The Forgotten Crisis — Refugees & Europe’s Borders

Angus Satow
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read
Bordered Idyll: The Short Stretch of Water Between Chios & Turkey

I’ve recently returned to the UK following three weeks volunteering on the Greek island of Chios, a short distance from Turkey, as a legal interpreter for refugees seeking asylum. Some thoughts…

The European border regime is an egregious, inhumane outrage, which continues to kill and immiserate those it deems less human because of their arbitrary position outside Fortress Europe. A common refrain among my clients was that Europe was a place of ‘human rights’, unlike the home countries they’d been forced to flee. That belief is tested to breaking point.

Just as common is a declaration of severe illness, of not being able to stand life in Vial, the refugee camp now several times over its capacity on Chios. Refugees are forced to wait over a year for their asylum decisions, facing three separate interviews if they are to make it all the way through. Most of my clients had been through severe trauma (often sexual violence); the vast majority had severe mental health problems, while many also had physical health problems. The response we were forced to give them was pretty much ‘I’m really sorry, but there are very few medical resources on the island’. The camp doctor had just resigned, psychologists were in desperately short supply and NGOs were overwhelmed. We couldn’t even tell them that their clear ill health and need for support was a guarantee of their safe entry into Europe. It isn’t. Refugees are abandoned by the European Union, severely ill, isolated, unable to work or even leave the island.

They are unable to leave the island because the islands now serve as giant outdoor prisons, mass holding pens for Greece and the EU. The Dublin regulation means that Greece, Italy and Spain are left to deal with large numbers of arrivals without meaningful support from Europe. The illegal accord the EU made with Turkey in 2016 then promises that refugees will be sent back to Turkey in exchange for aid programmes and the resettlement of Syrians. As a result, refugees are limited to the islands, housed (if at all) in overcrowded camps in terrible conditions, unable to work, travel or live any kind of meaningful life. When I would ask my clients how they were doing they would reply ‘no one is okay here’.

It’s worth noting that despite the cruel apathy of Europe’s borders, they don’t, and won’t, work. People will keep coming — Turkey is often a terrible country for Africans fleeing persecution to be in, and not a safe one for many Arabs either. And the number of refugees ever sent back is relatively small, for the same reasons. The end result is refugees consigned to the category of unpeople, either appealing their asylum rejection or living a life beyond a radar of the state. This is a logical consequence of the actions of European states, national and supranational alike.

This is a slow-burning crisis of apathetic racism, as the power of borders and nationhood continues to rise. Blame for this should be laid squarely at the feet of the European Union, which has facilitated the rise of fascism and brutal border policies within its member states. Having immiserated Italy and Greece through the Eurozone and, particularly in the latter case, a brutal programme of austerity, it now abandons these countries to deal with the arrival of thousands of refugees, each deserving support as their human right, even though it is the former colonial powers and the EU who have done most to cause these mass migration movements through their colonialism, imperialism, and leading role in climate breakdown. When fascism then rises in Italy and takes over the government, the EU is no bulwark, but folds to Salvini’s demands to criminalise refugee NGOs, a power the Greek state is now wielding too. Refugees are not resettled across Europe, and the already-peripheral and poor countries of southern Europe treat the marginalised refugees as an inconvenience to be sidelined as much as possible. If Chios and Lesvos are Greece’s holding pens, then Greece and Italy are Europe’s. Those who choose to wrap themselves in the EU’s flag, or depict it as some anti-racist force working against rather than in concert with nationalism, sicken me.

But we should look closer to home, too. One of the reasons the EU has the consent of its populations to condemn refugee populations to unlife and *still* be presented as some anti-racist bulwark to fascism is because there is no effective large-scale anti-racist movement across Europe, no sufficiently large-scale left engagement with borders and the nation-state. Britain’s response to refugees is beyond egregious, 20,000 over five years promised by Cameron (Germany took in around a million in one year), even the Dubs amendment reneged upon by the Tories. Yet there has been no large-scale grassroots movement since one demonstration in 2015. Left-wing parties across Europe, but most disappointingly Corbyn’s Labour here, have not risen to the challenge. While defending asylum seekers Corbyn has made no effort to offer a positive and proactive migration policy, instead indulging in bullshit rightwing rhetoric around migrants lowering wages. But recent polling shows there has been a remarkable shift in British attitudes towards migration. The conditions are there for an ambitious internationalist socialist project, uniting the dispossessed against the ruling classes.

I make that link because they truly are inseparable. The urgently-needed mental health services denied to refugees are denied to us too. There is a scale, but contemporary European capitalism necessitates the immiseration of workers and ‘surplus’ refugee populations alike. The fascism being nurtured across Europe, grounded in ethnic nationalism, will not stop at refugees (though it will start with them). Humanitarian work is urgently needed in Calais, Lampedusa and the Greek islands, as ever, but ultimately we must tackle the root causes. That means building a radical and achievable vision of ‘no borders’, working towards it through revolutionary reforms. A failure to articulate and push this vision is cultivating the conditions for fascism.

To end, one of the most important learning curves I had in Greece was the de-Othering of refugees. The temptation in the face of oppression and hatred from the European right is to adopt a stance of condescension, resulting in the weirdly dehumanised category of the ‘pitiful refugee’. The truth is that, while the vast majority of my clients had a common experience of persecution and oppression (from society or the state), there was otherwise little to unite them. There is no pure refugee, there is no clear demarcation between economic migrant and deserving asylum seeker. They are people, individuals struggling within huge systems. Because they are people, and not two-dimensional stereotypes, there will be a whole host of violent and oppressive phenomena which manifest themselves among refugee populations. And there are also traumatised women, traumatised men, just wanting safety and a new life, beautiful people wanting to do beautiful things (one of my favourite examples was a client who wanted to utilise their interior design skills in Greece because they were ‘inspired’ by the poor state of the buildings). The reality of refugee populations is messy and complicated. Because they are people.

The only response to Europe’s border crisis is, for me, an insurgent and radical universalism which demands a world where we are all given what we need, where our movement is unrestricted and where we are, in every sense, free.

Further reading, if interested:

Open letter from Chios NGOs and Groups to the EU Commission on conditions on the island: https://www.facebook.com/notes/shoufu-%D8%B4%D9%88%D9%81%D9%88-stories-from-chios/open-letter-eu-commission-must-take-responsibility-for-inhumanity-of-its-hotspot/464455880689542/

BBC article on the atrocious conditions for refugees on Lesbos: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45372942

Daniel Trilling’s book ‘Lights in the Distance’: beautiful blend of (auto-dictated) refugee experience and political analysis on Europe’s border crisis

Great article in Jacobin on the political implications at Greece’s border: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/refugees-greece-lesbos-syria-european-union

Richard Seymour on the left and migration: https://www.patreon.com/posts/reinventing-anti-20945069

Recent turnaround on British migration attitudes: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-of-concern/#kp2

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