Judging by the content of the debate in Greece over the past few days, one
might think that the most pressing issue facing the country ahead of the
upcoming general elections is illegal immigration rather than the economy. The
two coalition partners, New Democracy and PASOK, have attempted to outdo each
other by trying to appear determined to tackle a matter to which the crisis has
lent extra weight.
With elections probably due to take place on May 6, Greece’s two main
political parties have stepped up the rhetoric. New Democracy leader Antonis
Samaras wants to repeal the citizenship law passed by the PASOK government in
2010. The law allows second-generation immigrants whose parents have been living
in Greece legally to apply for Greek citizenship. Despite the fact that only a
few thousand people, mostly ethnic Greeks, have taken advantage of the law, New
Democracy insists it is a magnet for undocumented migrants who see it as an
opportunity to obtain legal status in a European Union country.
“Our cities have been taken over by illegal immigrants, we have to reclaim
them,” Samaras told members of his party on Thursday, as police conducted sweep
operation in downtown Athens. Samaras’s comments are typical of the kind of
language that is fueling the surge of populism threatening to overwhelm any
constructive attempts to deal with the issue.
PASOK, meanwhile, via its Citizens’ Protection Minister Michalis
Chrysochoidis, is attempting to go one better than its political rival by
announcing the creation of 30 reception centers around the country by next year
to house up to 30,000 people awaiting asylum approval or deportation. This,
Chrysochoidis says, will ease the pressure on cities like Athens, Thessaloniki
and Patra.
Undocumented economic migrants and asylum seekers often live in squalid or
cramped conditions and even makeshift camps as they attempt to eke out a living
or find a way to reach another EU country where they will have more prospects
than in Greece. In its fifth year of recession and with unemployment at 21
percent, Greece has little to offer them at the moment. Chrysochoidis’s
predecessor, Christos Papoutsis, also of PASOK, inaugurated the construction of
a 12.5-kilometer fence on Greece’s border with Turkey in Evros last month to
deter migrants and traffickers.
In a sense, both parties are right. Greece does have an immigration problem.
According to the ELIAMEP think tank, in 2011 the country was home to an
estimated 1.1 million migrants, who make up roughly 10 percent of the country’s
population (compared to less than 2 percent in 1990). About 400,000 are thought
to be undocumented, which is a very high number for a country as small as
Greece. This carries serious security and economic consequences as authorities
cannot keep track of these people, who are able to avoid paying tax and social
security contributions if in work.
The tendency for undocumented migrants to be drawn to inner-city areas has
caused considerable tension. Many Greeks, particularly in downtown Athens
neighborhoods, feel threatened by the large numbers of foreigners that have
moved into these areas. The fear felt be these residents, often elderly people,
should not be discounted. In some neighborhoods, such as Aghios Panteleimonas in
Athens a neighborhood escort scheme has been set up so scared residents can call
on someone to accompany them when they leave their homes. Rising crime and a
general sense of lawlessness, fueled by the incapacity and ineffectiveness of
authorities, have turned these districts into breeding grounds for
extremism.
The neo-fascist group Chrysi Avgi won a seat on Athens’s municipal council
for the first time in its history in 2010 and opinion polls show it has a chance
of gaining seats in Parliament. The party’s rise has been accompanied by an
alarming number of attacks on migrants. A pilot scheme set up by nongovernmental
organizations, including the UNHCR, recorded 63 racist attacks in central Athens
alone over a three-month period. In 18 cases, the assailants were identified as
members of extremist groups. In another 18 cases, the immigrants alleged they
were attacked by police officers. The Greek police have no method for recording
racist incidents.
The recession appears to be stemming the flow of economic migrants to Greece:
Just under 100,000 illegal immigrants and traffickers were arrested last year,
according to police figures, which is by far the lowest number for the last five
years. But authorities estimate that at least 100 undocumented immigrants enter
the country every day. Along with Italy, Greece is the main point of entry in
the EU for undocumented migrants. Given the deepening recession and the rising
tension, it is clear that the government cannot afford to turn a blind eye to
illegal immigration and its consequences any longer. It threatens to create a
deep rift in Greek society, encourage extremism and blight the future of
hundreds of thousands of migrants who live in Greece legally and make a
significant contribution to daily life and the economy.
Although PASOK and New Democracy may be right to draw attention to the
immigration issue, they clearly have little idea how to tackle it. For instance,
there is no clear evidence that Samaras’s bete noire, the citizenship law, is
attracting more immigrants to Greece. In fact, it seeks to correct an injustice
against children who are otherwise destined to be foreigners in the country
where they were born. The law also recognizes the fact that Greece has nothing
to gain in terms of the economy and social cohesion by refusing documents to
those who should be entitled to them.
The construction of reception centers also seems a pre-election publicity
stunt when more substantive measures are needed. There is no doubt that Greece’s
capacity for hosting and processing undocumented migrants and asylum seekers is
woeful, leading to poor treatment in inhumane conditions at existing reception
centers or exposure to criminal gangs and traffickers that operate in Athens and
other major cities. Both immigrants and Greeks suffer the effects of a
disjointed and incomplete immigration policy that allows migrants to slip
through the cracks and resurface in treacherous conditions in overcrowded
neighborhoods or at the mercy of employers looking to exploit them.
The transformation of old army camps and other disused sites on its own will
not fix this. Locals have already begun protesting the opening of reception
centers in northern Greece. This sort of reaction is to be expected when the
government is dealing with immigration as a problem that can simply be shifted
from one place to another rather than addressed holistically. Similarly,
building a fence on the Evros border will do nothing more than inconvenience the
trafficking gangs that have made a thriving trade out of ferrying immigrants to
Greece for a few thousand euros per head. Greece has more than 15,000 kilometers
of coastline (the 19th longest in the world) and some 6,000 islands (more than
200 of which are inhabited) that can provide access points for traffickers. A
European Commission spokesman labeled the fence “pointless.”
Removing 30,000 undocumented migrants from the center of Athens and other
cities will not change the fundamentals of the situation. There will still be
tens of thousands of people in a bureaucratic limbo: asylum seekers caught up in
the torturously slow-turning cogs of the Greek public administration and
economic migrants who still hope to get by in Greece long enough to make it to
somewhere else in Europe. These people still need to be found, recorded,
processed and be provided with adequate social services.
At the moment, this task is largely left to NGOs like the UNHCR and the Greek
branch of Doctors of the World, which provides accommodation to about 70 people
and medical care for another 100 or so every day. In Aghios Panteleimonas, the
burden of maintaining a balance between frightened locals and frightened
migrants falls mainly on the local priest, Father Maximos. But these groups and
individuals are becoming stretched due to the economic crisis. About a third of
the people that Doctors of the World looks after now are Greek. Last year, it
was just 6 percent. The organization had its water supply cut off this week
because of an unpaid bill. It says it is waiting for money from the European
Refugee Fund to be released. In Greece’s current circumstances, it’s clear that
NGOs and tireless individuals will not be able to fill the gap left by a
retreating and unwilling state for much longer.
One of the options available is to return undocumented migrants and those who
do not qualify for asylum to their homelands. Greece began a pilot repatriation
scheme last year that saw migrants given 300 euros in cash and a plane ticket
home. About 1,200 immigrants returned to their home countries this way in 2011.
This year, 2,000 will be repatriated at a cost of 5 million euros, 75 percent of
which is covered by the EU. However, this scheme is far too small to address the
magnitude of Greece’s situation. At this rate, it will take 15 years to
repatriate the immigrants the government plans to place in its new camps next
month.
Greece needs a much more substantial approach to addressing its immigration
and asylum process. In fact, a much more comprehensive plan was agreed between
the European Commission and Greece when Papoutsis was citizens’ protection
minister in September 2010. The action plan was based around five key points:
improvement of reception conditions, creation of screening centers to record and
manage migrants, dealing with the asylum backlog, establishing a dedicated
civilian asylum department, and provision of EU funds to finance this process.
While much of the relevant legislation has been passed, hardly any of these
elements have been implemented. For instance, an independent asylum department
was set up several months ago but applications are still being processed by the
police. Greece has remained standing still, allowing the problem to overtake
it.
The system for processing asylum applications, for instance, remains
medieval: Greece has a first instance asylum approval rate of less than 0.1
percent and still has about 40,000 first and second instance cases outstanding,
although this is down from more than 150,000 in 2009. The sight of thousands of
asylum seekers queuing up outside the Aliens' Bureau in Athens every Friday in
the hope of being one of about 20 who receive the “pink paper” that proves their
application is being examined and allows them to remain in Greece legally is
unacceptable for an EU country.
Beyond putting into effect the action plan agreed with the EU, Greece also
has to do a better job of stating its case for assistance at a European level.
If it is ever going to deal with this issue decisively and humanely, Athens is
going to need much more help from its partners. It will, for example, need more
funding for repatriation programs and NGOs that can provide social care for
asylum seekers and migrants. It will also require more substantial assistance in
patrolling its borders. The European Union’s border monitoring agency Frontex
has set up an operational base in Athens and provided officers to help with
patrols on the Turkish border but there has been a lack of interest from EU
states in committing more resources to this effort.
It should not be forgotten that Greece and Bulgaria are the only EU countries
which border Turkey, which has so far appeared indifferent about cracking down
on the traffickers who exploit a steady flow of immigrants trying to enter the
Union, often with the aim of reaching one of the more prosperous countries.
Unless the EU as a whole demands concrete action from Turkey, the problem will
not go away. As long as the rest of the EU treats Greece’s borders as those of
Greece alone and not those of the Union as well, little progress will be
made.
The threats made recently by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and other EU
politicians that Greece could be expelled from the Schengen Agreement, which
allows the free movement of people within member states, poison the debate. It
is the equivalent of Greece threatening to give every migrant that crosses the
border a Greek passport and a free ticket to his or her preferred destination
within the EU. Rather than proceed down the path of nationalism, a more
constructive approach would be to examine the impact of the Dublin II
Regulation, which leads to migrants and refugees being returned to Greece for
processing if they are caught in other EU countries. Re-evaluating this measure
would go some way to easing the pressure on Greece and establishing fairer
burden sharing within the EU.
There is one more aspect being overlooked within Greece and the EU and that,
ironically, is the economic factor. There is a lot of talk these days of how
much Greece is paying to catch and look after undocumented immigrants but few
are highlighting the economic contribution that legal migrants are making. A
study carried out in 2010 by the Laboratory for Migration and Diaspora Studies
(EMMEDIA) at Athens University suggested that migrants added about 1.5 percent
of GDP to Greece's growth rate each year. Almost half the legal migrants in
Greece have finished secondary school and about a fifth have degrees. Without
their social security contributions, Greece’s rickety pension system might have
collapsed some time ago. The construction sector would not have boomed without
the influx of manual labor and if immigrants had not offered domestic services
such as childminding and housekeeping, the economic contribution and prosperity
of many Greek families would have been limited.
Despite problems along the way, the integration of economic migrants into
Greek society, particularly from Albania, some parts of Eastern Europe and Asia,
has largely been a success. In many cases their children are now fully
assimilated and an integral part of the country’s future. When examining the
issue of immigration, it is this future that Greece, as well as its EU partners,
should be looking to above all.
With less than 10 children being born for every 1,000 inhabitants, Greece has
one of the lowest birthrates in the world (205th out of 221 countries ranked in
the CIA World Factbook last year). Its death rate -- 10.7 per 1,000 inhabitants
-- is one of the highest in the European Union (44th one the CIA’s global
index). In simple terms, this means there will soon not be enough people working
and producing wealth to cover the cost of running the state and looking after
the country’s aging population.
At the moment, Greece has an old-age dependency ratio of about 30 percent,
which means there are three people of working age for every pensioner. This
ratio is projected to be close to 60 percent by 2050. Unless Greeks start
producing more babies -- a prospect that has been stymied by the current crisis
-- or integrating more migrants into its society, there is no way the country
will be able to function. Most EU countries face a similar problem but Greece’s
is compounded by the fact that many of its young, bright people are packing
their bags and leaving. This is creating a huge gap that needs to be filled.
If for no other reason than its economic well-being, Greece desperately needs
to ditch spasmodic moves and knee-jerk populist reactions in favor of adopting
an effective process for registering immigrants and asylum seekers and assessing
their skills, knowledge and experience. Authorities can then decide who to
accept and who to turn away in the most respectful way possible. With some of
the ablest members of society pursuing their futures elsewhere, Greece’s
survival -- not just that of the immigrants whose fate is in our hands --
depends on this. Maybe immigration is a bigger issue than the economy after
all.
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