Dealing with the migration-refugee challenge

The first news the prime minister heard when he got off the plane following a trip to Berlin on Tuesday, 30 August, was that 13 boats had reached the shores of northeastern Lesvos. En masse and in an organized manner, 530 migrants and refugees had arrived on the island, ramping up the already considerable pressure on the authorities and the local community. The Turkish Coast Guard had not responded to Greek requests to stop this wave of new arrivals.

What happened that day in the eastern Aegean starkly confirmed the concerns Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had expressed to Chancellor Angela Merkel during their meeting in Berlin. It was the moment when the upsurge in mixed migrant flows broke on Greece's shores, recalling the crisis of 2015.

A month earlier, Greece's new government had inherited an impasse - a closed system of migrant/refugee inflows with virtually...