When Greece warned the EU’s top officials and executive bodies last summer about the obvious signs of Libya weaponizing illegal migration, no one in the bloc’s leadership payed too much attention to these signals, disregarding the fact that some 9,000 people have arrived in Crete from Libya since the start of the year – most of them in two weeks -, already almost double the number for the whole of 2024. (Crete, Greece’s largest island, sits approximately 300 kilometres north of Libya.) Overall there was a 7 percent rise in irregular crossings in the central Mediterranean in the first part of the year, almost entirely from Libya, POLITICO wrote last July, based on official data from EU’s border management agency FRONTEX. Overall, Crete saw a threefold increase in irregular migration last year, becoming Greece’s busiest point of entry with about 20,000 arrivals.
’For our own society, the flows of illegal immigrants are very large. I cannot say that we can manage it,’ Greek migration minister, Thanos Plevris said last July, adding that, on the island of Crete ’we have every day 1,000 illegal immigrants who want to reach Greece, and in Libya we have 3 million. This means that we have to find solutions within a European framework, but also within our societies.’
Plevris, who describes himself as ’hardline’ on immigration, also presented Greece’s draft law on illegal immigration which includes swifter asylum rejections, stricter prison terms, a reduction in benefits, and the possibility of electronic surveillance for illegal entrants.
Despite Greece warned the EU of a new ’invasion’, referring to migrants using a journey across the sea from Libya to Europe’s southern tip, Athens could not really convince its allies to step up back then.
A few months later, it has become clear in a number of EU countries just how acute the problem in Greece actually is. The current situation can be described as a state of emergency threatening the EU as a whole, since Greek island Crete has become the main gateway for asylum seekers arriving from Tobruk in eastern Libya. With almost 20,000 crossings in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of 2025, the Libya-Crete corridor became the main route, FRONTEX acknowledged.
However, in the context of irregular migration from Libya to Greece, it is worth noting that the migratory pressure together with its root causes and related issues, is just one of those aspects that needs to be examined more closely. The other, equally important issue worthy attention and a more detailed examination is the fact that increasing migration pressure from Libya hits not the most effective EU country with the strongest executive powers, but a member state that has faced major scandals in recent years, such as the case of corruption and fraud at the Greek Payment and Control Agency for Guidance and Guarantee Community Aids (OPEKEPE) which is accused of mishandling hundreds of millions of euros in EU agricultural subsidies.
Recognizing the equal importance of these two elements is key in order to understand that the migration situation in any country within the EU cannot be interpreted separately, but should instead be examined within the context of governance in individual member states.
In the specific case of Greece, this means that implementation weaknesses in the Greek system of agricultural funds, based on EU subsidies, increase security and political risks in particular. Just as the case of OPEKEPE revealed that the Greek system was unable to ensure effective control over its own agricultural subsidy payments, the handling of the influx of Libyan migrants arriving in Crete shows that the same system has only limited capacity to manage dynamically changing migration trends. Considering that the Greek authorities’ role in Crete is basically limited to transferring illegal migrants to the mainland as swiftly as possible, this, while reducing the pressure locally and in the short term, just hides the general and broader problem at state level. However, this approach cannot come as a surprise considering that Greece has struggled to manage migration since 2015, when more than 850,000 people arrived on Greek islands from Turkey.
As for the recent migration pressure, more than 600 migrants arrived on Crete over a 24-hour period in December; at the end of March, 22 people died while adrift in the Mediterranean after leaving from Libya and their bodies were thrown overboard, according to survivors who were rescued off Crete; two weeks later, Greek authorities have rescued over 300 migrants coming mainly from Bangladesh, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan on makeshift vessels.
The concentration of arrivals at the Greek coasts indicated that smugglers had made a shift in Mediterranean migration routes in order to avoid heightened enforcement elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR’s response to a possible new migration crisis was that it expressed criticism related to conditions in Greek reception centres and called for better coordination among EU member states to share responsibility for asylum seekers arriving via Mediterranean routes.
Although the European Commission acknowledged that the surge in small boat arrivals off the coast of Crete had ’possible consequences in terms of European security’, nothing really happened. In fact, there was only one statement claiming the Commission is seeking to curb irregular migration through Libya but that was all. Despite EU Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner said he pressed Libya for for tougher measures to block departures, his talks with Tripoli and Benghazi were not followed by any concrete results. ’Several aspects of EU migration policy in Libya must be acknowledged as having failed,’ German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) says in a study.
Overall, current developments in migration off the Greek coast are not an isolated case, but mark the beginning of a new influx of migrants into Europe. The problems in Greece are more than just temporary difficulties; they are symptoms of a deeper structural problem.
Migration has not disappeared from Europe’s southern borders; it has just shifted its route, making it even more difficult to tackle. The upsurge in the Libyan route indicates that smuggling networks can adapt quickly to new circumstances, while state responses remain slow and fragmented. In the case of Crete, this means the island was not prepared to handle huge numbers of arrivals, that is why every single vessel with migrants becomes not only a humanitarian case, but also a test of structural vulnerability.
Since migratory pressure and institutional shortcomings reinforce one another, every new route poses not only a challenge but also a potential destabilizing factor for a less well-functioning state. The question is no longer whether there will be a new migratory pressure, but whether individual states will be able to cope with it before it becomes a system-wide problem, especially since they cannot expect any concrete help from the EU.
