If you go and pull up a map of Greece and it's isles.....you come to notice Lesbos way over on the eastern side....which is more or less ten miles off the western coast of Turkey. In a plain fishing boat....it's a ride that you can make in thirty to forty-five minutes.
So over the past year or two...Iraqi and Syrian refugees (as well as some other regional state).....have shown up on the shore. Summer of 2018, it was figured to be around 10,000 refugees on Lesbos. This year, some people say it's doubled to near 20,000. Some are in the official camps....some aren't.
Well, this past month....there's been disturbances and riots at the authorized camps. Greeks will say in a blunt way.....none of these camps were intended to be permanent, nor were they built to handle this number of 'guests'.
This morning, the Greek authorities announced that 10,000 of the Lesbos 'guests' are going to be moved....over to the mainland of Greece. There's no time-table and no one is saying that it will be an improvement.
So you start to ponder how this dispersal idea might work. Greece, for those who aren't aware....hasn't really recovered that well from the 2008 economic downfall. In the summer of 2019, the unemployment rate for Greece was near 17.5-percent. Greeks being thrilled over migrants and asylum-seekers? No. You might find some urbanized political groups pushing a pro-agenda, but once you get into rural surroundings, no one is that thrilled over migration.
The idea that some of these refugees might accidentally find their way up to the border with Macedonia? Well....now that you bring that up....it's probably a 99-percent chance that once on the Greek mainland....most will buy a map and plot their escape up through the Balkan region.
Most of the Balkan route 'players' (Hungary, Serbia, Austria, etc) have put up barriers and have active patrols. My humble guess is that a new route....probably via the coast of Albania, and using Albanian fishing vessels to reach Italy....will be developed by the smugglers.
A 50-mile boat-ride to reach Italy? Yes. And from there, you can hope a train to reach the border....crossing over Austria, and in a day or two.....you'd be at the border of Germany.
So how many of this 10,000 group will end up in Germany within six months? I would imagine a minimum of half. Once this proves successful....the Greeks will go full-throttle and move all of the Lesbos refugee crowd to the mainland, and maybe even offer up free maps of Europe.
Blame to shift back to Turkey for allowing this smuggling route to exist or to Greece for moving folks out of Lesbos? Well, the EU will admit that they still pay in the range of 2 to 3 billion euro a year for the route to be ceased. The Greeks hoping on some EU solution to solve all of this? Zero trust or belief in this now.
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