The European Refugee Crisis, presented by Richard Hardigan

In 2015 over 1.3 million people applied for asylum in Europe. They were escaping violence, conflict, religious or ethnic discrimination and poverty. Roughly half of the asylum seekers came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, where war and violence caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

This surge of refugee arrivals in Europe in 2015 is part of what is often called the European Refugee Crisis. To reduce the number of arrivals, the EU instituted policies that make it as difficult as possible for asylum seekers to reach the continent. There are illegal and violent pushbacks, reduced search-and-rescue budgets, criminalization of NGO’s and outsourcing of border control to organizations with abysmal human rights records such as Libyan militias. The refugees who overcome these obstacles have to spend years living in inhumane refugee camps for years awaiting the results of their asylum processes.

Richard is a professor at San Francisco State University. He has worked with refugees on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos, in the forests along the Balkan Route and on the rescue ships Sea Watch and SOS Humanity in the Central Mediterranean. He is the author of The Other Side of the Wall: An Eyewitness Account of the Occupation in Palestine. His work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Huffington Post and other news outlets. His website is richardhardigan.com.