As far as I’m aware, I’m the only British national who has ever suffered detention in Greece’s infamous migrant processing system. Held in facilities from Patras to Corinth to Athens for several months in 2021, I witnessed first-hand both the Kafkaesque brutality of the European border regime and its detrimental impact on small Greek island communities.
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 centres. 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 centres 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 centre — 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.
“I saw one man slash himself to pieces with a razor after being denied urgent medical care.”
“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 criminalising 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 centres a permanent feature of the local landscape.
Local resentment is fuelled and attention deflected from the real villains: canny politicians who weaponise 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.
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 tax-payers’ 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 labour 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 favour by allowing asylum-seekers to work while their applications are processed — rather than crowding them in hotels and detention centres. 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 centres or funnelling 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.
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 centres, 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.