The orange “floating tents” are increasingly common in the Aegean this year. People of all ages, huddled inside the motorless vessels, are on a return journey. After having reached Greek waters or islands by boat, they are set adrift back to Turkey by the Hellenic coast guard — using its own rescue equipment, sometimes with the complicity of the EU border and coast guard agency, Frontex.

It is one of the many “pushback” strategies that have been illegally implemented in the Aegean in recent years to prevent asylum seekers from landing on EU terrain; there have been an estimated eight thousand asylum seekers expelled from Greece in 2020 alone. Others seeking to reach the country find their dinghies intercepted by masked men on flagless boats, are shot at or beaten with chains, and then towed back out of European territory. Others are simply picked up and deposited on one of the Turkish islets in the Aegan, many of them uninhabited.

It was perhaps tactics such as these that Australia’s former prime minister, Tony Abbott, had in mind when he told a gathering of center-right members of the European parliament in 2016 that they could not afford to be “squeamish” about border protection. The following week, then Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, similarly declared to the United Nations that his country’s border policies were the “best in the world.”