Unofficially, though, the wave-through approach had already started.71 Rozakou’s (2017a) ethnographic research on the island of Lesvos during the summer of 2015 is particularly illuminating of non-recording practices on the island. Operating in a state of legal limbo and with an overwhelmed system, due to severe staff shortages, Greek officials neither registered nor fingerprinted most of the new arrivals. Near the end of the summer, the police that were responsible for managing the closed reception centres on the islands opened the gates due to their incapability to provide food to all the detainees.72 Rather than trying to impede movement like in the past, the focus was now on speeding up the flow to avoid congestion on the islands. Hence, the number of immigrant and asylum seeker detainees remained very low. The Greek government did not just turn a blind eye to this practice, but was actively involved by chartering ferries to take people from the islands where they land, to Athens or to Kavala (a port in north Greece) so they could continue their journey to northern Europe; turning ferries into, what has Spathopoulou (2016) identified as, mobile hotspots. As Papada et al. (2020, p. 1033) further report, the issuance of removal orders to all new arrivals was employed as a ‘governance tool to secure the fastest possible transit of those arriving towards the rest of Europe’.73 However, because of a lack of sustainable plan, this wave through policy resulted in refugees and migrants congregating in squares in Athens, where the number of people sleeping rough swelled dramatically. The huge makeshift camp in Idomeni, at Greece’s border with Macedonia, which the Greek Interior Minister, Panagiotis Kouroumblis, called ‘modern-day Dachau’ (Worley and Dearden, 2016), was constructed through humanitarian support to hold those who were waiting to cross the border to continue their journeys through the Balkans to Northern Europe.74 However, the idea of people being waved through was not welcomed by the countries on the receiving end of the flow (European Commission, 2016), isolating Greece from its neighbouring countries, as evidenced by its exclusion from the Visegrad and Austria summits which were convened to discuss the handling of the ‘refugee crisis’ (Deutsche Welle, 2016). Tyler (2018) adeptly captures the role of Visegrád states in the dramatic events of 2015. ‘Visegrád politicians began to craft For more on how Greece has attempted to control outward mobility over the years, compared to other countries, see Weber et al. (2019). 72 This is mainly based on anecdotal evidence drawn from my experience as an NGO worker at the time. 71 This excluded Syrian nationals, who received a six-month suspension from removal. For a chronicle of the events before and after Idomeni turned from a transit hub to a dead end, see Anastasiadou et al. (2017). 73 74 116