“Are we liberals or are we not? Do we really want borders? Once upon a time there were no passports — the world was a much better place. When Lord Byron went to Greece, where he died, or Lord Elgin for that matter, he didn’t need a passport. What was wrong with that? I think borders are a sign of failure of the human species.
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“You shouldn’t be having that debate [about immigration] — it is a misanthropic, stupid debate, and you have a minister who should have been expelled from this country [the UK] for having these ideas. She even challenged the United Nations Charter on refugees [...]
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“Look, we Europeans exported hordes of people — we emigrated to the four corners of the planet. We populated the earth, from Latin America to North America, to Asia, to Africa — millions, usually armed, as imperialists. We had no qualms about that for a thousand years. All that has happened is that we’re getting old. Demographically, we are aging. So migratory flows have reversed. We need migrants — the more the merrier.
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“Why do people worry about the Romanians living next door to them? It’s because the flats have been privatised. They used to be council houses and now they have been privatised. And austerity, together with largesse for the financiers through quantitative easing, has destroyed the foundation of society — even if you didn’t have a single foreigner. So all this angst and rage is being diverted, as in the mid-war period, against the Jew, the Muslim, the Romanian, the Brit, the German, the foreigner. We must not tolerate that, and we must never pander to that and say, ‘Oh, the solution to that is to erect taller fences’ — no, it is not.”
—Yanis Varoufakis