Mouaz Khrayba, who had been put in touch with me by a mutual acquaintance, had attached photos of refugees protesting in front of barbed-wire fences on Samos. Many of them held signs, one of which asked simply: what is our destiny?My name Mouaz Khrayba of Daraa, Syria I am 20 years old
It is now in the Greek island of Samos
My brother was one of the journalists of the events in Syria
I dream to be well
Walid, a friend of Mouaz Khrayba's who I met when I visited the refugee Reception and Identification Center, or hotspot, on Samos, had, like Khrayba, lived for seven months in a flimsy tent.
"This is not life," Rusheen told me, as she led me through the cabins. "In Aleppo, we had a beautiful clean house. The door locked."
Several hundred refugees live at the squatted Acharnon School in Athens, run by the Revolutionary Left Current of Syria.
Smugglers work openly on Acharnon Street, as they do in many immigrant neighborhoods in Athens. It's tricky to find a decent smuggler, Malik (he asked that I use a pseudonym) a 20-year-old Syrian refugee from Deir ez-Zor, told me when we met at City Plaza. You need recommendations from friends; otherwise, they could rob you. Malik had interviewed 30 smugglers before deciding to pay about $3,000 for a fake-identity card that would allow him to board a plane to Germany. First, he put the money in escrow. Then, the smuggler gave him an ID and took him to the airport. There, people's chances come down to the whiteness of their skin, the niceness of their clothes, and their confidence with the demeaning rituals of modern air travel.It hadn't yet worked out for Malik. Each month, for the past three months, he went to the airport with an ID card in hand. Each time, police confiscated the card and turned him away. The smuggler would keep providing new papers until Malik was safely in Germany.The Great Refugee Crisis of 2015 has birthed competing stories. To the racist far right, it's an "immigration jihad," carried out by young men who want to mooch off welfare, grope European girls, and impose Sharia on the decadent, unsuspecting West. Liberals counter with the real, heartbreaking stories of Syrian refugees—families who fled torture, barrel bombs, and ISIS. Compassion is the least they deserve.While this vision is true, it is also selective, and it imposes its own cruelties. It segments people into categories: "good" refugees (generally Syrian) and "bad" economic migrants (everyone else). Following this logic, refugees have the right to governmental support in the wealthy countries of Northern Europe, while economic migrants are left in detention centers until they are deported back to Turkey. This distinction seems clear when you're in an office in Brussels, but stand a bit closer, and the neat lines blur. The young Afghan who left his village for a better-paying construction job in Iran might be running to Europe to escape forced conscription to fight in Syria. The Syrian dad slaving for starvation wages in the relative safety of Turkey might take the boat to provide a decent future for his kids. These complexities disappear once you slot people into a hierarchy that pits citizens from one country against those of another.At night, Exarchion Place is packed with refugees, anarchy tourists, and longtime residents, of every color and from every corner of the globe. They drink, play with the stray dogs, and, often, clash with the cops.
Khrayba, 20, who first sent me his photos of the refugee camp on Samos during our months-long conversation via Facebook message. I finally met him in Athens after missing him at Samos's hotspot.
