GOVERNING IRREGULAR MIGRATION AT THE MARGINS OF EUROPE persons who wish to apply for asylum and persons who can be returned immediately. This in turn would lead to different procedures for immediate return and for persons with regard to whom the situation may remain doubtful, where normal procedure applies (Statewatch, 2015). A recent report commissioned by the European Parliament (Neville et al., 2016) notes that after the Paris attacks of 2015 security has become paramount, leading to checks in belonging, physical checks, cross checking data on the Schengen Information System (SIS), Interpol and Europol databases. The attack in Paris proved particularly crucial for Greece. A Syrian passport had been found lying close by the bodies of two other persons identified as responsible for the terrorist attack. At the time, «Greece’s citizen protection minister, Nikos Toskas, confirmed that the passport’s owner had entered the European Union through the Greek island of Leros on 3 October»8. Fears that terrorists will be using the same entry routes as migrants resulted in renewed pressure to Greece to finalise the setting up of hotspot facilities in the islands that would enable various agencies to come together and process arrivals (and their personal information). According to one of the interlocutors employed by an EU Agency in the hotspot of Moria, the hotspot approach was designed to ensure frontline states perform the roles pre-assigned to them under CEAS and Schengen. This becomes clear if one looks at the operational aspect, which remains grounded in the notion that the responsibility for the processing, screening and processing asylum applications rests in the hands of the country of first arrival; i.e. the frontline State. What was crucial in the early days of the hotspots (autumn 2015) is that the facilities were not designed for long term. At first, they functioned as transit centres for people to register and then move onwards to the mainland. Thus, the hotspot was meant to regulate who is in and who is out of the space of mobility defined by the Schengen Acquis. It was perceived as one more tool in the governance of irregular migration. This policy aimed at ensuring that countries like Greece undertook registration and processing of new arrivals at the border. Greece was asked to establish the hotspots as early as June 2015. Yet, bureaucratic delays and objections from local societies on the islands delayed the project. The first hotspot, Moria in Lesvos, was introduced on October 2015. The island of Lesvos alone received roughly 140,000 new arrivals between October and November 20159. By the end of November and after the Paris attack, Samos and Leros were also operational, with the hotspot in Chios opening in February 2016. The last hotspot opened on the island of Kos in the Spring of 2016. From discussions with migrants that entered Greece in late 2015, it is clear that the hotspots functioned as registration centres. Migrants underwent nationality screening and registration, and received a paper to board on ships x 8 The Guardian, «Paris terror attacks ’carried out by three coordinated teams of gunmen», (14 November 2015), available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/syriangreece-refugee-paris-attacks-killers. 9 Data from UNHCR Operational Portal: the Mediterranean situation, available at http:// data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean. – 79 –