Greek authorities “are scrambling to house almost 4,000 people crammed into an overflowing migrant camp in Samos, as aid groups warn of a ‘humanitarian disaster’ on one of Europe’s forgotten frontlines,” writes the Guardian’s Helena Smith in a Feb. 22 article.

“Likening Samos to a ‘new Lesbos,’ the country’s migration minister warned of a race against the clock to find suitable accommodation for the ever growing number of people trapped in a reception centre now six times over capacity,” Smith reports.

As in Lesbos, “which received more than 1 million people at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, smuggler rings have their sights on the eastern Aegean outcrop, which lies barely a mile from the Turkish coast.”

Writer Richard Cooke notes in a recent New York Times opinion piece that Australia honored author Behrouz Boochani with the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia’s most valuable literary prize.

But Boochani “was unable to collect his stipend in person. The same nation praising him is also keeping him in indefinite detention on a small island in the Pacific,” writes Cooke.

For the past five years, “along with 700 or so other inmates, he has lived on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. His is a prison sentence without an end date: Australia refuses to accept asylees attempting arrival via boat, even if they attain refugee status, and Iran rejects forcible repatriation of these individuals,” Cooke notes.

A new Migration Policy Institute Europe report argues that an effective communications strategy, “though often not at the top of policymakers’ to-do lists, is integral to the success or failure of integration policies.”

But government communications related to immigrant integration in the wake of the 2015-2016 refugee crisis “have often occurred in ad hoc fashion, clustered around narratives that offer either unabashedly positive views of diversity or fear-mongering about costs, social cohesion and crime resulting from migrant arrivals,” MPI said in a news release about the report.

The report, “Communicating Strategically about Immigrant Integration: Policymaker Perspectives,” is available here.

The Australian government said on Feb. 3 that the last remaining children held on the Pacific island of Nauru while seeking asylum “would be resettled in the United States, a long-awaited end to a controversial practice and a victory for migrant advocates,” the New York Times reported.

The Guardian reported that the number of children remaining on the island totals four and that they were preparing to fly to the US with their families for resettlement.

“They are the last of the more than 200 children who had been held at the island’s processing centre when the Coalition won government in 2013,” the Guardian’s Feb. 2 article said.

“The psychiatric and physical suffering of children has been the major criticism of the government’s policy since 2013 to send asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by boat to an immigration camp on Nauru or men-only facilities on Papua New Guinea,” wrote AP reporter Rod McGuirk.

The United States agreed in 2016 to accept up to 1,250 refugees and ore than 1,000 others remain on the islands “and face uncertain futures,” wrote McGuirk.