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A Greek coast guard vessel and a helicopter take part in a search and rescue operation off the island of Lesbos
Manolis LAGOUTARIS / AFP
The Greek island of Lesbos has all but stopped illegal migrant landings, thanks to Greece’s hardline policy of maritime “pushbacks”—a strategy condemned by activists but backed by locals who say it saved their island.
Once the epicentre of Europe’s migrant crisis, Lesbos saw more than 3,000 people arriving daily at the peak in 2015. Now, the total for 2025 stands at just 1,700. British newspaper The Sun reports that not a single boat landed last week, despite calm seas across the Mytilini Strait.
Locals credit the turnaround to a policy introduced by the centre-right New Democracy government in 2019: intercepting migrant boats at sea and returning them to Turkish waters, now designated a “safe third country.” The strategy has seen a dramatic fall in both arrivals and deaths—more than 75% fewer fatalities compared to 2015.
“It was extremely bad before,” said fisherman Thanassis Marmarinos. “I saw the corpses floating in the sea with my own eyes.” Now, he says, smugglers no longer profit from dangerous crossings because most migrants are swiftly sent back.
Tourism, once devastated, is recovering. “The UK could learn a lot from the things done here,” said Kristos Condeli, a waiter in the port town of Molyvos. “The cruise ships stopped coming because people didn’t want to see corpses in the water. Now things are getting back to normal.”
Lesbos’ notorious Moria camp—once housing 20,000—is gone. Fewer than 1,200 migrants now live in a closed facility with basic conditions. Aid workers criticise the approach as illegal and inhumane, but islanders say it was necessary.
Yet while Lesbos has stabilised, traffickers are shifting south. Gavdos, the EU’s southernmost island with only 70 residents, has seen a surge in migrant landings—over 400 in a single day last week, with arrivals totalling 7,300 this year across Crete and Gavdos combined.
“We don’t have the capacity to manage these flows,” warned Gavdos mayor Lilian Stefanakis. Officials say smugglers are exploiting weak points in the EU border system, rerouting boats from Libya to more remote, less monitored islands.
In response, Athens is tightening national laws. A bill expected to pass this summer will scrap the seven-year rule for illegal migrants to gain residency and introduce five-year prison terms for unlawful entry. Detention before deportation will be extended to two years, and new controls will target abuse of asylum claims.
Lesbos shows that Europe’s migrant crisis is not inevitable—it is a policy choice. And while the EU dithers and Britain struggles, one small island has quietly taken back control.
- Tags: Greece, immigration, Mediterranean
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