Luckily, Europe, step by step, recognised that these mass refugee movements to Europe cannot work.
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.
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.
Enough of Sicily being the refugee camp of Europe. I will not stand by and do nothing while there are landings after landings of migrants.
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 was three years old, so I actually don’t remember much of the refugee process.
I’ve seen mothers and children really being vulnerable in the refugee camps; it’s supposed to be temporary, but they end up having children who have grown up in refugee camps.
We know that ISIS desires operationally to use the Syrian refugee program to infiltrate countries, to use migrant flows as a way to gain an operational foothold in other countries.
I remember, when I lived in a refugee camp, it was the people who weren’t Somali, the people who came from Western countries, who helped the most. I remember being six and thinking, ‘I want to be one of those women,’ because I knew how much they helped us.
A lot of people are thanking me for standing up, but I don’t want to be the only one standing up. Our political leaders are important. But I don’t see anyone hunting down these guys setting refugee camps on fire or sending them to jail.
A rapidly expanding Syrian refugee policy could create conditions for domestic tragedy.
My father came by himself across the North Korean border when he was seventeen. And hasn’t seen his brothers or sisters or parents since then. And he died some time ago, but never saw any of his relatives. My mother was a refugee in war-torn Korea.
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.
As a teenager I became a boat person – a refugee – as I made my way to Palestine.
I clearly remember the pain of partition; the whole of Delhi was seeing the struggle of refugees. We stayed near Roshanara Bagh, and the whole city appeared like a refugee camp.
I remember when I was a kid, as a refugee in Egypt, every day, there was always a hope that we’d get to leave tomorrow and we’d get to go somewhere.
There is a real problem in terms of the refugee flow, the ability of ISIS to infiltrate those refugee flows, our inability to track them.
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.
The deplorable Syrian refugee crisis was created because Syrian President Bashar al-Assad started a war on his people, and the international community refused to confront him.
Tools can rule men sooner than they expect; the plow makes man the lord of the garden but also the refugee from the dust bowl.
I own a shameless number of ethnic necklaces acquired at local markets in developing countries or inherited from my grandmother. These have seen me through meetings in Davos and visits to refugee camps.
There should be a global commitment to try and get rid of UNHCR refugee camps and long-term people in those camps.
You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back – it’s hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.
I started my career with ‘Refugee’ in Bhuj. Now, it has become a full-fledged city.
I don’t support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.
I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time.
We can’t turn Italy into a refugee camp.
I grew up in a country that was in a civil conflict for most of my childhood and adolescence. I saw violence and lived as a teenager through the time of a brutal dictator called Idi Amin. I fled and became a refugee.
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.
I am not a refugee. I sought refuge for many years, but the word ‘refugee’ does not define me. It just limits me and puts me in a box.
From natural disasters to the refugee crises, the impact we can have as individuals might seem limited. But as many of our hosts know, sharing your home for even a few nights can make a tremendous difference in someone’s life.
The Palestine I know is a place where Christians and Muslims are equal. My mother, a Muslim village girl, attended a Catholic girls’ school in Ramallah, and my refugee husband spent the Second Intifada side by side with his Christian brothers from Bethlehem.
I lived in an atmosphere where Mama brought 60 Basque refugee children to England during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
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.
We are sold the idea of a refugee as a tiny child sitting crying, as a way of raising money, but elderly ladies and kids largely can’t move. The demographic is mostly young men.
I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.
Half of Syria’s refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.
I’ll work to ensure that every single refugee who seeks asylum in the United States has a fair chance to tell his or her story. This is the least we can offer people fleeing persecution and devastation.
Trump has long said he favors a ‘safe zone’ in Syria to prevent Basher al Assad’s regime from carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes against Syrian civilians and to halt the refugee flow out of Syria.
I work with refugee families in Hackney in my local area in east London. Sport brings them together. A lot of the children come from different countries and speak different languages. It’s difficult to find things they can all connect and interact with that are non-verbal. Sport is it.
The journey has been long, fleeing a war, living in a refugee camp, coming to Canada is what we were dreaming as a family to get here. Now that we’re here I’m excited that I’m a Canadian citizen.
My great-grandfather came here as a refugee from the pogrom in Ukraine.
Refugee policy is only one part of immigration law needing a drastic overhaul.
Between the summer of 2015 and spring 2016, Austria became one of the European countries most affected by the migration and refugee crisis.
As a child growing up in refugee camps, life taught me that many things were impossible. My older sister, Claire, taught me otherwise when her strength and resilience made the impossible possible in the way she worked, behaved, and took control of our lives.
From age six to 12, I lived in seven different countries, moving from one refugee camp to another, hoping we would be wanted.
My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.
As a former refugee myself, I am very grateful for the help my family received and the opportunities this opened up for me and where it has brought me.
I think a lot of Americans forget that they are not originally from here, that somebody in their past was a refugee.
My grandmother – my mother’s mother – was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.
I can reveal today that the U.S. government has information to indicate that individuals tied to terrorist groups in Syria have already attempted to gain access to our country through the U.S. refugee program.
The lack of livelihood opportunities in refugee camps pushes many people to embark on dangerous journeys in the quest for a better life.
