Wasil awoke to the sound of a knife ripping through nylon. Although he was only twelve years old, he was living alone in a small tent at a refugee camp in Calais, France, known as the Jungle. Men entered his tent; he couldn’t tell how many. A pair of hands gripped his throat. He shouted. It was raining, and the clatter of the drops muffled his cries, so he shouted louder. At last, people from neighboring tents came running, and the assailants disappeared.

Wasil had left his mother and younger siblings in Kunduz, Afghanistan, ten months earlier, in December, 2015. His father, an interpreter for NATO forces, had fled the country after receiving death threats from the Taliban. Later, Wasil, as the eldest son, became the Taliban’s surrogate target. Wasil was close to his mother, but she decided to send him away as the situation became increasingly dangerous. Her brother lived in England, and she hoped that Wasil could join him there. To get to Calais, Wasil had travelled almost four thousand miles, across much of Asia and Europe, by himself. Along the way, he had survived for ten days in a forest with only two bottles of water, two biscuits, and a packet of dates to sustain him. Before leaving home, he hadn’t even known how to prepare a meal.

Wasil was stunned by the conditions of the Jungle. The camp, a forty-acre assemblage of tents, situated on a vast windswept sandlot that had formerly served as a landfill, didn’t seem fit for human habitation. “I did not come here for luxury,” Wasil told me, in excellent English, which he had learned from his father. “But I can’t believe this is happening in Europe.” A chemical plant loomed nearby. There was no running water, and when it rained the refugees’ tents filled with mud and the camp’s rudimentary roads became impassable.

The Jungle had one thing to recommend it: its proximity to the thirty-mile-long Channel Tunnel, which connects France and England at the Strait of Dover. Thousands of refugees and migrants from all over the world congregated at the camp, amid rats and burning trash, with the sole objective of making it, whether by truck, train, or ferry, onto British soil. On one of Wasil’s first days at the camp, he called his mother on his cell phone. “Are you safe?” she asked. “I was saying to her, ‘I’m in a good condition, I am too safe. I’m going to school and learning French. . . . I can touch the water that one side is here and the other side is England,’ ” Wasil recalled. “I’m not telling her the real situation.”

The morning after Wasil was attacked, he returned his tent to the charity organization that had given it to him. Whether the assailants had sought to rob him or to hurt him, he was too frightened to continue sleeping in the Jungle. A volunteer took him to the police, who found him a bed at a government-run center for vulnerable youth about four miles west of Calais. There was little to do there, and no one spoke Dari, Wasil’s language, so each morning he walked two and a half hours to the Jungle in order to spend the day in the company of the hundreds of other unaccompanied minors at the camp. His friends were a band of fellow-Afghan boys who clung together with a staunchness that was directly proportional to their lack of parental protection. Wasil’s best friend was a boy named Rohullah. They drifted around the camp, trying to pick up bits of news or hearsay that might aid their quest to get to England. Each night, as dusk fell, Wasil made the trip back to the youth center. “I walk slowly,” he said. “I’m thinking of the others”—children who had made it to the United Kingdom—“and I’m disappointed. I’m hoping that maybe one day I will be like them and go to college safely.” Occasionally, he snapped a selfie: a boy in a cast-off woman’s windbreaker, wandering through a deserted suburban landscape as the sky darkens.

Wasil is a kind, scrupulous kid, with intelligent eyes and a mop of black hair. He wants to be a doctor. “My best subject is biology and my second is chemistry,” he said. His favorite soccer team is Real Madrid, and his favorite player Cristiano Ronaldo. “I love him,” he said. “His style, appearance, actions, attitude, and the way he is making a goal, some of his technical movings.” He adores the movie “Troy,” Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Greek epic. He can quote Achilles nearly word for word, in the hero’s address to his men: “My brothers of the sword! I would rather fight beside you than any army of thousands! Let no man forget how menacing we are—we are lions!”

In the weeks after the attack, the muscles in Wasil’s throat ached where he had been choked. He began having stomach problems, and his feet were shredded and blistered. He couldn’t reach his mother. “Kunduz has become very dangerous,” he said. “I called her number, but it was dead.”

Among the 1.3 million people who sought asylum in Europe in 2015 were nearly a hundred thousand unaccompanied children. Most were from Afghanistan and Syria. Thirteen per cent were younger than fourteen years old. The data for 2016 are incomplete, but the situation is comparable. Experts estimate that for every child who claims asylum one enters Europe without seeking legal protection. (The number of unaccompanied minors attempting to enter the United States, most of them from Central America, has also increased dramatically in recent years. President Trump’s executive order on immigration, in addition to barring refugees, targets asylum seekers, many of whom are unaccompanied children.) At an age at which most kids need supervision to complete their homework, these children cross continents alone.

The process of starting over in Europe is supposed to be fairly straightforward. Under the Dublin III Treaty, refugees must apply for asylum in the first European Union country they enter. However, an unaccompanied minor with a close relative elsewhere in Europe has a right to pursue asylum there. In addition, in May, the U.K. Parliament passed an amendment—sponsored by the Labour peer Alfred Dubs, who was evacuated from Czechoslovakia as part of the Kindertransport, in 1939—stipulating that the government accept an unspecified number of unaccompanied refugee children from other countries in Europe. Last spring, the Dubs plan enjoyed widespread support. Even the Daily Mail, which is often virulently anti-immigrant, affirmed, “We believe that the plight of these unaccompanied children now in Europe—hundreds of them on our very doorstep in the Channel ports of France—has become so harrowing that we simply cannot turn our backs.” The Minister for Security and Immigration declared, “We have a moral duty to help.”

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But political infighting among the European states, which by accidents of geography have been unequally burdened by the refugee crisis, has led to a breakdown of the process. Few refugees and migrants can envision settling in overstretched Italy and Greece, where almost all of them make their first entry into Europe. (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees distinguishes between “refugees,” people who face a direct threat of persecution or death, and “migrants,” but the difference is not always clear-cut.) The governments of border countries have often been happy to wave the newcomers on. The goal, for the majority of refugees, is to reach one of a group of countries in northern Europe, where unemployment is lower and social support can be more generous. If, in theory, securing a viable future is about making it to Europe, in practice it is about making it across Europe. Unaccompanied minors, navigating unfamiliar terrain in a vacuum of authority, are especially vulnerable travellers. Sarah Crowe, a spokesperson for Unicef, has said, “There is an assumption that everything is under control when they arrive on the European shores, but it’s actually just the beginning of a new phase of their journey.”