The circumstances of my personal maltreatment by the Greek authorities are admittedly unique. But as an unexpected byproduct, they helped me understand what actually happens behind the doors of Greece’s notorious detention centers. Whichever party executes that plan here in Britain — whether Reform, Robert Jenrick’s Conservatives, or even Labour under new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood — detaining refugees and processing asylum claims in closed, Greek-style centers will only worsen the very problems these proposals are purported to solve.

In brief, I have spent many years reporting on the Kurdish political movement in Syria and the existential wars their Western-allied movement has fought against both ISIS and Turkey. My work as a journalist incurred the ire of the Turkish authorities, who in turn pressured European governments to issue me with a travel ban preventing me from entering the Schengen Zone. The first I heard of all this was when I visited Greece on holiday back in 2021, and then tried to travel on to Italy. Instead, I was halted at the Italian border by gun-toting, balaclava-clad police, locked in a room in a ferry, and deported back to Greece.

I then spent two months held in filthy conditions, including one notorious detention center — a massive ex-military base condemned by the European Committee to Prevent Torture. I was stripped and cavity-searched. I passed days in isolation while severely ill and distressed detainees rattled at their cages, and weeks sharing a room with dozens of men. Many inmates carried the scars of police beatings, and disease and self-harm were rampant. I saw one man slash himself to pieces with a razor after being denied urgent medical care. Shortly before I arrived, a Kurdish refugee died by suicide.

“You’re the Englishman, right?”, bored guards would say as they came to gawp at me. I was languishing in my cell playing solitaire chess on a contraband cardboard set. “Why are you here?” You tell me, I would think to myself. I desperately wanted to get back to Britain, and my jailers had no real reason for keeping me there; Athens, of course, is no friend of Ankara. But thanks to European interests beyond our control, there we were, gazing at one another through the bars.

This summer, Greece has introduced still harsher measures, aimed at curbing migration from North Africa, suspending all asylum applications and criminalizing those seeking asylum in Europe by detaining them in military-style prison camps like those where I languished. It’s an approach that’s gaining traction across the political spectrum in Britain, and one that Aris Roussinos wrote about for UnHerd. But it is also an approach that simply doesn’t work. Rather, it only perpetuates the problem of long-term detention in pressure-cooker detention facilities, threatening migrants with five-year spells behind bars and thus making these detention centers a permanent feature of the local landscape.

Local resentment is fueled and attention deflected from the real villains: canny politicians who weaponize the immigration crisis, distracting locals from sky-high employment and rock-bottom wages, with the result that rage once directed against the IMF and EU is now turned on handfuls of hapless Afghans. Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis implied, without evidence, that migrants were responsible for deadly wildfires that swept the country back in 2023. He thus deftly deflected accusations of government incompetence by feeding into unfounded anti-asylum paranoia. Meanwhile, the charred bodies of 18 migrants were numbered among the dead.

Today, with oversea arrivals back up to 2017 levels, the very persistence of oversea migration to Greece suggests knee-jerk crackdowns are only a temporary fix. Though Greek authorities are talking about declaring a new “state of emergency”, fast-track deportations and the use of illegal violence to deter refugees have been a fact of life there for years. Meanwhile, the first deportations under this “new” system have already been blocked by a Greek court, suggesting the intensified measures are unlikely to end the endless whack-a-mole game between European authorities, smugglers and migrants.

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Has migration broken Schengen?

By Michal Kranz

Doubtless, harsh measures can suppress migrant flows to a given destination. Post-2016, for instance, refugees who were pushed away from the Aegean Islands turned to Spain and Italy, while Libyan smugglers have now set their crosshairs on Crete, after crackdowns elsewhere in the Med. Yet if the Crete route is indeed closed, another will open. A grown-up migration policy should acknowledge this reality. Instead, rival politicians across the globe compete to outdo one another with tough-on-migration proclamations as their costly detention efforts waste time and taxpayers’ money.

In Greece, the locals struggle to get by. Despite its steadily-improving credit rating, the average monthly salary in the country is reportedly 20% lower than it was 15 years ago. All the while, unemployment remains sky-high, prompting mass strikes and an exodus of educated youngsters.

Immigration can certainly suppress wages and damage the economy, and in Greece and Britain both there remains a risk of cynical business-owners exploiting migrant labor to keep wages down. But in the Greek example, this has nothing to do with the refugees passing through, who only started arriving in substantial numbers long after the financial crisis, and who tend to treat the country as a stepping-stone toward other, more robust employment markets.

