‘The smugglers don’t care’

 Lesbos

A young woman in a headscarf stumbled over some rocks and onto the beach. She stood there, rigid, stunned, then burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. ‘It’s over now, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘You’re in Europe.’

A Burmese man from the same boat looked around anxiously and asked: ‘Will the police here beat us?’ It was after dawn on the Greek island of Lesbos, the sun glinting off the turquoise sea, an idyllic holiday-brochure landscape of hills with whitewashed houses. But the Turkish coast is so close that you can see it, and so this tiny island has become the front line in Europe’s migration crisis. Hundreds of people arrive here every day in rubber dinghies. The UN says more than 185,000 illegal migrants have come to Europe by sea this year, 100,000 of them entering Greece, half of those making landfall on Lesbos.