"Today the Philippines is the biggest labor-exporting country in Asia and is ranked second in the world after Mexico. As of December 2003, the number of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) was estimated to be 7.7 million; contributing US$7 billion to the national economy in 2003"
—Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan, by Pei-Chia Lan (Duke U. Press, 2006), pp. 44-47.
"Brain drain has cost the African continent over $4 billion in the employment of 150,000 expatriate professionals annually"
"According to UNDP, Ethiopia lost 75 per cent of its skilled workforce between 1980 and 1991, which harms the ability of such nations to get out of poverty. Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia are believed to be the most affected. In the case of Ethiopia, the country produces many excellent doctors, but there are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than there are in Ethiopia"
"As always on this boulevard, the faces were young, coming annually in an endless migration from every country, every continent, to alight here once in the long journey of their lives"
—Brian Moore quotes (Irish Writer and Novelist He immigrated to Canada and is best known for his first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 1955, 1921-1999)
"I would therefore encourage European states to open up greater avenues for legal migration – for skilled and unskilled workers, for family reunification and economic improvement, for temporary and permanent immigrants"
—Kofi Annan
"Were this to happen, jobs would go unfilled and services undelivered. Your economies would shrink and your societies could stagnate"
—Kofi Annan, in front of the members of EU parliament in 2003, after explaining that the population of the soon-to-be 25 member States of the EU [European Union] – 452 million in 2000 – would drop to under 400 million people by 2050
"Every possible effort should be made to ensure that [migration] may bring benefit to the immigrant's personal, family and social life, both for the country to which he goes and the country from which she leaves"
—John Paul II, Laborem Exercens #23
"Just a few years ago, many people did not think it possible to discuss migration at the United Nations. Governments, they said, would not dare to bring into the international arena a topic on which their citizens are so sensitive"
—Kofi Annan, delivered before the United Nations general assembly that convened, for the first time, in a High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development on 14-15 September 2006 in New York
"As we have grasped migration's powerful potential for good, old stereotypes have crumbled and new opportunities have captured our imaginations. We recognize that migration continues to increase -- driven by the age-old pursuit of a better life, as well as by increasingly understood phenomena such as climate change. And so, we accept that we must take effective action without delay"
—Ban Ki-Moon
"This is a global phenomenon that defies the easy categorizations of the past, with its neat separations, such as that between countries of origin and destination. Today, we recognize that we are all in this together. The revolutions in transportation and communications, together with the globalization of our economies, make our experience of migration different from any previous time in human history"
—Ban Ki-Moon
"Jewish immigration in the 20th century was fueled by the Holocaust, which destroyed most of the European Jewish community. The migration made the United States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world"
—Jon Porter