Gangs of Migrants Are Being Detained High Up in the Swiss Alps

The Asylzentrum Lukmanier asylum centre in the Swiss Alps

Since July, the most remote asylum centre in Switzerland has been housed in an abandoned military bunker high up in the Swiss Alps. Standing outside the facility at the top of the Lukmanier Pass, you can see nothing but an endless amount of rocks and a strangely shimmering black reservoir that is so cold your skin starts to burn as soon as you put your feet in it. The only sound is the incessant buzzing of the high-voltage wires running through the small pylon that stands in front of the entrance to Asylzentrum Lukmanier.

The centre usually houses between 50 and 80 men, sent to wait up in the mountains to find out if they will be granted the right to live in Europe. The residents are forced to sleep in bomb shelters they share in groups of five and follow a strictly regulated daily routine; three meals a day, lights out at 10PM and if you want to leave the camp, you'll have to wait for the weekend. One would have thought that the detainees were horrible criminals, yet all they've done is look for a better life away from their war-ravaged countries.

This isolation cell is one of many and the first of many more to come, since a law was passed this summer that will essentially allow empty military facilities to be transformed into "integration zones". Due to bad weather conditions, this month a lot of the detainees were removed from Asylzentrum Lukmanier and distributed to other detention centres across the country. A few weeks before that happened, in October, we hiked up into the mountains to pay a visit.

The first person we met was 18-year-old Narsi from Afghanistan. Narsi has a good sense of humour, hates products from China and loves cars, mentioning that the surrounding landscape and hiking trails would be perfect for a dirt rally. His Facebook profile is full of pictures of him in black blazers standing on the beach in front of his Lexus back home. Is he really 18? He claims he is, but the department of immigration are distrustful since a lot of asylum seekers pretend to be underage to speed up the process of their claim.

Like a lot of other Afghan refugees, Narsi spent the majority of his childhood in Iran but left for Turkey when life in the country started worsening. On the doorstep to the West, just before crossing over to Greece, he and the others he was with tossed their passports into the Mediterranean. From there on, their paths separated. Although he did say he imagined Europe to be slightly more hospitable, he didn’t complain about the living conditions in the centre too much – with the exception of the boredom and bland food, that is.

This guy goes by the name "Beer Wolf" because his Ethiopian name is impossible for European people to pronounce. Beer Wolf didn't share Narsi's optimism; he hates the mountains and hiking, but he does like rappers who get shot like 50 Cent and Tupac. His wife and children live about an hour's drive away – in Buchs, St Gallen – and he misses them every second. If his claim for asylum doesn’t work out he will be sent back to Greece, his first point of entry to the EU. He's heard that it's much easier to get asylum in Greece but for now he's trapped up in the Swiss mountains.

The next man we spoke to was Joseph, a French-speaking Eritrean florist. The rest of the detainees at Asylzentrum Lukmanier call him "The Mafioso" and if they held Best Dressed contests there, Joseph would win every time. We found him furiously talking into his mobile phone; turns out he was getting deported that very same day due to "bad behaviour". What this bad behaviour amounted to, he couldn’t say, and he had no idea where he was being shipped off to, either.

His main gripe was that detainees don’t receive any climate-appropriate clothing, other than their working clothes, which they are not allowed to wear outside working hours. For the asylum seekers at Asylzentrum Lukmanier, work consists of different community jobs, such as removing rubble from hiking trails or roadwork. When Joseph's not being kept busy with that, he wanders the mountainsides smoking in his crocodile brogues.

The situation we encountered in the Alps may seem weird but it's not unique; if anything, it's symptomatic of the modern face of Swiss immigration policy, which seems to betray the country's humanitarian tradition. Back in August, for example, ten asylum seekers in the village of Solothurn protested against being forced to live in a bomb shelter with no sunlight or fresh air supply. You would think that those demands were fairly reasonable but their demonstration was a disaster; some guy poured beer and milk all over the protesters and the Swiss authorities withdrew both the wages that were legally due to them and their food. Four days into the protest, the police shut the whole thing down and the ten asylum seekers were split up and carted off in different directions.

Other stories abound: of migrants being banned from swimming pools, sports grounds, schools and churches, and of a place known as Minimalcenter Waldau – a colony of containers in Landquart. That is the place you get sent to if you have displayed “behavioural problems” in other asylum centres. In January, 32-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian Feras Motaleeb died in mysterious circumstances. He had been brought to Waldau because of a fight at his previous facility – and also because he refused to put out his cigarette in the transit centre, which acts as a kind of asylum seeker sorting office, in Cazis.

Could this be the beginning of a new, shady era of European border control? When the Schengen Implementing Convention – created by the Schengen Agreement (Schengen 2) at the end of the 1990s – was converted to EU law, the EU's asylum policy was supposedly inspired by the German Idea of “safe third- and home-countries”. What this means is that people who have “unlawfully” entered Schengen territory can be sent back to their countries immediately. To avoid that, millions of migrants get rid of their passports and the result is a bureaucratic nightmare that keeps thousands of immigrants in the system interminably.

Despite its reputation as a country full of mountains filled with gold, this seems like an odd time for Switzerland to be spending so much money converting its old military centres into isolation tanks for people in need. Population growth is down, the unemployment rate has just nudged above a relatively high three percent and certain companies are constantly understaffed. Even more absurd than this, however, was the image of dozens of hikers, faces smeared with sun cream, coming across the group of boulder-hacking migrants and not having the slightest idea who these people are.

More on how Europe is handling immigration:

Hunting For Illegal Immigrants With the UK Border Police

A Borderline Crisis

Silent Asylum