I encourage you to welcome refugees into your homes and communities, so that their first experience of Europe is not the traumatic experience of sleeping cold on the streets, but one of warm welcome.

Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. For those peoples and their nations, from the heart of American democracy, I wish to reaffirm my highest esteem and appreciation. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present. Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our 'neighbors' and everything around us.

According to the Council of Europe, in 2024, almost 50% of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants. In Austria, the number was 53% of the people in prisons were from places that weren't from where they are now. In Greece, the number was 54%. And in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, 72% of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland. When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaid kindness, and that's what they did, they repaid kindness with crime, it's time to end the failed experiment of open borders.

They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more.

We cannot allow the Mediterranean Sea to become a vast cemetery.

There are mothers, who risk perilous journeys to desperately try to give the fruit of the womb a better future and are judged to be redundant by people whose bellies are full of things, but whose hearts are empty of love.