The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis QUOTES

1 " The choice is not between the current crisis and blissful isolation. The choice is between the current crisis and an orderly, managed system of mass migration. You can have one or the other. There is no easy middle ground "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

2 " Europe, he says, is frightened that an influx of foreigners will erode European values. But what values will there to be uphold if we abandon our duty to protect those less fortunate than ourselves? Wat incentive do we give to refugees to maintain the fabric of our society if that fabric is so ragged in the first place? "If Europe is not able to show a better way of life to them, then they will think that their morality is better than ours."

"They need to face some higher standards of morality, " he says. "If not, they will set their own."

[Quoting Serbian priest Tibor Varga] "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

3 " In the process, you obscure the actual reasons why people might risk their life to cross the sea – the wars and dictators that forced them from their homes. By denying the existence of these real root causes you simultaneously absolve yourself from the duty of providing sanctuary to those fleeing from them. Acknowledging this duty would prove very problematic: it would be an admission that your own failure to do so previously was the reason why so many thousands then turned in their desperation to smugglers – and why so many of them then drowned in the ocean. It would be an admission that a Syrian boards a boat only when he realises that there’s no realistic means of winning asylum from the Middle East. And an admission that Libya’s current predicament is in part the result of NATO’s (justifiable) airstrikes against Gaddafi in 2011 – and subsequent (and unjustifiable) failure to help Libya’s post-Gaddafi transition. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

4 " The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement. In the near future , people will move even more, particularly if, as some predict, climate change sparks mass migration on an unprecedented scale. The sooner we recognize the inevitability of this movement, the sooner we can try to manage it. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

5 " At a time when travel is for many easy and anodyne, their voyages through the Sahara, the Balkans or across the Mediterranean – on foot, in the holds of wooden fishing boats and on the backs of land cruisers – are almost as epic as those of classical heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. I’m wary of drawing too strong a link, but there are nevertheless obvious parallels. Just as both those ancient men fled a conflict in the Middle East and sailed across the Aegean, so too will many migrants today. Today’s Sirens are the smugglers with their empty promises of safe passage; the violent border guard a contemporary Cyclops. Three millennia after their classical forebears created the founding myths of the European continent, today’s voyagers are writing a new narrative that will influence Europe, for better or worse, for years to come. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

6 " The writer Jeremy Harding made this point best in 2000, writing in the London Review of Books: ‘We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

7 " But for pragmatists on both sides of the debate, this very reductive picture of an economic migrant is ultimately not a particularly useful one. For a start, people who travel for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers. Ironically, they instead display qualities that would be prized in indigenous Europeans – the kind of on-yer-bike resourcefulness that conservatives wish was intrinsic to every native jobseeker. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

8 " The number of refugees walking through the Balkans has exploded. Back in June, around 1000 people were landing every day on the Greek islands, which was itself unprecedented. Now in mid-September, the average is 5000, and later in the year, it will rise to as high as 9000. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

9 " Until 2011, the business was a comparatively low-level affair. In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the smugglers of Libya and Tunisia might collectively send around 40,000 people2 each year to Lampedusa, the southernmost Italian island, and the Italian mainland beyond. Spain had built not one nor two but three fences around its pair of enclaves in north-west Africa, so Morocco was finally no longer the best option for those trying to reach Europe. The "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

10 " The first is in late August, when seventy-one refugees are discovered dead in the back of a smuggler’s truck parked at the side of a road in Austria, with putrid juices dripping from the door. The second comes a week later, when the body of a Kurdish toddler, Alan Kurdi, is photographed face down on a beach in Turkey, having drowned with his brother and mother in a failed attempt to reach Kos. Suddenly Europe cares. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

11 " Firstly, it’s more accurate. When you’re describing a large group of people whom you don’t know, it makes sense to define them by what they’re doing (which you can be reasonably sure of) rather than why they’re doing it (which you can’t). Migrant is the most efficient way of achieving this: in its purest sense it simply means someone on the move – and casts no aspersions, positive or negative, on why they set out in the first place. Secondly, many of those who push for the use of ‘refugee’ do so by defining refugees in opposition to migrants. Refugees, they say, deserve rights, whereas migrants don’t. Refugees had good reason to leave home; migrants did not. This is a problematic differentiation. In attempting to separate the two groups, we imply that it is easy to distinguish between them. In reality, as I’ve attempted to explain in earlier chapters, it is increasingly hard to do so. There is often overlap, and many people’s experiences might fit the definitions of both categories. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

12 " The point of delineating between different kinds of migration is to draw a line between who has the right to move and who doesn’t – and in turn to identify which people should be prevented from moving in the first place. But, in reality, history proves that prevention may not be possible, and so too does the current crisis. People have always moved. The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement. In the near future, people will move even more, particularly if, as some predict, climate change sparks mass migration on an unprecedented scale. The sooner we recognise the inevitability of this movement, the sooner we can try to manage it. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

13 " Despite experiencing the horrors of war, despite the suffering of displacement, despite the pains and traumas of crossing the sea in old boats, despite the difficulty of adapting to new customs and cultures, the uncertainty about what the future holds, the constant anxiety about my children and my family - despite all this, I have learned many things. First among them is that there are many people who will always give you the hope and determination to plough on through the darkness." - Hashem Al-Souki "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

14 " after a series of bad-tempered meetings, the countries of the EU finally agree in September to share 120,000 of the refugees who’ll land in Italy and Greece over the next two years, and to resettle 40,000 of those still languishing in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Britain opts out of the agreement, but promises to admit 4000 refugees every year for the next five years. Wonks in Brussels hail all this as a huge step forward, given Europe’s previous intransigence. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

15 " And Merkel is certainly courageous, promising to welcome any Syrian, regardless of whether they’ve already been fingerprinted in Greece, Hungary or any other EU country. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

16 " When I’d previously asked Syrians where they wanted to end up, I drew a range of answers: Holland, perhaps, or Sweden, Austria or the UK. Now almost everyone says they just want to reach Germany. The pragmatism of the lower Balkan countries is also increasingly apparent. Having previously tried to block the path of refugees, or slow them down, Macedonia, Serbia and Greece have now bowed to the inevitable and created a de facto humanitarian corridor to Hungary. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

17 " It is, however, the likes of Fico who need to wake from their fantasies. Europe’s isolationists may not feel the ethical need to protect people who’ve fled from Paris-style attacks that occur every day, rather than once a decade. It’s nevertheless time for them to recognise the practical problems with the security solution they seek. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

18 " Why do we keep going by sea?’ Abu Jana asks me. ‘Because we trust god’s mercy more than the mercy of people here. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

19 " To deport refugees from Greece to Turkey, Europe has therefore ridden roughshod over the 1951 convention – a charter created in the aftermath of the Second World War, partly to ensure that the continent did not repeat the mistakes of the Holocaust. Just as we did in the 1930s, Europe is once again sending thousands of people back to places where they risk considerable danger and hardship. We risk unravelling the progress we have made as a continent since 1945. The very identity of post-war Europe is at stake. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

20 " There are two obvious conclusions. First, whether we like it or not, people will – to some extent – keep coming. Second, given this fact, Europe’s current approach to migration benefits no one. Not the refugees, who’ll keep on drowning at sea and suffocating in the back of smugglers’ vans. And not the Europeans, who in their refusal to admit the inevitability of the situation are making things far more chaotic than they need to be. "

― Patrick Kingsley , The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis