Effy
Tselikas
(Athènes)
The Greek
government has decided to build a “wall of shame” along the
border with Turkey because it is overwhelmed by a massive wave of
immigration, which its economy can no longer absorb in the midst of
an economic crisis. An analysis from our correspondent in Athens.
Putting up 12
kilometres of barbed wire along the border between Greece and Turkey
probably won't make much of a difference, but as Greece has come
under fire from its European partners for being a “sieve,” it no
longer knows how to handle its increasing illegal immigration:
125,145 arrests were carried out at its borders in 2009. Humanitarian
organisations regularly condemn the inhuman conditions in detention
centres, xenophobic incidents are multiplying, and some playgrounds
are even forbidden to foreign children. How did Greece ever reach
that point?
From
emigration to immigration
Until the
1980's, Greece was a country from which people emigrated – to
Germany, where up to 700,000 Greek migrants lived, to Belgium, to the
United States, to Canada or to Australia. After joining the European
Union in 1981, and especially since the 1990's when the Berlin wall
came down, opening doors to Eastern Europe, Greece has become
something of an El Dorado in the Balkans. A wave of immigration has
come in from a whole constellation of countries: Russians from the
Black Sea, Epirots from Albania who can claim Greek descent,
Egyptians and Syrians under binational contracts, and other Eastern
Europeans in general, Poles, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldovans,
Ukrainians, and mainly Albanians.
From economic
miracle to crisis
While Greece in
its “economic miracle” years had neither infrastructure nor
administrative preparation, it was able to take in an estimated 1.5
million migrants (out of a total population of 11 million), because
labour, both on the formal and informal markets, was in high demand,
thanks to a growth fuelled by the boon of EU subsidies and by the
Olympics in 2004. The boom also drew other migrants, each with their
own speciality: Indians in marine farms, Pakistanis in vegetable
farming, Filipinos in home-care services.
They quickly
integrated, thanks to a “Greek lifestyle” mix of sunshine,
informal relations and arrangements. As a proof of this integration,
one can simply look at the high percentage (sometimes more than half)
of children of foreign descent in schools; they fortunately
counterbalance the very weak birth rate of Greeks, Europe's lowest.
Not that the social conditions these immigrants live in are rosy:
they usually are employed illegally, with little or no insurance,
face humiliations on a daily basis, and have nearly no hopes of ever
being naturalised.
Two events
changed the picture:
1 - The economic
crisis has hit Greece hard, and the austerity measures being
prescribed have worsened the lot of the most vulnerable, as
immigrants often are. A number of those who were legal lost their
residency because of unemployment and a loss in purchasing power.
Some have left, others have stayed on in ever more precarious
conditions.
2 - Europe has
sealed its other entrance doors shut, as the number of migrants from
Asia (Afghans, Kurds, Iraqis) and Africa (Northern Africa) coming in
by sea first, then by land over the border with Turkey (over 125,000
arrests in 2009) has grown exponentially. While these illegal
immigrants, handled by well-organised trafficking organisations,
consider Greece as nothing more than a transit country on the way to
England or Germany, they find themselves trapped by the EU's
so-called “Dublin regulation,” which allows migrants to be
deported back to the country through which they first entered the EU.
This bleak
picture does not excuse the decision to build a wall of shame on the
Greek-Turkish border, but it explains how confused and overwhelmed
Greek authorities are. This case also highlights how urgent it is to
devise a real European migration policy, other than one turning the
EU into a fortress.
05.01.2011
