Patrick Kingsley > Quotes

“For a start, people who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers”
― Patrick Kingsley

“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

“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

“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

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Different people have always come here,’ says Tuwara. ‘But in the olden days we didn’t know what migration was – it’s only in the last four or five years that the word “migration” appeared in our speech.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“This belief, tragically, turned out to be completely wrong. In the spring that followed the end of Mare Nostrum, more people attempted to cross the Mediterranean from Libya than during the equivalent period in 2014, which itself was a record year. And around eighteen times as many people died. Between January and April 2015, 28,028 people tried to reach Italy from Libya, according to the International Organization for Migration – compared with 26,740 in the first four months of 2014.2 And more than 1,800 died, compared with 96 the year before.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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

“Nizar claims, complicit officials are paid up to 100,000 Egyptian pounds (about £8,900) a trip. By agreement with the smugglers, police arrive after most of the migrants have managed to leave the beach. At that point, the remaining passengers are arrested and taken for a few days’ detention in police cells, to maintain the pretence that Egypt is playing its part in ending the smuggling trade. ‘It’s normal that if I want to smuggle three hundred [migrants],’ says Nizar, ‘the authorities will take fifty and let two hundred and fifty go, to show the Italians that they are doing some work.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The mess reached its nadir in the aftermath of the Paris attacks in November 2015. Two of the nine assailants were revealed to have probably arrived in Greece a month earlier in a boatload of refugees.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“That normality goes like this: on arrival in Ajdabiya, you’re locked in a compound until your extended family cobbles together the cash to pay the smugglers. Wherever your relatives are, be it Israel, Sudan or even the UK, the smugglers will have a contact your family can pay in person. No refugees will pay the money themselves before they reach Ajdabiya, because the smugglers might not take them all the way. And no one carries cash to pay on arrival, because it will be stolen. So your family will have to find $1,600 in retrospective payment for the desert journey. And if your family hasn’t got that money, the smugglers torture you while your family listens on the phone.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Like Katie Hopkins, prime minister David Cameron described migrants as a ‘swarm’. Foreign secretary Philip Hammond called them marauders bent on overrunning European civilisation. Home secretary Theresa May frequently scoffed at any suggestion that they might simply be seeking safety. Interviewed on Today, BBC radio’s flagship current affairs programme, May said, ‘People talk about refugees, but actually if you look at those crossing the central Mediterranean, the largest number of people are those from countries such as Nigeria, Somalia and Eritrea. These are economic migrants.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“People turn their heads. A Greek plane? Are they still in Greek waters? It’s another cruel setback. Greek waters mean Greek coastguards and a Greek rescue mission, and no one wants to go to Greece. As absurd as it sounds in retrospect, given the thousands of refugees who would arrive in the Greek islands later in the summer, Greece is still largely an unknown route for Syrians, full of potential pitfalls. To get to Germany from Greece would mean walking through two countries that lie outside the EU (Macedonia and Serbia) and then a third that is in the EU but behaves as if it isn’t (Hungary).”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The EU promised to pay Turkey €6 billion, in exchange for their policing their borders better and readmitting all those landing in Greece.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Big profit’, as Vasilis the activist would later summarise. But the barwoman is having none of it, keen to foster the impression of Simos as the worst businessman of all time. ‘Profit?’ she says. ‘You can’t make a profit here. Yes, he takes more money, but he also has to pay more staff. He’s just the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I’m almost convinced, until I remember the missing receipts.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The figure 850,000 sounds like a lot – and in terms of historic migration to Europe it is. But this is only about 0.2 per cent of the EU’s total population of roughly 500 million, an influx that the world’s richest continent can feasibly absorb, if – and only if – it’s handled properly”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“An accidental smuggler, he fell into the trade because the demand suddenly spiked in 2014, as Syrians realised that Egypt would never offer them the long-term future that they need. Providing alternatives to smuggling communities should be part of any sensible response to the migration crisis. But, in the end, where there is a demand for their services, there will always be smugglers.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“He escaped a second time, was caught a second time, returned to prison, and then sent for yet another spell of military service. By the time he finally fled to Sudan, aged fifteen, he had been jailed twice, and forced to become a child soldier three times. After being kidnapped and tortured by Libyan smugglers, he finally reached Italy by boat in May 2015.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“But you would still have 100,000 people piling through Niger every year – and no one particularly interested in stopping them.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Just as Hashem al-Souki found, the sheer act of leaving Syria was exhausting and financially depleting. Fattemah and Nasser headed north towards Turkey, which required going through a litany of regime checkpoints. At each, the soldiers always wanted bribes – sometimes as much as 1000 Syrian pounds. At the last one, Nasser had only 450 left, and the soldiers were satisfied. Others who had less were beaten till their teeth fell out. The Isis checkpoints weren’t any better: if the jihadists found any women who were travelling alone, they arrested them, perhaps to keep them as slaves. Travelling as a family, Nasser, Fattemah and Hammouda made it through – and reached Turkey in November 2014. Turkey shoulders a bigger burden of”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“The ship looks like a complete community, with families and individuals, young and old, white and black,’ he writes that day. ‘It’s a small mixed community where everyone cooperates with everyone else.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“Agadez has only a handful of multi-storey buildings. The main ones are the mosque and, next door to it, the palace of the Sultan of Aïr, who still retains a role in the local judicial system. But the houses overlooked by this pair are mostly single-storey courtyards, each enclosed by a windowless wall. These are the compounds, and perhaps fifty of them are used by smugglers – though no one knows the exact total. And that’s the point: they’re the perfect places to hide a hundred migrants until they head north to Libya. Once inside, the haggling starts. The going rate between Agadez and Libya is thought to be about 150,000 West African francs (CFA), or £166. But one traveller said he paid as much as €500 (£363), while Cisse claims he charges each of his thirty passengers as little as 50,000 CFA (£55). With such big numbers, it is no surprise that the business continues in full force despite a recent ban.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“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 the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis

“As a phenomenon, this isn’t new. For centuries, Agadez has been an important crossroads for travellers and traders trying to make it through the Sahara. In the Middle Ages, salt and gold merchants picking their way between Timbuktu and the Mediterranean often had to pass through the town. By the fifteenth century, Agadez had its own sultan, its famously imposing mosque, and a knot of winding streets that still exists today.”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis