Cover photo: Beside the tracks, a coat remains, a silent witness to those who passed through Calais seeking safety. May 2014. ©Maryam Ashrafi
At the start of September 2025, Greece introduced a new law which made irregular stay in or entry into the country a crime, punishable by up to 2 years of imprisonment or a fine between 5,000 and 30,000 euros. A new ministerial decision replaced the term “irregular migrants” by “illegal migrants” in the official state language, a rhetoric many European states and the United States are adopting too. Additionally, each person whose asylum is rejected will have 14 days to leave Greece. Prior to deportation, they will be required to wear an ankle tag. The law provides no possibility to suspend the punishment, unless the person accepts their “voluntary return.” Under the new rules, asylum seekers whose applications are rejected face two to five years in prison if they stay in Greece.
These new provisions mark the beginning of implementing the New Pact on Migration in the European Union (EU). They will soon be imposed in other countries across the EU, and “externalised” in the Balkans, northern Africa, Turkey, Caucasus, and elsewhere.
Anyone who needs shelter, a home, and safety risks being criminalised under the New Pact provisions and forced to become invisible. Once again, Greece is used as a testing ground for the EU’s “migration management,” the process that further fortifies existing border regimes.
Only ten years ago, the Greek islands and southern Italy were in the global media spotlight due to a visible increase in people arriving by boat to their shores, after strict border regimes had forced them to take irregular routes. Most were from Syria, alongside others from Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, and beyond. Back then, first local people and then solidarians from around the world flocked to Greece and Italy to try to assist in any possible way those who were coming.
When the number of new arrivals exceeded one million, EU leaders faked a welcome under the slogan “We can manage this.” In practice, it meant that for a while, the EU and countries in between (the Balkans) softened their borders and allowed some people to enter and apply for asylum. It gave hope to many people, but only for a short period, which was followed by the introduction of more stringent policies, controls, surveillance, securitisation, criminalisation, and the externalisation of these policies outside the EU. In this new reality, border violence and criminalisation of migration became normalised, alongside the camps where people are concentrated and their movements controlled and restricted. At the same time, increased securitisation and mass surveillance became a reality for all. Migration management and the externalisation of border regimes entered the vocabulary in different parts of the world. Both are followed by deportations of unwanted people back to their home countries, or third countries, somewhere along the way.
Pushbacks at EU borders are no longer news. Europe’s border fences have grown from 315 km in 2014 to over 2,000 km today, with Poland and the Baltic countries now mining their border areas. Over the last months, hundreds of people were violently pushed back from Croatia toward Bosnia, including families with children. In at least one case, people died due to a severe beating. At this border, everyone who was pushed back is pushed straight into minefields, leftovers of the war in the 90s in this part of the world.
To migrate, to move, to change places has become a privilege. Freedom of movement, one of the fundamental human rights, no longer exists. The evidence for this claim comes from all over the world. In Britain, this reality has a name: the “hostile environment”—a term coined by Theresa May in 2012 and pursued with ruthless consistency ever since. But the suspicion of the other, the bureaucratic cruelty, the denial of dignity to those who move—none of this is new. It is rooted in colonial ideology, the same ideology Britain violently exported across the globe for centuries. The empire that drew borders through other people’s lands, that extracted wealth and displaced millions, now slams its doors shut and calls those seeking entry a threat. As Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it with simple elegance: we are here because you were there.
And yet, despite it all, people still move. They cross deserts and seas, endure detention and deportation, navigate hostile bureaucracies and hostile streets—and still they build new lives, forge new communities, make new homes. The walls grow higher, the laws grow harsher, but the human impulse to seek safety, dignity, and belonging cannot be legislated away.
In the next four weeks, we will publish stories from different countries that illustrate this “brave new world.” In this world, human rights are denied or completely annulled. Laws are turned into tools of oppression. Justice is a word without meaning. Fear is the tool in the hands of those with power.
From Gaza to Greece, the consequences of Europe’s border regimes unfold with brutal consistency. Entire neighbourhoods are reduced to rubble, while islands are transformed into spaces of surveillance and control. Across frontlines and coastlines, people are pushed into the margins, forced to navigate a world in which movement is criminalised, and survival itself becomes an act of defiance. Yet within this landscape of fear and exclusion, another reality persists: the quiet endurance of those who continue to rebuild, remember, and resist. Their stories show that, despite exile’s erasures, people continue to speak, remember, and refuse to disappear, and it is on us to listen.
