Refugee Crisis Quotes

“It's strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“For a start, people who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers”
― Patrick Kingsley

“The choice is not between the current crisis and blissful isolation. The choice is between the current crisis and an orderly, managed system of mass migration. You can have one or the other. There is no easy middle ground”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

“...he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“The current system for refugees who remain in their region of origin is a disaster. It is premised upon an almost exclusively 'humanitarian' response. A system designed for the emergency phase - to offer an immediate lifeline - ends up enduring year after year, sometimes decade after decade. External provision of food, clothing, and shelter is absolutely essential in the aftermath of having to run for your life. But over time, if it is provided as a substitute for access to jobs, education, and other opportunities, humanitarian aid soon undermines human dignity and autonomy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“For the period that refugees are in limbo, we should be creating an enabling environment that nurtures rather than debilitates people's ability to contribute in exile and when they ultimately go home. This should involve all of the things that allow people to thrive and contribute rather than merely survive: education, the right to work, electricity, connectivity, transportation, access to capital.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The humanitarian silo model is increasingly out of touch. It fails against almost any metric. It doesn't help refugees, undermining their autonomy and dignity. It doesn't help host governments, transforming potential contributors into a disempowered and alienated generation in their midst. It doesn't help the international community, leaving people indefinitely dependent upon aid, less capable of ultimately rebulding their countries of origin, and with onward movement as their only viable rout to opportunity.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The catch-22 is that urban refugees are expected to help themselves and yet cannot freely access the labour market.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“There is an alternative. And it starts with recognizing that refugees have skills, talents, aspirations. They are not just passive objects of our pity, but actors constrained by cruel circumstance. They do not have to be an inevitable burden, but instead can help themselves and their communities - if we let them.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Imagine if, instead of the humanitarian silo, we could conceive of an approach that could support refugees' autonomy and dignity while simultaneously empowering them to contribute to host communities and the eventual reconstruction of their country of origin.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Humanitarianism may be appropriate during an emergency phase but beyond that it is counter-productive.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“As we have seen, the geographical reality is that the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees are in countries that neighbour conflict and crisis. These 'countries of first asylum' in developing regions today host 86 per cent of all refugees, up from 72 per cent a decade ago. In consequence, it is the countries with the least capacity to host refugees that bear the greatest responsibility.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“But generosity of spirit is not enough: our responses must be grounded in wisdom. The headless heart may lead to outcomes little better than the heartless head. So we need to be a little more specific about what generosity of spirit implies. What shoud it mean in the context of Syria, and, by extension, what should it mean more widely in the global context of refugees?”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Around the world, refugees are effectively offered a false choice between three dismal options: encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The world simply has not created a refugee assistance model compatible with a world of global cities.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Although UNHCR has an Urban Refugee Policy, it offers very little assistance in practice, with most urban refugees receiving no tangible help. By moving to cities, most refugees relinquish all formal support but also end up locked out of the formal economy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Over half of the world's refugees, including 75 percent of Syrians, live in urban areas in neighbouring countries. But, in cities, assistance is limited and the formal right to work is usually restricted.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“From a refugee's perspective, long-term encampment has described as a 'denial of rights and a waste of humanity'.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The cooperation problem in the refugee regime can be thought of as what game therorists would describe as a 'suasion game': one in which weaker players are left with little choice but to cooperate and stronger players are left with little incentive to cooperate.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“One way of grounding how we should identify refugees in a changing world is through the concept of force majeure - the absence of a reasonable choice but to leave. More specifically, the threshold for refuge would be: fear of serious physical harm. And the test would be: when would a reasonable person not see her- or himself as having a choice but to flee? In other words, if you were in the same situation, what would you do?”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“A new approach to safe havens that is radically more supportive is urgently needed in order to address this dysfunctional imbalance, and to simultaneously meet the concerns of donors, hosts, and refugees.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps. Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The inability of refugees to earn a living within the standard UNHCR approach was not only psychologically diminishing for the refugees, but also highlighted the lack of viability of the financing model. Paying for 4 million refugees to live without work for ten years was manifestly unsustainable. Even at a cost of only $1,000 per refugee per year, which would have implied a drastic reduction in lifestyle relative to Syrian pre-refugee conditions, the bill would have amounted to $40bn.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The Dark Cloud
Is the danger women face every day and that is why many of them cried
Is the stranger you were attacked by while walking outside
Is the unfortunate stoicism of refugees who are told that what they have to offer is not smart or new
Is the power that a group can have even if they are few”
― Aida Mandic, The Dark Cloud

“All of us inpatient for the sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home.”
― Khaled Hosseini, Sea Prayer

“Better a refugee to the sea than prisoner of the pond.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Refugees & Colonizers (The Sonnet)

Refugees carry culture,
Colonizers carry infection.
Colonizers are the virus,
Refugees are civilization.

Refugees live on hope,
Colonizers thrive on greed.
Refugees dream of acceptance,
Colonizers dream supremacy.

Refugees are the true free and brave,
they carry within the silver lining.
There's nothing brave about genocide,
no matter the whitewashed thanksgiving.

Refugees are practicing healers,
living testament of wounds to ointment.
Colonizers are proof of darwinism,
that from monkeys comes the human race.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Refugees carry culture,
Colonizers carry infection.
Colonizers are the virus,
Refugees are civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Refugees are practicing healers,
living testament of wounds to ointment.
Colonizers are proof of darwinism,
that from monkeys comes the human race.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations