Greece: migrants seek alternative routes to authorities' restrictions ·Global Voices
Faced with the restrictive immigration policy pursued by the conservative Greek government, migrants are looking for other routes to enter Europe.
With our correspondent in Athens, Joël Bronner.
Dozens of migrants have disappeared in Greece after sinking their boat off the island of Folegandros, in the Cyclades Archipelago. The Greek Coast Guard said that so far they had rescued 12 people, including children, while at least one other person was reported to have died.
The accident, relatively far from the Aegean islands where refugee camps are located, seems to reflect attempts by migrants and asylum-seekers to find alternative routes while Greece continues to harden its migration policy.
As authorities have repeatedly stated since the summer, the country does not want to be again "the gateway to Europe". A status that Greece had acquired during the 2015 and 2016 migration crisis, when more than a million people arrived on the European continent, especially from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In power since 2019, the conservative Greek government has steadily tightened the country's migration policy, especially with the multiplication of rejection of asylum applications and increasingly closed camps.
Faced with this hardening, migrants seek alternative routes that avoid the Aegean islands, such as Lesbos and Samos. In October, a boat with 400 migrants drifted further west, between Rhodes and Crete, before being rescued.
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