THESSALONIKI, GREECE — I used to balk at letting my three teenagers go on sleepovers, so I have a hard time comprehending how Omer’s and Shahzaib’s parents gave them permission to journey, alone, overland via Iran and Turkey, the 3700 miles from Pakistan to Greece.
Omer was 15 when he left his village in 2016. Shahzaib was 14. They traveled separately, only acquainted since they’ve been in Greece. Now I’m interviewing them in the snug kitchen of an apartment in Greece’s second-largest city, resuming work on a project I had to abandon in 2020 because of COVID. They have asked me not to use their last names.
“I am the one who can save you from this crisis,” Omer told his folks when he announced his plans to seek his fortune someplace where there would be more jobs, better pay and less official corruption. “I can go abroad to work and send you as much money as I can.”
His mother cried. His father cried also, but not in front of his son.
They gave him what little cash they had, borrowed some more from relatives, and let him go.
No one had any inkling of how hard the journey would be.
“I was enthusiastic,” Shahzaib told me. “I knew my future never could be better in Pakistan. I didn’t realize the danger.”
The danger included trekking for days on shear mountain trails, riding in the trunks of cars and in overcrowded vans, abuse at the hands of smugglers, fording the river that separates Turkey and Greece and falling into the hands of the Greek police.
Shahzaib spent a fortnight in a prison cell, six months in a refugee camp and four months picking strawberries for which he was paid, after room and board were deducted, about $30. Things only took a turn for the better when he was placed in a shelter for unaccompanied minors and started school. Now he’s 20, married, and working as an interpreter.
Omer spent a year working in a T-shirt factory in Istanbul, 10 days in jail, five months in a camp and a couple of months working construction before he too moved to a shelter, started school, learned Greek and English and got a job as an interpreter.
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I knew when I returned to this lively port city that I would enjoy retracing my steps and renewing acquaintance with the handful of people I’d befriended three years ago. But I wondered whether I was chasing old news. The peak year for asylum seekers entering Greece from war-torn countries was 2015. Since then, with the dangers of the journey becoming better known, the border controls more strict and the pandemic freezing people in place, the numbers dwindled.
Then, the day after I got here, a fishing boat carrying hundreds of migrants sank in the Mediterranean Sea. “The disaster has made some things clear,” The New York Times reported. “Europe’s migrant crisis has not gone away…An inexhaustible number of people are still willing to risk everything and board rickety boats in the hope of reaching Europe…”
It is the nature of the news business that it takes a major maritime disaster or a little boy’s body washing up on a beach or a conflagration in a refugee camp to rivet our attention to a situation of ongoing misery.
When we do hear about refugees, whether here in Europe or on America’s southern border, the loudest voices reduce the refugee problem to a resource problem: How can we possibly accommodate, feed or employ all these extra people? What we really have, though, is a xenophobia problem.
You may have noticed that the nations of Europe did not hesitate to accommodate the white, Christian Europeans of Ukraine when Russia invaded in 2022. The brown and black people from the Muslim world certainly noticed.
The crazy thing is that demographers are telling us that Europe, with its aging populations and low birth rates, needs people. Yes, say the demagogues, but not those people.
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Shahzaib hasn’t seen his parents since he left home in 2016. Omer visited his family back in Pakistan this past spring, receiving the royal welcome he had expected when he arrived in Europe.
“I will come to Europe and have a life like a king,” his 15-year-old self had thought. “I will find peace. I will have a lot of money for the others in my family.”
Alas, the streets of Europe are not paved with gold. But Omer and Shahzaib are certain their lives are much better here than they would be if they had stayed in Pakistan. And if they needed a further reminder of their relative good fortune, they got it when that fishing boat sank, drowning hundreds of their countrymen..
“All of them trying to search for a good life,” Omer said. “It hurts.”
