The New Yorker | 08.12.2017
By Jake Halpern
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.