Although efforts to stem the flow of migrants has been more successful in Spain than in Italy or Greece, the flow still continues today. In the 2010s it is concentrated on the Spanish North African enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta, which remain tantalising positions for anyone seeking to make their way into Europe. Regular efforts by migrants to break down the fences and walls surrounding the enclaves mean clashes with police and frequent unrest. At the same time – and powerful though the pressures of those enclaves remain, the migrant boats still continue to head for the Spanish mainland or tiny pieces of territory like the islet of Alboran. In December 2014 in bad seas one boat of more than fifty sub-Saharan Africans headed off from near Nador in northern Morocco to the southern coast of Spain. The Cameroonian Muslim captain blamed the bad weather on a Nigerian Christian pastor who was praying on board. The captain and crew beat the pastor and threw him overboard before searching the other passengers, identifying the Christians, then beating and throwing them overboard in the same manner.4

This is only one more major route – one that has existed for years and where once again nothing is new but the scale. It was to this other side of the Mediterranean that the world’s attention turned in the crucial year of the crisis.

5. ‘We have seen everything’

5

‘We have seen everything’

As in the Italian islands, the boats have been coming into the islands of Greece for years. And like the Italians, for years the Greek authorities had to try to deal with this problem on their own. Once again there could hardly have been a more unfortunate country to have to deal with such a challenge. By 2015 the Greek economy had been in a debt-repayment crisis for six years. While struggling with economic astringency enforced by the other Eurozone countries, with Germany at the helm, Greece was also struggling with a humanitarian crisis along its ragged borders.

As with the Italian islands, the migration went on for years before the rest of the continent even began to pay attention. And as with Lampedusa, the Greek islands are a prisoner not only of their geographical proximity to another continent but their own history. The dozens of Greek islands within short sailing distance of the Turkish coastline makes the northern Aegean and Dodecanese islands an even softer underbelly of the continent than those nearest North Africa. Like Italy, the Greek islands were already so consumed with financial and social problems when the flow of arrivals increased that they too pushed the migrants on up into the mainland in the hope that they would find their way north from Greece and through into the rest of Europe.