Earlier this month, a boat carrying an estimated 700 migrants sunk off the coast of Pylos, Greece. At least 82 people died, only 102 have been rescued, hundreds are still missing, and many are feared dead. The shipwreck was one of the deadliest incidents off the country’s coast in modern history and has prompted shock and outrage across the world.
Pylos, though, must be placed in a global context where anti-migrant policies from Europe to the U.S. result in inevitable tragedies repeating themselves over and over again. Almost exactly one year ago, 53 people were found dead in an abandoned truck in San Antonio, in what the New York Times reported was one of the “worst episodes of migrant deaths on the southern border in recent years.” The victims, migrants from Mexico and Central America, died after being trapped inside a tractor-trailer in the sweltering Texas heat. And just three months ago, 39 migrants burned to death inside a Ciudad Juarez detention center near the U.S. border. As Pedro Gerson wrote in Slate at the time, policies on both sides of the U.S. border guaranteed the fire would “not only be a tragedy but also a premonition of what is to come” for future migrants seeking refuge in the United States. The Pylos disaster renders this prophecy just as true in the Mediterranean as it is in the Sonoran Desert.
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All of these incidents are tragedies of unimaginable proportions, but they are not coincidences. As three human rights lawyers working in the European Union and the United States, we know that they are the direct result of parallel policies implemented at our respective external borders.
Barely one week before the Pylos shipwreck, European leaders took a critical step towards passing long-discussed reforms to the Common European Asylum System. While politicians across Europe hailed the agreement as a breakthrough after years of failed migration policies, if passed, it will expose more people to immigration detention, undercut legal safeguards, and severely curtail the right to asylum. It will also inevitably lead to more dangerous crossings like the one that led to the tragedy in Greece.
Meanwhile in the United States, just last month, President Joe Biden, who repeatedly criticized the Trump administration’s cruel and needless immigration policies, decided to outright to adopt some of the very same. Crucially, the administration recently implemented an updated version of Trumps’ transit ban, which was struck down repeatedly by federal courts. The rule virtually eliminates asylum for those who did not first apply in any of the countries through which they traveled to reach the U.S. border, constricting an already narrowed pathway to refuge in the country
The Biden administration’s newest immigration reforms also take a page from a similar policy that has been in place in Greece for nearly a decade. Since 2016, Greece has relied on the “Safe Third Country” policy to systematically reject thousands of asylum seekers by claiming that they can be returned to Turkey to apply for asylum there. This policy, backed by the EU, is born from a disastrous 2016 migration agreement between Turkey, which tried to establish a system for returning asylum seekers arriving on the Greek islands to Turkey in exchange for EU funding.
Governments like Greece and the United States want you to believe that these policies actually protect migrants by encouraging people to apply for asylum closer to home. That could not be farther from the truth; as we saw last week in Greece, deterrence policies do not work. Instead, they simply force people to look for more dangerous ways around them, including smuggling. In Greece, we have noticed for more than a year now an increasing number of shipwrecks off the coast of Crete and mainland Greece as people try to take the much longer journey from Turkey to Italy instead.
These policies fail because protection for asylum seekers in countries of transit is often illusory. Turkey’s protection system is woefully inadequate, and asylum seekers there regularly experience detention, expulsion, torture, and sexual assault. This is not to mention that Turkey has refused to take back any asylum seekers from Greece since March 2020, leaving thousands of people trapped in legal limbo in the meantime. At the same time, in Central America and Mexico, persecutors track migrants’ routes across borders, and asylum application in those countries—woefully underdeveloped and underfunded—offer fool’s protection.
Those who do manage to arrive in Greece are met with unimaginable cruelty. Since 2016 hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers have arrived in Greece only to be forced into overcrowded refugee camps, separated from their families for years on end, and left to linger in detention in the name of the EU-Turkey Statement. As one young Syrian woman told us about her asylum procedure in Greece, “if I knew that it would be this way, I would rather have died in my country than come here.”
The situation in the U.S.-Mexico border is no less devastating, as demonstrated by this year’s migrant detention center fire. The policies leave little hope for those unable to secure asylum appointments in short supply, while those seeking to cross in between ports encounter either the infernal Sonoran Desert or the currents of the Rio Grande, with few alternative options between the Scylla and the Charybdis
The obligation to protect refugees and asylum seekers is not simply a moral one; it’s the law. Out of the smoldering embers of World War II arose the universal commitment to protect the right to seek asylum, a plant that once sown was meant never to wither. The newly formed United Nations consecrated asylum and refugee rights in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the cornerstone of global human rights law. But despite this international compact, as war rages, the climate crisis worsens, and global political turmoil displaces millions, our leaders and policymakers have left this legal commitment to die on the vine.
