161 Quotes About Refugees

I, Zebra, am recrossing borders I have already crossed in order to map the literature of the void and prove once and for all that any thought worth preserving in our pitiable human record was manifested in the mind of an exile, an immigrant, a refugee"--my mind and mouth had aligned themselves to perfection--"persons fleeing from persecution, and/or otherwise homeless beings.

The global refugee crisis is indeed global. It isn’t a question of whether we should respond here (in the West) or there (at the crises’ points of origin), nor if we should address immediate needs or root causes. We can and must do all of the above.

I want to tell him that when we were in the camps waiting for a boat we spoke about what we imagined Australia would be like. Kangaroos, koalas, wide open spaces. Then, when we arrived, we were locked up and the images we had shrank smaller and smaller until Australia became tiny patches of sky beyond the barbed wire.

It's a fucking jail! A jail for people who've done nothing wrong except come here by boat. It's not even fucking illegal - did you know that?

Unmoored and in flight, the refugee is vulnerable to every king of harm- from homelessness to fraud- but sexual violence is the most intimate and most public act of brutalization, and it erupts wherever laws and social norms are unraveled. As transit bodies drift in search of sanctuary, gendered violence can buttress a social taxonomy of dominance and oppression, demarcating the tapeable and those with the power to rape, siphoning spheres of male and female, captors and prisoners.

Whoever comes to these shores of liberty, in the hope of life, freedom and happiness, automatically becomes an American, by measure of the same determination and will that made our founding fathers set foot on Plymouth Rock escaping British bigotry, snobbery and barbarism.

We Have a ChanceTo Save LivesIf We Don't Take ItWe May Regret ItLike We DidWith Alan Kurdi

But if the world measures a refugee according to the worst story, we will always excuse human suffering, saying it is not yet as bad as someone else's.

Being an immigrant is not a status but a state of mind. It doesn’t stop when you “assimilate” or “integrate” or when you go from being an “outsider” to an “insider.” It is what you think of yourself. You only really stop being an immigrant when you reject other immigrants and try to slam the door in their faces when they try to emulate you.