He makes no secret of his joy: Greece’s right-wing conservative migration minister Thanos Plevris has expressed his satisfaction at the significant decline in refugee arrivals. “The deterrence is working,” Plevris said on the private Athens television station Skai.
As the Athens Ministry of Migration has now officially announced, exactly 48,298 refugees and migrants were newly registered in 2025, 21 percent fewer than in the previous year. This means that the radical downward trend continues. According to UNHCR, there were 861,630 new arrivals in 2015.
According to the Athens Ministry of Migration, in December 2025 there were a total of 96,438 recognized refugees in Greece with its 10.3 million inhabitants. Furthermore, a further 38,138 people had a residence permit with temporary protection status. Most asylum seekers last year came from Afghanistan, Egypt and Sudan.
As Migration Minister Plevris explained on Platform X, the number of newly arriving refugees and migrants would have increased by July 2025. The decline in 2025 as a whole was largely achieved in the last five months of this year through “tough measures”, as Plevris emphasized.
Returns without registration
What Plevris means by this: Initially, the conservative government under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis passed a new asylum regulation in the Athens parliament on July 11th in order to drastically reduce the significantly increasing number of new arrivals who reached the island of Crete by sea from eastern Libya.
Accordingly, people who came into the country by sea from North Africa were temporarily no longer allowed to submit asylum applications. “These people will be returned to the country of departure or origin without registration,” it said. The new asylum regulations were valid for three months and expired in October. By then the number of new arrivals in Crete had actually decreased significantly.
At the beginning of September, the Greek government also passed a new migration law (number 5226/2025), thereby further tightening its already restrictive migration policy. The key points: According to Article 27, rejected asylum seekers now face a prison sentence of at least 2 years and a fine of at least 5,000 euros if they remain in the country illegally.
Only if the person concerned leaves the country voluntarily will the penalties be suspended. The Greek authorities are allowed to place electronic ankle bracelets for monitoring purposes on those obliged to return.
Fines, administrative detention and “safe third countries”
Keyword prison or return: Anyone who reaches Greece without an entry permit will in future be exposed to administrative detention of up to 24 months. According to Article 26 of the new Migration Act, the illegal re-entry of people who are on a list of “undesirable foreigners” will also be punished with prison sentences of at least 3 years, and fines will increase to at least 10,000 euros.
For the first time, a “compelling reason” for refusing entry in the event of a “threat to public order and security” is being introduced. Furthermore, the term “country of return” is expanded. From now on, it includes not only the country of habitual residence, but also “safe third countries” and the first country to grant asylum.
Returns should be accelerated and so-called asylum shopping, i.e. onward travel to countries that supposedly offer better asylum conditions, should be prevented. On top of that, the previously granted legalization will be abolished after an illegal stay of 7 years. Submitting applications for international protection will also be made more difficult in order to prevent, as it is officially called, “abusive practices”. The aim of all these measures: maximum deterrence.
Meanwhile Refugees and migrants continue to die in the Eastern Mediterranean. 2 migrants, including a 4-year-old boy and a woman, arrived on Last Saturday he died off the island of Ikaria while trying to get from Turkey to Greece. Three other people, including two children, are still missing, the Greek coast guard said. Accordingly, 49 refugees were rescued.
According to the Greek Coast Guard, citing statements from survivors, the boat hit rocks in the open sea northeast of Ikaria and capsized. The survivors were taken to the closed migrant camp on the island of Samos on Monday under the supervision of the Greek police (Elas).