All the chatter of rebuilding prisons on Lesbos and western European states evacuating a handful of children from the island still seems absurd when they still have to make a deadly boat journey here in the first place.

When they finally get off Lesbos, they still have a gauntlet of violent border guards and barbed wire ahead of them to reach western Europe, where they usually get status anyway. And in doing so give their life savings to organised crime smuggling groups to facilitate it.

The majority coming over the Aegean are still Afghans and Syrians. If the same political bartering and financing was concentrated towards meaningful, global resettlement programmes nearer the region, less would be encouraged to take this route.

Instead it’s a focus on fortification and incarceration while smugglers merely raise their prices. Islands like Lesbos are kept in a state of permanent crisis, a media and NGO circus, that gives the impression that refugee management is chaotic. It doesn’t have to be.

But it seems that Assad and Taliban have won, over the bodies of millions of their people, and European normalisation with both these regimes is likely to follow, heavily incentivised by the prospect of deportation agreements

It already happens in small numbers with Afghans. Next will be Syrians from “safe” areas like Damascus. It sounds unthinkable, but then training and financing Libyan militia to drag back migrants at sea into the torture chambers of an active war zone seemed unthinkable.

Refugees are sent adrift at sea and tortured in forests in the dark of night by police inside the EU and the response from the highest levels in Brussels is to propose fictitious ‘monitoring mechanisms’.

Maintaining Moria as an inflammable ghetto was merely a part of a wider border policy towards migrants that is incredibly violent at its heart, just a part that was chosen not to be sanitised.

These reoccurring scenes on Lesbos would never be acceptable in western European capitals. Disrupting the lives of a few villagers on distant Greek islands is an incredibly low cost of doing business.