Rachel Donadio writes:

From the olive grove just outside the high cement wall—one topped with spirals of razor wire, enclosing one of Europe’s most infamous holding pens for asylum seekers—you can see all the way clear to the Aegean Sea, gray-blue in the distance. It’s a straight shot across the water to Turkey, just six miles away at the narrowest stretch, an ancient Dardanelles trade route.

Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, is a symbolic place—a hinge between the Middle East and Europe, the eye of the needle through which migrants must pass as they travel from east to west, a pressure point between Istanbul and Brussels. It is where the collateral damage of contemporary history—Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey—crosses the threshold into Europe. Moria is where geopolitics becomes European politics becomes national politics. Every new arrival here could one day translate into rising poll numbers for right-wing parties across the Continent, parties divided by language and culture that find common ground in wanting to block these humans from entering.

The United States’ border with Mexico is not the only immigration flash point in the West. What Juárez is to America, Moria is to Europe. The arrivals here have come by boat from across the Mediterranean, now the most dangerous border on Earth.

From up close, Moria is a chaotic mass of humanity. Built to house about 3,000 people, it is now home to more than 13,000 (including an estimated 1,000 unaccompanied minors)—more than it has ever held. They wait, sometimes for more than a year, for the slow wheels of Greek bureaucracy to turn, to review their asylum applications, to send them to the mainland for a decision. Winter is approaching, and many of these 13,000 live outside the camp’s walls, in tents pitched on the surrounding hillsides, without electricity or running water, which are provided only inside the camp. NGOs, which lease the land for the tents, help run basic services and report atrocious conditions. Fights break out in the hours-long food lines. Women are afraid to use the toilets for fear of harassment. In September, a woman died in a deadly fire.

How did it come to this? Because Europe allowed it to come to this.

The huge number of migrants who sought to enter Europe in 2015 spurred a strengthening of border controls and a rise in the popularity of right-wing parties. Then came Brexit, and Donald Trump, and shifting political winds. It came to this because of the European Union’s inability to set an immigration policy that would help individual member states whose own infrastructure was not enough to bear the burden. Greece was—still is—recovering from a crippling economic crisis at the time of the 2015 migration crisis. Its current conservative government, which took power in July with a more law-and-order approach to immigration, has asked for additional European help. But so did its previous leftist government. Not enough help has yet arrived. [Continue reading…]