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Plastic Boat

Humans of New York (HONY), a blog and bestselling book that features street portraits and interviews collected on the shore of Greece by photographer Brandon Stanton has shed an enormous amount of light on the “plastic boat”. The “plastic boat,” is a central figure in the story of almost every Syrian refugee fleeing from the control of ISIS and coming to Europe via Turkey. As a result of the extremely strict immigration restrictions in Europe, the plastic boat seems to be the only way the refugees can seek asylum. However, two major factors come into mind when thinking of fleeing by a plastic boat, the price and the life threatening journey. Despite paying Turkish smugglers $1500 per person, the refugees are loaded into boats that are filled over their capacity. Almost every refugee spends all of their live savings to get on board and brings only the clothes on their backs along with them. The boats usually leave at night to avoid detection and the windy autumn weather has severely affected sea crossings from Turkey over the past few days, making the trip even more life threatening.

Refugee and migrant arrivals in Greece continue to climb and are expected to reach the 400,000 mark shortly. Greece remains by far the largest single entry point for new sea arrivals in the Mediterranean, followed by Italy. Out of 131, 000 refugees making the trip to Italy, more than 2 505 have been reported dead or missing on maritime routes of irregular migrations.

History

“An estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011, taking refuge in neighboring countries or within Syria itself. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), over 3 million have fled to Syria's immediate neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. 6.5 million are internally displaced within Syria.” “Meanwhile, under 150,000 Syrians have declared asylum in the European Union, while member states have pledged to resettle a further 33,000 Syrians. The vast majority of these resettlement spots – 28,500 or 85% – are pledged by Germany.”

Recent Arrangements

In addition, Turkey, who is home to 2 million Syrian refugees, is the source of the majority of the refugees entering Europe. The migration of these refugees during the recent months has become one of “Europe’s biggest crises, triggering panic, the erection of national border controls, razor wire fences and endless feuding between EU member states.”

One of the European country that is a part of the largest migration movement Europe has seen since World War Two is Hungary. It has registered more than 220,000 asylum-seekers this year. “To stem the flow of migrants, the country's right-wing government has built a fence on the Serbian frontier and is constructing another on Hungary's border with Croatia.”

According to the European Union, “there have been 507,421 total asylum applications in the EU between April 2011 and September 2015” and almost "150,00 Syrian refugees have declared political asylum in the European Union since the start of the current conflict in Syria, the majority in Germany and Sweden.” Thus, during the recent migrant crisis summit, the EU declared that it will “offer at least 1 billion euros more to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, its World Food Programme and other agencies and increase funding for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and other countries in order to eliminate factors that are encouraging Syrians to risk sailing to Europe.”

Help on the Shore

If the refugees are lucky and they reach the other side alive, there is usually little to no help awaiting their arrival. At times, there are a handful of volunteers that greet them on the beach with a bottle of water. However, their survival cannot be guaranteed by a bottle of drinking water.

Although, in Lesvos, Greece, the UNHCR has constructed camps for the refugees. During the construction, their first priorities were basics such as, shelter, health, food, water and toilet access. The next priority was to respect the dignity of the refugees. Thus, in order to make the refugees feel as though they have their own space and place to live, they are given a tent that has four meters of space between every other tent and are allowed to enter and leave whenever they please.

Nevertheless, the UNHCR and NGOs only have a limited amount of resources and are now scrambling to provide basic necessities. Thus, the future for the refugees seems bleak in Europe as well. The European governments, citizens, UNHCR and the NGOs are hoping that the EU’s increase of funding for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon will decrease the amount of migrants entering Europe.