Such is the desire to cross the channel that migrants, some of them children, face huge hardships.
Samaras, the prime minister-designate pledged to stick broadly to the Greek bailout terms but added: "We will simultaneously have to make some necessary amendments to the bailout agreement, in order to relieve the people of crippling unemployment and huge hardships".
Imports would dry up - some of them, such as medical supplies, oil, raw materials and a range of food and everyday items, would create huge hardships.
He calls for huge tax cuts, while proposing specific spending cuts that, while inflicting immense hardship on our most vulnerable citizens, would fall far short of making up for the revenue loss.
If they did suddenly pull out, many feared it would mean huge economic hardship for the car-free, three-mile-long island.
Ordinary Greeks have endured huge economic hardship as previous governments implemented the austerity economic programme demanded as a condition of the bailout by the "troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2010 – and then again in 2012 – to address the country's debt crisis.
"As it confronts its massive debt problem…and a new austerity threatens to become its default setting, Europe seems to have lost sight of the fact that it has been there before; that the baby boom generation found its roots in postwar hardship; that…the huge affluence of more recent years could barely have been imagined as people struggled to shake off the gloom of war," he wrote.
