Through both our admissions policies and, equally importantly, through our support for international protection and assistance, the United States leads the world in responding to refugee and related humanitarian crises.
The way a government treats refugees is very instructive.
The global movement of displaced people, many of whom end up in detention without hope, is one of the most pressing issues of our times.
I hope the Icelandic government grants me political asylum.
It has never been illegal to be a refugee.
The drafters of the [Refugee Convention ] had the Cold War in mind and mainly sought to protect a few thousand dissidents from the Communist bloc. They did not envision the mass displacements of people we are seeing today.
Poland is ready to admit every refugee who arrives in Poland, fleeing the war in the Middle East, no matter their faith or economic status, provided that they comply with our legal regulations and want to stay in our country.
Freedom-loving people around the world must say . . . I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.
I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn't ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.
I approached UNHCR because I believe in what the United Nations. I believe refugees are the most vulnerable people in the world. They are affected by everything, including landmines. They are vulnerable to everything.
We are also assisting the refugees who have fled across the border to Chad. As many of them have been subject to attacks by militia crossing from Sudan, UNHCR is mounting a major logistical operation to establish camps and transfer refugees away from the border zone.
When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.
I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.
Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.
I officially designated every US ambassador on earth to be my personal human rights representative, and to have the embassy be a haven for people who suffered from abuse by their own government.
We need... to say to people that this is a temporary residential status, and we expect that, once there is peace in Syria again, once IS has been defeated in Iraq, that you go back to your home country with the knowledge that you have gained.
Our asylum laws were written to protect victims fleeing persecution in their home countries. By limiting the scope of these laws and refusing to acknowledge gang violence or domestic violence as a valid reason to seek asylum, we are turning away women and children in grave danger.
World Refugee Day is a reminder that there is no 'us' and 'them.' There is only us, one human family, connected in ways we sometimes forget.
I think on all the debate on immigration, and all of that, the class of person that should be given the benefit of the doubt is the genuine refugee that is just in real desperate strait. Some of them are in the United States illegally because of [human] trafficking. They were caught up in trafficking, and you can argue to what extent it's their fault, to what extent they didn't know what they were getting into.
We need to understand that the Geneva Conventions are not just some historical documents born of another time, created for another purpose.
To show a 'well-founded fear of persecution', an alien need not prove that it is more likely than not that he or she will be persecuted in his or her home country.
Long before the migrant crisis, Sweden had codified its form of humanitarianism into the country's domestic and foreign-policy framework.
When was the last time you heard news accounts of a boatload of American refugees arrive on the shores of another country?
Today, as yesterday, a nation is judged by its attitude towards refugees.
We pray for the many brothers and sisters who seek refuge far from their native lands, who seek a home where they can live without fear: that they might always be respected in their dignity.
