Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Alexander Betts

Quote by Alexander Betts

“Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps. Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps.”

Quote by Alexander Betts

Work

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Alexander Betts

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Alexander Betts. more

You May Also Like

“The inability of refugees to earn a living within the standard UNHCR approach was not only psychologically diminishing for the refugees, but also highlighted the lack of viability of the financing model. Paying for 4 million refugees to live without work for ten years was manifestly unsustainable. Even at a cost of only $1,000 per refugee per year, which would have implied a drastic reduction in lifestyle relative to Syrian pre-refugee conditions, the bill would have amounted to $40bn.”

“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]”

“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. Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have learned to think of generosity as a vice. [from the London Review of Books Vol. 22 No. 3 · 3 February 2000]”

“If Syria is to rise from the ashes it needs a united Arab world which has one thing on its agenda, not the falling of a dictator for we have seen many of those fall, but the reemergence of a prosperous Arab nation, one that is not reliant on foreign aid but is self-sustained and set on its way to become powerful once again.”