Asylum Seekers And Refugees Quotes & Sayings

My brothers are retro-refugees in the new exile of the asylum-seekers' hostel. — Lidija Dimkovska

By the end of 2014, UNHCR would record close to 60 million forcibly displaced people, 8 million more than in the previous year. Half of those were children. Every day that year, on average, 42,500 people became refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced, a fourfold increase in just four years. — Melissa Fleming

In the midst of migrants in search of a better life there are people in need of protection: refugees and asylum-seekers, women and children victims of trafficking ... Many move simply to avoid dying of hunger. When leaving is not an option but a necessity, this is more than poverty. — Antonio Guterres

While my library contains the works of travel writers, I have mostly searched for those who speak about their own place in the world. But the world is changing and many people have no place to call home. Some of the most important kinds of travel writing now are stories of flight, written by people who belong to the millions of asylum seekers in the world. These are stories that are almost too hard to tell, but which, once read, will never be forgotten. Some of these stories had to be smuggled out of detention centres, or were caught covertly on smuggled mobiles in snatches of calls on weak connections from remote and distant prisons. Why is this writing important? Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and human rights campaigner who has been detained on Manus Island for over three years with no hope for release yet in sight, puts it plainly in a message to the world in the anthology Behind the Wire. It is, he wrote, 'because we need to change our imagination'. — Alexis Wright

Australia will take more refugees from Syria in response to the growing international crisis but it will not increase the total number of asylum seekers it accepts. — Tony Abbott