The New Yorker:

Two years ago, the Greek island of Lesvos was often in the news, as thousands of refugees arrived on its shores—nearly daily—in small rubber boats. They came from Turkey, just a few miles away. Some made it, while others drowned. At the time, Lesvos was essentially a pit stop. Virtually all of these migrants continued on to the Greek mainland, and then headed north—following an overland route that took them to Germany or points beyond. Since then, European nations have pressured Greece to block the sea route via Lesvos, and other islands, in order to stanch the flow of refugees. The number of refugees streaming into Lesvos has diminished, but in the last few months it has started to rise again. In August, a thousand and fifty-three refugees arrived on the shores of Lesvos, according to Oxfam. In October, there were twenty-two hundred and sixty. The island is now a bottleneck in Europe’s unresolved migrant crisis in which human misery is being contained and forgotten.

In October, I visited Lesvos and saw how the crisis continues to unfold in plain view on one of the most idyllic islands on Earth. After flying into Mytilene, the island’s largest town, I drove north into the rolling hills that abut the city. After twenty minutes, I reached Moria, the island’s largest refugee camp. Barbed-wire fences surrounded it, as if it were a prison. The camp’s gates remained open, but some residents complained that they were harassed by the local police if they ventured outside. Moria currently holds more than six thousand migrants—triple its capacity, according to the Greek government.

Outside the gates of Moria, I met a young man from Syria, in his twenties, named Abed. He was handsome, with a shock of jet-black hair and jade-green eyes. Abed told me that he used to study economy and finance at Damascus University, until the civil war disrupted his education. As the fighting escalated, a bomb fell on the house where his sister lived. Abed rushed to her residence and discovered her and her husband in the rubble. Abed eventually fled to Turkey. He worked odd jobs there until just three months ago, when he had finally saved enough money to pay smugglers for passage to Lesvos.

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