Fortress Europe
Big Story
•
57m
At the height of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, more than one million people sought refuge on the continent. Many of them were fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, and most of them were welcomed, even as their numbers overwhelmed Europe’s outer reaches.
Today, the winds have changed. Borders are closing, routes are becoming blocked, and the EU is paying countries like Turkey billions to keep the desperate on distant shores. This, as right-wing, anti-immigrant parties gain traction in polls across much of Europe.
As a result, the number of migrants who do make it is decreasing. But the challenges they face once they arrive, are increasingly on the up.
Shot on the Mediterranean’s migratory front lines, and deep into nationalist Europe, Fortress Europe examines a continent being pushed to the brink, as it struggles to balance its response to the worldwide crisis that’s arrived on its shores.
Up Next in Big Story
-
The Landing Strip
It’s one of the poorest countries in Latin America, and a hotbed for the international drug trade. With eight percent of the drugs that come into the United States passing through its borders, the mark left on Honduras is dark, and plagued with destruction. Here, traffickers control a trade so po...
-
The Lost Children of Tunisia
The small coastal North African nation that was the birthplace of the Arab Spring is becoming the latest casualty in global terrorism. A longtime hotbed for ISIL recruitment, the U.N. estimates Tunisia has the highest per capita rate of foreign ISIL fighters of any nation in the world. But even a...
-
The New Silk Road Part 1
At the turn of the century, China embarked on a development plan that saw the country’s economy explode to 60 times its original size in just 40 years. By focusing on infrastructure and mobility, China changed its destiny and is now looking to the Belt and Road Initiative to share these lessons w...
