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In early July 2021, writes Caitlin L. Chandler today in the NYR Online, “the Lithuanian government declared a state of emergency due to a ‘mass influx’ of immigrants” who had come via neighboring Belarus, which had just loosened its visa policies. “A week later it sent guards into the forest that stretches along the border with Belarus, imposed six months of mandatory detention for all asylum seekers, and constructed detention camps” to imprison the people at its doors.

One of those detainees, taken later in July, was Sajjad Mohammedhasan, a twenty-four-year-old IT professional who had just fled Iraq for fear of persecution. He spent a year in Lithuanian detention, most of it at a repurposed prison, amassing evidence about the suffering and deprivation to which the authorities subjected him and his fellow asylum seekers. Now he lives in Germany, awaiting both the outcome of his asylum application there and the verdict in a case he filed against the Lithuanian government in the European Court of Human Rights. Over the course of a number of interviews with Chandler, he shared his story.

Below, alongside Chandler’s article, we have collected five essays from our archives about Europe and its treatment of migrants.

Caitlin L. Chandler
At the Gates of Fortress Europe

The story of Sajjad Mohammedhasan, who sought asylum but received a year in Lithuania’s border prisons.

Neal Ascherson
Room at the Bottom

The immigrant labor system, on which Western Europe now so heavily depends for unskilled work, ensures that the burden of unemployment in the north and west of the continent is carried by the south and east.

—February 5, 1976

Molly Crabapple
Where Else Can They Go?

In times like this, chauvinists try to paint refugees as a plague, as terrorists. Stories are one way to fight back.

—December 6, 2018

Khaled Mattawa and Jérôme Tubiana
The River

Four weeks on a migrant rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

—February 6, 2023

Marina Warner
No Freedom to Move

The current politics of immigration have twisted human nature against itself, fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life.

—November 23, 2023

J. Hoberman
Polish Compassion

Green Border is the filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest confrontation with her country’s brutal history.

—June 20, 2024

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