In December, 2018, a volunteer who teaches photography at a school for refugee children on the Greek island of Samos gave Kodak disposable cameras to her class. She told the students to photograph their daily lives. “When we developed the pictures, we were highly impressed,” Giulia Cicoli, one of the founders of the school, known as Mazí, told me as she showed me a number of the images, which had been given captions by the children who took them. One captured angry men climbing a fence topped with barbed wire and had the caption “There was a protest. All the African guys wanted to be transferred and they burned 2 toilets.” A picture that showed women waiting in the dark to visit the camp health clinic was presented with the words “I hate this line. The line for the doctor.” It went on, “The last time I had to wait for 14 hours.” To me, the most striking image was one of the simplest: a picture of the interior of one of the trailers that many refugees live in on the island. Wires hung from a dirty and stained ceiling, and a tube light traversed the frame. The young photographer captioned it, “I put this light here to make my container more beautiful.”

Samos is one of five islands that house refugees in the eastern part of Greece. It is known for its wine, its small size, and, now, for chronic overcrowding. This year, the situation has been growing worse as more migrants have arrived by boat from Turkey to join the four thousand refugees who are already here. The island’s thirty-three thousand residents initially aided the migrants themselves, providing them with food and clothing. Four years later, they say that the Greek government has failed to do its part and that both the asylum seekers and the island’s permanent residents are being neglected by politicians in Athens. “The population is slowly becoming a victim, because it has to deal alone with the situation,” Nikitas Kiparissi, a volunteer who teaches art to asylum seekers on Samos, told me.

Greece is still suffering from the effects of a decade-long economic crisis and the resultant austerity program imposed on it by eurozone lenders. When asylum seekers started arriving on the island, in 2015, tourism waned, and politicians argued that the migrant crisis had scared people away. Even though tourists soon returned in even stronger numbers than before, politicians continue to invoke the spectre of another drop.

The fear of migrants, locals told me, is being used as a political weapon in Greece’s legislative elections, which are scheduled for July. The political rhetoric has filtered into all aspects of life on Samos. When I was there, the youth wing of the local Communist Party had hung a banner in the center of the island’s capital, Vathy, which read “Solidarity with the refugees and migrants!” Some upscale restaurants, meanwhile, were refusing service to people who look like migrants.

Recently, after schools on Samos started staying open later to allow migrant children to attend classes, many local parents kept their children home in protest. The national government, which is controlled by Alexis Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party, was quick to criticize the locals for keeping their children out of school. “A small number of parents are trying to cultivate a climate of racism and xenophobia,” the education ministry said in a statement.

Samians think this rhetoric from the central government is unfair. Last year, Samos’s mayor, Michalis Angelopoulos, called for the Greek government to transfer migrants off the island. “Together, we can and must be able to give a real solution to a problem for which we have no responsibility,” he said, “but in an unfair way, we have suffered and continue to suffer from all its consequences."

The Greek government has been given 1.6 billion euros by the E.U. to spend on the migrant crisis since 2015, but the funds don’t seem to have filtered through to the migrants. “You look at the conditions . . . and they are abysmal,” Bill Frelick, the director of the refugee-rights program at Human Rights Watch, told me. “You can’t help but think there is a deliberate strategy of deterrence, to make the conditions as bad as possible despite all the funding they are getting from Europe.”

The largest refugee camp on Samos is situated on a disused military base perched in the pine forests above Vathy. Some four thousand people inhabit a space designed to accommodate six hundred and forty-eight. Inside a barbed-wire fence, people inhabit filthy trailers with windows broken by police raids. Outside the camp, in an area known as the Jungle, migrants cluster in the trees in squalid collections of tents, shacks, and tarpaulins tied to branches. “The conditions have always been bad,” Bogdan Andrei, who leads the group Samos Volunteers and has worked on the island since 2016, told me. “But now, since September, they have been the worst in three years, and people still keep on coming.” Faced with the threat of growing nationalism in their own countries, politicians from E.U. member states, who are well aware of the conditions in the camps, have not prioritized finding a solution to resettle refugees quickly and humanely. “It’s a situation of people being stuck here in a power struggle that they can’t see,” Agus Oliveri, a field coördinator with Samos Volunteers, told me.

In the summer of 2015, I visited the island of Lesvos, which had become a sort of twenty-first century Ellis Island as two-thirds of the million or so refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere who arrived in Europe through Greece passed through the island. A veteran aid worker told me that the last time he had seen such chaos was in camps in Zaire in the nineteen-nineties, as that country plunged into civil war.

The camp I saw in Samos was far worse than anything I saw in Lesvos. The Jungle begins a few yards from the camp’s barbed-wire fences. Journalists, including myself, and N.G.O. workers are routinely barred from entering the camp proper, but the area outside is open to anyone. When I approached, I heard a group of migrants praying to Jesus that they would be delivered from the ordeal they were going through. Vermin wandered the camp and burrowed into children’s beds, biting them at night. “In the winter, we have rain. In the summer, we have rats, we have snakes,” Majida Ali, a Palestinian-Syrian refugee who works at the camp’s health clinic, told me. Ali, who has been given temporary residence in Greece, said that the refugees don’t know how long they will remain on Samos. “The fact is,” she said, “no one explains to them why they are waiting or how long they are waiting.”

Charlie Pebou, a twenty-five-year-old Congolese man who had been in the camps for four months, told me that some refugees had grown mentally ill. “Here, I’ve seen people who’ve done seven or eight months, who have gone crazy,” he said. “I’m scared of becoming like them.” Pipina Katsari, the head of the U.N. refugee agency’s local field office, told me that refugees remain on the island, on average, for four months. But she acknowledged that some of the migrants have asylum interviews scheduled as late as 2022. “Of course, living in such a situation even for some days can be very frustrating,” she said.