“When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaid kindness with crime, it’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders.” The President of the United States said this at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. He added a warning to Europe: “Your countries are going to hell!”
The message is echoed across Europe.
In London, the largest nationalist march in decades was led by a former fascist street leader. The crowd was told migration was destroying British identity. Elon Musk warned: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”
Europe’s Right promises salvation through mass deportation. Nativist parties propose first removing the “illegals,” then making the settled illegal too.
At the UN, Trump claimed that Europe’s prisons were full of migrants, naming the Greek example. It was evidence, he said, “of the death of Western Europe”. Here in Greece, as CPT has warned for over a decade, migrant men are funnelled into prisons upon landing from across the seas, on baseless claims of having “facilitated the illegal entry” of themselves and their co-passengers.
The Greek migration minister admits that border security cannot exist without death. At least he’s honest. In Lesvos, we watched an “island of solidarity” become a place where lifeguards threw people into the sea. A year ago, at a town-hall meeting, we asked our neighbours what motivates those who do the dirty work:
The question could be asked of judges and prosecutors too, whose commitment to a myth overpowers the evidence in front of them. Migrants accused of smuggling themselves into the country form the second-largest prison cohort.
The conviction rate – built on the routine miscarriage of justice – has become the evidence that migrants are a threat to European safety. Now they must be kept out or kicked out. Not only are they sentenced to life in jail; they are then held up as the example – the existential threat facing a continent on the brink – that would justify the erasure of their kin.
The process conjures up the migrant of our nightmares, and Europe seems to need a bad dream. The question is why?