In contrast to the Greek case, many asylum seekers to the UK want to start working here immediately, as I myself heard from my fellow detainees. Whether fleeing persecution, insecurity or both at home, they hope to improve their English, build a life and contribute to the economy. This could be made to work to our favor by allowing asylum-seekers to work while their applications are processed — rather than crowding them in hotels and detention centers. This way, they would demonstrate that, contrary to much political discourse, they haven’t arrived expecting a comfy, taxpayer-funded existence. Meanwhile, imaginative political thinking around strengthened worker protections and robust investment could easily mitigate the risk of suppressing wages, especially when asylum seekers are overall arriving in relatively low numbers.

Setting up more pressure-cooker detention centers or funneling people into local hotels only fuels local discontent. In Epping, as throughout Britain, clout-chasing politicians seize on tensions, and genuine examples of criminality among asylum seekers, to fan fears of violence and sexual abuse committed by new arrivals. A focus on these individual incidents, accompanied by massaged statistics, obscures the fact that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working, just like most ordinary Brits.

More from this author

The betrayal of British Kurds

By Matt Broomfield

A political party that acknowledged that reality, rather than inflaming the debate, could then start improving the lives of everyone in the country. In England as in Greece, prior generations of migrants have proven themselves perfectly willing to work and integrate into society, once given the chance. Yet in both countries, ordinary people have been let down by the calculated degradation of the public sphere, with the political class knowing they can rely on cheap shots at newcomers to distract from their own generational failures.

I myself remain strongly critical of the British authorities for continuing to violate my rights as a journalist and perpetuating the Middle Eastern conflicts which drive so many refugees to Europe to start with. Nonetheless, once my ordeal in Greece was over, I felt a great sense of relief once I set foot on British soil again. And I feel confident enough in the life and community I have here to want others to share in that too.

As I learned during my sojourn in Greece’s migrant detention centers, those who want to travel will find a way. Neither the cold fact of the deadly Mediterranean crossing, which claimed over 2,000 lives last year, nor the harsh reality of the British or Greek migration systems, will dissuade the desperate from attempting the journey. As I heard in countless conversations, migrants beaten and abused at one border simply assume things will be better at the next, so desperate are they for a new life. Ultimately, the emotive debate over whether migration is a “right” or a crime misses the point: migration is a fact of life, and our political representatives need to start treating it as such.

Among these are our attitudes towards borders. Within the EU the concept of ‘ever closer union’ was already faltering. The Schengen agreement has been falling apart, support for ‘Fortress Europe’ growing, and within that fortress, the nation states have become separate bastions.

A virus may not respect borders, but populist politics certainly does, and proponents understand the primal instinct in the  concept of ‘ love of one’s own’ in a wider setting than extended family. Take Nicola Sturgeon’s recent hint at a sovereign Scotland:

“I don’t have the power to close borders, but… if the UK Government took decisions that I thought were premature in terms of coming out of the lockdown, then clearly I would want to make sure that Scotland did what I judged was best to protect the population.”

Sturgeon is more articulate than President Trump, but the sentiment here is not so far from his boorish pronouncements on closing borders to save American lives.

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The return of every man for himself

By James Barr

Everywhere we have seen nations retreating into their castles. More than 80 countries have banned or limited the export of PPE, ventilators and drugs. 72 are WTO members, dedicated to open trade, but only 13 bothered to inform the organisation of their decisions despite it being a requirement. The US invoked a law from the 1950s to order the 3M company to stop supplying protective masks to Canada and Latin America. Germany complained when a shipment of masks it had ordered from an American company was seized at Bangkok airport and flown to the US. France ignored calls from the EU to lift its export ban on some drugs despite being told it was causing shortages elsewhere in the Single Market. The phrase ‘sauve qui peut’ which roughly means ‘every man for himself’ appears to be easily translated into every language.

Within the EU, member states have responded to a pan-national pandemic at a national level. The ‘community’ is an afterthought. At the height of the emergency in northern Italy, the government in Rome made a desperate appeal to the EU for help — especially for supplies of PPE. However, the other member states failed to agree on triggering the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism. Italy cried ‘betrayal’, causing Germany and a few others to step in — but, again, on their own national initiative. Noticing what was going on, China and Russia staged their own ‘soft power’ interventions, flying in emergency supplies (albeit of substandard material). A subsequent poll found that 88% of Italians believed that the “EU is not helping us”.

There’s also the issue of financial help. The richer northern members of the Eurozone are blocking the ‘Coronabonds’ that the poorer southern states say they need to fund the recovery. Instead, Brussels has offered cash from the European Stability Mechanism, but that comes with humiliating restrictions on how it can be spent. The Dutch have added to the resentment by asking why the southern states don’t have stronger economic policies.

