egypt for three and a half years. But it was not illegal. If he had broke the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah.
President Obama has argued there isn't a threat of terrorism from the U.S. refugee program because for individuals who apply it takes two years, 'heavy vetting' and is a relatively long process. It doesn't matter. Jihad is patient, and as ISIS has pledged, it will do whatever it takes to get the job done.
It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.
The United States has already experienced the danger of flawed refugee vetting as well as the potential for refugees to be radicalized once they are here. In 2011, two Iraqi refugees were arrested in Kentucky for conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals abroad in support of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIL.
The political solutions to the refugee crisis may be complex, but that does not mean we should abandon our humanity. We should not close our hearts, retreat behind walls, real or imagined, or ignore the pressing moral imperative to provide assistance and sanctuary for some of the world's most desperate people.
Back in August 2013, when Obama entertained the White House press corps in the Rose Garden to explain that he wasn't quite as eager to upbraid Bashar Assad as he might have inadvertently led them earlier to believe, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees counted about two million Syrians in its refugee statistics.
Because I became a refugee in Macau during 1941, we had this war in Hong Kong, I fought for the government as an air raid warden for 15 days. Our government surrendered, Hong Kong Government surrendered, so I took a junk and came to Macau in 16 hours and I was a refugee, so that's why I was so much indebted to Macau.
I was born in Iran, my parents are Armenian. We fled from Iran to the Netherlands when I was eight years old. We had a lot of family and friends in Iran, so it was hard to leave, especially for my parents. But we managed to settle well in the Netherlands, after a year in refugee camps. But I understood it was a process.
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 refugee camps around the world, I met people who were gone. They were still walking around but had lost so much that they were unable to claim any sort of identity. Others I met found who they truly were, and they generally found it through service to others. They became teachers when there was no school, books or pencils.
Mr. Soros, the chairman of Soros Fund Management, is best-known as a speculator, philanthropist and political activist. He made a fortune by doing things such as betting against Britain's currency in 1992 and Thailand's in 1997. A Hungarian refugee, he has spent millions to promote democracy and learning in post-Soviet nations.
Anne Richard, a senior U.S. State Department official, testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in November 2015 that any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States is scrutinized by officials from the National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and Pentagon.
Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.
The 21 Arab states that could easily have absorbed the original 650,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948 refused to do so, even though their combined land mass was 700 times greater than that possessed by Israel. By contrast, the Jewish population of the new state was only 600,000, yet Israel willingly absorbed some 820,000 Jewish refugees from Europe.
Israel was established as a homeland for the Jewish people and embraced all the Jews who had to leave Arab states. This should be also the true meaning of the future Palestinian state. It should be the answer for the Palestinians wherever they are - those who live in the territories, and those who are being kept as political cards in refugee camps.
