Quotes About Migrants

Migrants identified cotton growing with slave labor as if the relationship were natural.

Skills development as a means to income generation is the key to integrate vulnerable migrants into the mainstream of society and to equip them for an eventual return home.

For years, media moguls and campaigns bankrolled by the rich have fed the lie that migrants are the cause of injustices propagated by the powerful: the failure to build housing, the strain on public services by cuts, the lack of secure jobs, the decline in real wages.

My message to everyone: the next time you hear about migrant children near the border, just picture them as your own. Then think what you would want our government to do.

Austerity and economic insecurity have collided with the scapegoating of migrants and refugees, at a time when global instability and warfare have driven millions to flee violence and persecution, a minority of whom have arrived on European shores to be met with hostility.

Look at me - I'm the daughter of migrants and I certainly felt on the ground very early on in my premiership that people did warm to me.

These bills include hundreds of thousands of economic migrants who, after years in the UK, probably still can't believe that British taxpayers are stupid enough to give them free housing, free education, free healthcare and £20,000 or £30,000 or even £40,000 a year for producing ever more children without ever having to do a day's work.

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity

The tiny Emirates has more than eight million migrants—more than Canada, France, Australia, or Spain. A rags-to-riches story on a nation-state scale, it was a sleepy patch of desert until the 1960s, when it discovered it held 9 percent of the world's oil.

I wonder how many illegal migrants fanned out across the country while I and others were subjected to the stone-faced, suspicious inefficiency of the Border Force?

Many migrants awaiting asylum hearings in the U.S. never show up for their court dates. And the longer they stay in the U.S., the more sympathy they draw in the media and from many compassionate Americans.

Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he's reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

In the morning, a local resident drapes a hose over the garden wall so the migrants can brush their teeth, wet their faces, and fill their canteens. A contingent of older ladies walks the tracks, passing out blessings with homemade bagged sandwiches and pickles. A guard from the hut calls Luca over and passes him a grape lollipop through the chain-link fence.

All the way from Chiapas to Chihuahua, they cling to the tops of the cars. The train has earned the name La Bestia because that journey is a mission of terror in every way imaginable. Violence and kidnapping are endemic along the tracks, and apart from the criminal dangers, migrants are also maimed or killed every day when they fall from the tops of the trains. Only the poorest and most destitute of people attempt to travel this way.

migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter.

There are twenty-three migrants here, and despair has settled into their features like a powdery dust.

this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

He mispronounces the word hombres in the style of the US president who, attempting to call migrants bad men, inadvertently referred to them as bad hunger instead. It's a joke now, full of irony. Bad hunger. El comandante toes the line.

Before dawn, Lydia, Luca, and the sisters walk deeper into the city, where they discover that the railway fence in Hermosillo is serious business, expensive infrastructure. Tax pesos at work. In fact, it's not a fence at all, but a concrete wall topped with razor wire in threatening coils. Inside that wall, a train rumbles past with migrants asleep on top, their arms folded across their chests, their hats over their faces.

She knows how dangerous it is to trust anyone on La Bestia. There are thugs and rapists and thieves and narcos hidden in the ranks of la policía in every town, but it's not only the police who deserve their suspicion. It's every single person they meet—shopkeepers, food vendors, humanitarians, children, priests, even their fellow migrants.

It's a common tactic for bad actors to ride the trains posing as migrants, working to gain the trust of unsuspecting travelers, so they can lure them into a secluded place where they can commit some violence against them.

Lydia understands that it's not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she's pitied those poor people.

way the government clears migrants from the trains in some places, spending millions of pesos and dollars to build those track-fences in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Mexico state, all while turning a blind eye in other locations.