Wednesday, November 15, 2017 // The Statement
6B
From Skaramagas Dock
F

rom the center of Greece’s largest 
refugee camp, you’re surrounded 
by hundreds of temporary housing 
units. The white, rectangular metal 

boxes are in precise rows, creating a grid that 
projects a sense of order. Many of the boxes 
are adorned with rooftop solar water heaters 
and television dishes. The United Nations, Save 
the Children and other international donor 
logos abound. Here, Syrian families wait for 
resettlement in northern Europe. 

By noon the center of the camp at Skaramagas 

Dock, on the outskirts of Athens, is lively. 
Young children chase one another around the 
boxes. Teenagers kick a soccer ball. Parents 
bring children to the library, or to the Red 
Cross Red Crescent health clinic. Volunteers 
— Europeans — traverse the cement-covered, 
unshaded center in colored vests that identify 
their organizations.

As you progress through the camp, you catch 

glimpses of a radiant blue sea to your right — the 
Mediterranean. Hidden behind rows of white 
housing units, it’s striking.

The view to your left, above the rows of one-

story camp dwellings, leaves an even greater 
impression: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 
steel shipping containers stacked six or seven 
containers high, waiting to be loaded onto 
vessels bound for ports across the globe. 
They’re labeled with the names of South 
Korean, Chinese, German and Greek shipping 
companies.

--
I visited the refugee camp in March, 

alongside other graduate students from the 
University of Michigan. We saw the boxes, the 
sea and the shipping containers through the 
windows of our van as we were arriving. While 
those sights weren’t immediately distressing, or 
emotionally taxing, a brief encounter minutes 
later altered my perception of what I saw that 
morning, and of Europe’s refugee crisis.

With my back turned to our guide, I stood in 

front of a young girl, likely no older than four. 
She was alone, staring at me — an outsider. 
I stared at her. Moments before, I’d seen her 
chasing friends around a nearby box.

She was dressed and acted like many young 

children across the world. And yet I couldn’t 
avoid thinking that she might be different. I 
asked myself: How would being displaced affect 
her? How would her life be different than those 
of Greek children in nearby neighborhoods? I 
wanted more questions answered, too. Where 
and when would her family move? Would she 
ever return to Syria?

I knew almost nothing about her, but in the 

moments she happily chased her friends, and 
stared at me, I saw glimpses of her life. I also 
began to feel my own inadequacy.

It doesn’t matter that Skaramagas Dock 

is orderly and well-run. (I’d been told before 
visiting that, because of this, officials typically 
take visitors there and not to more deprived 
sites.) It doesn’t matter that volunteers ensure 
it is clean and safe. It doesn’t matter that living 
conditions seem to be improving, with a new 
library and sewing workshop.

Placing people in boxes in camps, for months 

if not years, is a tragedy. We box up goods — 
olives, olive oil and feta cheese from Greece — 
in shipping containers and send them around 
the world. We’ve sheltered tens of thousands of 
refugees in similar boxes (and much worse, in 
tents during winter storms), leaving them thus 
incapacitated for months, or more typically, 
years.

This contrast, and the consequences, is 

clear. One makes people richer; the other leaves 
refugees— including children like the girl I saw 
— stuck in time, in between places.

--
Earlier in the week I’d heard from prominent 

NGOs, politicians and researchers about how 
politics in the United States and Europe have 
failed. Skaramagas Dock is certainly evidence 
of that.

I’d heard how our foreign policy has failed to 

address the conflicts in the “origin countries” — 
Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria — that have forced 
millions up against, and through, Europe’s 
deadly borders and seas. I’d read, and now seen 
at Skaramagas Dock, how thousands have been 
left waiting in camps and “jungles,” amid the 
shadows of Europe’s “receiving countries.”

Experts from the United Nations High 

Commissioner for Refugees, politicians and 
foreign policy advisers convincingly argued 
how outdated regulations, austerity and 
nationalistic voters in receiving countries have 
extended the crisis and impoverished our 
world. These conversations led me to think 
that my government’s policy response has 
failed, contributing to my sense of inadequacy. 
The refugees affected by politics and policy 
in Europe, and by the immigration ban I’d 
protested at the airport only weeks before, now 
had images and names in my mind.

Seeing the similarity between the shipping 

containers and refugee shelters, and knowing 
how differently we treat their contents, made 
me question our economic practices and public 
policy as well.

Shipping containers are one of the most 

visible symbols of our global economy today. 