The EU has now endorsed a roadmap out of the lockdown, but not before each country had already announced its own unilateral plans. In Germany, this extends down to the federal level, with the country’s component Länder (states) making their own decisions — there are shades of ‘Make Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Great Again’ and ‘Bavaria First’.

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If only we could be more like Bavaria

By David Goodhart

All of this is consistent with a resurgent tide of nationalism and separatism. In fact, the idea of the nation never actually went out of fashion. It was just said to have done so by a highly educated class that wished it to be true. At a popular level nationalism is alive and kicking, and when it comes to the crunch, national governments join in — kicking hard. The current crisis provides ample evidence, but there are other recent examples — such as the risible response to the German plan to distribute migrants and refugees across the Union in 2016.

Human beings are inherently tribal. A tribe is the extended family writ large, and the nation state is the modern embodiment of a mega tribe. The story of civilisation is one of drawing upon this instinct in order to cooperate and share resources at an ever-higher level — from family to tribe, from tribe to nation. But can we go higher still — from nation to regional union and even to truly global governance?

In modern times we have made some progress in this direction — think of foreign aid, scientific co-operation and the United Nations. Such internationalism has all sorts of motivations, but are these working with or against the grain of our tribal instincts? Historians tell us the nation state is a modern concept, but while this may be true, we have always had borders, and they are the geographic building blocks of the state. You could abolish them overnight, but the first time a trawler from Norway appeared in the sea off Grimsby, a delegation would be sent to explain how far away it had to go before it could begin to fish. The emotion is primal, and in times of crisis it strengthens.

Looking at the EU response to the current crisis, there are (beyond the institutional failures) some examples of Europe coming together as a huge extended family. For instance, Germany took in dozens of critically ill patients when the Italian and French health systems began to be overwhelmed. Realistically though, these are isolated incidents in the sea of Sauve Qui Peut.

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Get ready for Fortress Europe

By Aris Roussinos

The sharing side of human nature comes under massive strain when, at certain times, and at certain levels, we believe there is not enough to go around. As soon as it becomes a matter of life or death, our tribal instinct, and the related politics, kicks in. In such circumstances, which government is going to announce that it is giving a different tribe the very things its own people believe they need to survive?

Our instincts, while basic, aren’t always base. It’s entirely natural that we should seek to serve and protect what is most familiar to us. This is why individuals who were living and working in other countries rushed to get home as the virus spread around the world. It wasn’t only to be with close family at a time of crisis, but to be with their own tribe and tribal systems.

These feelings will be with us for some time. Thinking of a holiday in the window between the probable first and second waves? If so, I doubt you’re considering a cruise, the Trans-Siberian express, Goa, Lombardy or Hubei province. Almost certainly, your plans will factor in distance from home and hospital.

This goes well beyond tourism, of course. Across western Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers from countries like Bulgaria and Romania have left to go home, adding to existing unemployment issues there. With no clear date for a possible return this will accentuate the huge economic gulf between different parts of the European Union.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

But there are even bigger inequalities between the EU and adjacent regions — and these too will be accentuated by the pandemic. Take the Sahel states. Already wracked by conflict, poverty, and drought, they are not only horribly positioned to deal with immediate threat, but will be less able to recover in the longer term. This will fuel the movement of peoples at a time when the destination countries will have high unemployment — thus putting further pressure on governments to take a hard line and close their borders ever tighter.

It is not just the openness of borders that is at stake, but also where they’re drawn. A recent Pew poll found that majorities in many countries do not support the status quo. For example, asked ‘are there parts of neighbouring countries that belong to your country?’ 58% of Turks and Bulgarians said yes, as did 60% of Greeks, 67% of Hungarians, and 53% of Russians. In recent years we’ve already seen borders change — de facto, if not de jure — in Ukraine, Georgia and Kosovo. The latter is discussing land swaps with Serbia, which, if implemented, could enflame irredentism elsewhere. Meanwhile separatist tensions continue in countries across the Continent. The economic stresses that followed the last great recession played their part in propelling the independence movement in Catalonia, for instance. The looming Covid recession (or depression) is likely to do the same.

Like the Spanish Flu of a different age, the current pandemic won’t change the direction of history, but it will speed it up. Given the already established trend towards nationalism, this should give us cause for concern.

We need to make the most of the positives — especially the international cooperation among the scientists and medics working to beat these diseases. Yet, at the same time, we can hardly deny the evidence of nations retreating behind their castle walls.

Borders really matter to people right now — which means they will become harder, but also, and for the same reason, more brittle.