EU governments may have deliberately allowed migrants in to boost domestic economies

The research argues that Greece is a common destination for irregular migrants only partly due to its unusually extensive borderline, including hundreds of remote islands, which are difficult to police. Large flows of irregular immigration have effectively been channeled towards Greece’s borders by ever-tightening restrictions imposed across Europe upon irregular immigration from other parts of the world, in the form, for example, of stricter policing of national borders. “Most crucially, however, and despite repeated official proclamations to the contrary, the Greek state itself has in the past introduced policies and promoted practices that have helped to maintain the size of the irregular migrant population in the country at consistently high levels, not only engaging in piecemeal attempts at blocking irregular migration routes into Greece, but also failing to facilitate processes of asylum, regularization, deportation, or even voluntary repatriation for migrants without papers.” Whilst, then, irregular migrants typically view Greece as a transit country on their way to mainland Europe, where the prospects of long-term and permanent settlement appear more appealing, in practice they commonly find themselves ‘trapped’ in the country.

The study adds that asylum and regularization procedures have been notoriously arduous, protracted and, for the overwhelming majority of applicants, ineffectual. Efforts to apprehend and deport irregular migrants have long been known to be of limited efficiency and effectiveness, voluntary repatriation schemes for undocumented migrants remain little used, and the legal maximum length of administrative detention of irregular migrants underwent repeated extensions before being rendered indefinite in April 2014. By 2012, Greece had used no more than 40 of the 250 million Euros of allocated EU funding for immigration and asylum management, according to the research.

All this, the study argues, has been in good part because irregular migrants have lent themselves as a highly exploitable workforce fit for the needs of Greece’s large informal labor market, itself estimated to account for around 25 per cent of GDP, one of the highest proportions in the EU. Broader developments such as the construction boom in the 1990s, the expansion of export-oriented labor-intensive farming, and the rise of dual-income nuclear families against the backdrop of persistently minimal levels of state welfare provision for the elderly and young children, have heightened demand for a wide range of low-prestige and poorly paid menial labour, such as building, fruit-picking and domestic care work, which unemployed Greek nationals have grown increasingly likely to shun, many even under conditions of financial crisis.

LSE notes that the research further explores the apparent paradox that irregular migrants are regarded by large segments of the Greek public as a threat to society and are blamed for crime in particular — views that have long been reinforced by a range of political parties in the country. Yet the aggressive policies and practices thereby authorized serve to heighten migrants’ exploitability in the workplace.

Cheliotis commented: “Since the 1990s, the mass import of irregular migrant workforce has been crucial to Greece’s large informal labor market and to native employers operating therein, just as it has been essential, by extension, to political elites seeking to retain and broaden their electoral clienteles. At the same time, irregular migrants have at best been given meagre access to social and legal rights and entitlements, and under the pretext of fighting crime across the country, they have also been placed under constant threat of physical violence by a range of state and non-state actors, from the police to members of the neo-fascistic party Golden Dawn. In effect, then, a continuum of violence has been formed, forcing migrants either to submit to any available condition of work or to await for their chance in a disciplined fashion. There are, to be sure, segments of the Greek public that have treated migrants with humanity and respect – attitudes also extended to refugees more recently. And, in any case, responsibility for the ways in which immigrants are treated on Greek soil does not reside exclusively within Greece itself, not to mention that the case of Greece is not without parallels elsewhere in Europe. But these caveats should not obfuscate immigrants’ plight in the country, nor of course could they plausibly excuse it.”

— Read more in Leonidas Cheliotis, “Punitive Inclusion. A Political Economy of Irregular Migration in the Margins of Europe,” European Journal of Criminology (2016, forthcoming)