Seeing them next to Skaramagas Dock 
suggested the crisis has had little impact on our 
economic world order or individual economic 
decisions. The containers should have been 
comforting evidence that Greece was finally 
recovering from a decade-long, severe economic 
depression. Instead, the sight of cranes 
shuffling containers around the port, and onto 
ships, imparted a disconcerting impression of 

normalcy — that the refugee crisis had had little 
impact on economic and business decisions.

It’s human nature that when something 

bad happens to others, you stop what you’re 
doing and help. It’s in law, too; when a ship is 
in distress, neighboring sailors must come to 
the rescue. Economists and businesses seem 
to behave differently. There are more refugees 
today than any time since the 1940s, but 
businesses haven’t altered what they’re doing, 
even when those in need are just next door.

I felt inadequate because I study economics 

and public policy, two disciplines that clearly 
haven’t done enough to solve the crisis to 
get refugees out of the camp at Skaramagas 
Dock. Economists and policy analysts have 
failed to persuade the public of the benefits 
of immigration and of welcoming refugees. 
Perhaps more damning is that both disciplines 
have contributed to the business-as-usual 
attitudes seen next door to the camp. Economists 
and policy makers may have tempered their 
enthusiasm for neoliberalism since the years 
of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, or 
even Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, but ideas like 
societies as markets and individuals as profit-
maximizers still affect how we act and justify 
narrow-minded decisions.

I haven’t abandoned my belief in economics 

as a systematic approach that can lead 
individuals, and ultimately societies, to the best 
outcomes. Why? Economics tells us to make 
decisions using a set of rules — by thinking 
on the margin, by considering “opportunity 
costs” (the next best alternative to a choice) and 
by weighing costs against benefits. Together 
these rules explain how we (should) respond to 
incentives, whether social, legal or financial. But 

in the absence of public policy, using this recipe 
to dictate your behavior, without thinking 
seriously about how others are affected, can 
lead us all to undesirable outcomes. Isn’t it crazy 
to make decisions in a narrow-minded, cost-
benefit calculating way when your neighbors 
are refugees (as in Greece), or living on $2 a day 
(as in much of the United States)? And yet many 
people and businesses regularly do this.

--
Our response to the crisis could be different. 

Before visiting the camp that morning, we met 
with Nadina Christopoulou of the Melissa 
Network.

The Melissa Network is a community 

organization 
led 
by 
immigrant 
women, 

including former refugees, for migrant women. 
From the first two floors of an apartment 
building in Athens’s Victoria Square, the 
Melissa Network provides classes, counseling 
and community for women in need. Artists and 
activists stop by each day. Several MacArthur 
fellows, including A.E. Stallings and Michigan’s 
Khaled Mattawa, have read and taught poetry 
there.

I left deeply impressed that morning. 

The 
community 
exudes 
generosity 
and 

empowerment. When introducing a teacher 
there, Christopoulou made sure we heard 
the teacher’s story: she was born in a refugee 
camp. And now as a young woman, that she 
has created and taught a hundred lessons to 
younger, newer refugees. The introduction 
was a small act, yet was visibly empowering; 
the young teacher spoke confidently to us. 
The Melissa Network is growing a diaspora of 
empowered refugees — throughout Athens, 
and as they are resettled, Europe. Many of them 
were once not much different than the girl I 
stood in front of at Skaramagas Dock.

Throughout the week in Athens, I had heard 

repeatedly that we must address the root causes 
of the crisis — the conditions and conflict in 
the origin countries. One foreign diplomat 
described “deep pools of suffering” in Syria, 
Iraq and Afghanistan. While this is certainly 
true, doing so may take decades.

In a lecture to the Ford School of Public Policy 

last month, Christopoulou proffered a different 
solution, one that can have an immediate 
impact, in the United States and Europe. 
We should work to build more integrated 
communities, connected by what we have 
in common and supported by small, healing 
gestures. Melissa’s approach is a noneconomic 
solution in a policy environment defined 
by economic ideas like austerity, efficient 
public management and entrepreneurial 
philanthropy. Instead of weighing the costs 
and benefits of serving those who have just 
joined their community, the Melissa Network 
welcomes them. And it’s clear that her 
approach is working — empowering young 
migrants, eradicating extremism and bringing 
the Athens community together. 

Visiting Athens in March led me to see the 

ways our government, and my disciplines, 
have failed. The Melissa Network shows what 
is possible.

by Anthony Cozart, Public Policy graduate student

PHOTO COURTESY OF ANTHONY COZART 

