Only their personal effects remain: passports, identity cards, mobile phones, bank notes and bleached photographs of family groups.
"All our passports and money got wet by the time we reached the plastic boats.
The passports of many peaceful activists were confiscated.
We all want our icons in the desert, but let's face it, your construction workers will probably do a better job if they're not living in squalor, 10 men to a room, trapped in labour camps with their passports confiscated, working for a year just to pay back their recruitment fees.
This follows evidence collected by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents workers' rights around the world, that migrant workers were being paid lower-than-expected wages, having their passports confiscated, trafficked for forced labour and living in cramped conditions.
However, a Sigma Dos poll for the Guardian on Thursday showed that many Catalans would be reluctant to part with the Spanish language, passports or Lionel Messi and his Barça teammates playing football in La Liga.
In Malaysia, migrant workers who manufacture electronics products are working as modern-day slave laborers who have had their passports and wages confiscated and are unable to return to their own countries.
Many asylum seekers and other migrants arrive in Britain without their passports, and they cannot be removed without travel documents.
During the 1920s they succeeded in getting real-estate deeds, passports, bank accounts and voter registrations issued in the names that they chose.
In the past few months, I have cancelled a substantial number of passports on security grounds and I continue to do so.
Shoeboxes full of passports, wads of bankcards and trays of wallets are stacked on the floor, while an impressive pile of feather jewellery sits on the side.
