By: Graeme Culliford | thesun.co.uk | 27 June 2025
How Greek island Lesbos stopped migrant invasion using controversial yet effective ‘pushback’ deterrent hailed by locals
AS the influx of illegal migrants to Britain’s shores shows no sign of abating, something very different is happening 2,000 miles away on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Here, just seven miles across the Mytilini Strait from Turkey, the number of crossings has shrunk, thanks to a controversial but extremely effective deterrent.
At its peak ten years ago, up to 3,500 migrants a day landed on Lesbos, having made the perilous journey across the Aegean Sea in makeshift boats and cheap dinghies.
But now, thanks to Greece’s robust policy of “pushbacks” — intercepting the boats and returning them to Turkish waters — that number has plummeted to just 1,700 so far this year.
Aegean Boat Report, a Norwegian non-governmental organisation that monitors migrant flows in the area, says Turkey also regularly intercepts boats before they reach the Greek Islands and returns them to the mainland.
Campaigners have slammed the practice, claiming it is illegal, but locals say the crackdown has saved the scenic holiday retreat from economic disaster — and most importantly, it has saved lives.
Fisherman Thanassis Marmarinos recalls the horror of seeing the bodies of migrants in the sea before Greece’s hardline anti- immigration government was elected in 2019.
Floating corpses
He said: “It was extremely bad before, I can’t imagine it being any worse.
“Every day there were thousands of migrants crossing.
“For five months I couldn’t make any money because I would spend all my time trying to stop them drowning.
“People were asking for help and they were dying in the water, so I had no other option.
“I saw the corpses floating in the sea with my own eyes.
“In 2015 there was only one coastguard ship and they were overwhelmed, so I and four other fishermen did what we could to help save lives.
“The smugglers were charging about 2,000 euros per person for the 90-minute sailing to Lesbos.
“But to save money they were giving the migrants cheap, Chinese-made boats that had two sections to their engines — one full of fuel, the other full of water, so they would stop working halfway.”
In 2015, triggered by war and political unrest in the Middle East and Africa, the refugee crisis had one of its deadliest years for small-boat crossings.
A total of 805 people drowned as they tried to cross what is dubbed the Eastern Mediterranean corridor by Frontex, the European Union’s border and coastguard agency.
An incredible 800,000 landed in Greece the same year, 60 per cent of them reaching Lesbos, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.
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