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GREECE: Financial Crisis Multiplies Migrant Miseries

Apostolis Fotiadis

ATHENS, May 6 2009 (IPS) - The economic crisis is hitting migrants harder than most other people, and it looks set to get worse for them.

With close to zero growth rate and a constant upward revision of the budget deficit, Greece is deep into recession. Thousands of jobs in the formal and informal economies are reported lost every month. State structures appear unable to take on the extra burden piled up by the economic downturn.

Once more the first, and the worst hit, will be both regular and irregular migrants offering cheap labour, and with minimum demands by way of working rights and social security provisions.

“The major result of the current crisis will be to slow down the integration process of many thousands of migrants,” says Apostolos Papadopoulos, assistant professor of geography at the Harokopio University in Athens. He was among the academics and researchers at a workshop on ‘Irregular Migration and Informal Employment in Europe’ held in Athens last week by the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants.

“Additionally, people who had managed to achieve some degree of integration are set to experience a reversal of the process, falling again back to informality (in employment).”

Unemployment or reduction of income brings with it the danger of losing legal status. Regularised migrants who do not manage to find adequate employment run the danger of not collecting the necessary social security contribution stamps in order to claim renewal of work and residence permits.


“Seasonal migrant workers who come from neighbouring Albania, employed mostly in the agricultural sector, have delayed coming to Greece this year,” said Papadopoulos. “In a number of industries migrants keep their jobs without receiving salaries for months now, or accepting a reduction in compensation.”

According to Prof. Charalambos Kasimis from the Athens Agricultural University, recession will also hit better off migrants who have decided to stay and integrate into Greek society.

“The cost of integration will increase together with the cost of living, and it is likely that Albanians, one of the oldest, better integrated and by far the largest migrant community in Greece, will face more pressure on labour markets by competitive newly arriving migrants from south-eastern Asia and temporary eastern European migrants,” Kasimis told IPS.

During the last two years Greece has seen a sharp increase in migration flows through its eastern Aegean Sea border with Turkey. Small islands have experienced difficult situations with migrants and refugee numbers there rising above those of the settled Greek population.

The majority of migrants manage to reach Athens, where they concentrate into central districts of the capital, which increasingly look like ghettos.

Anna Triandafyllidou, senior research fellow at ELIAMEP, says these are dangerous developments. “The state is making no provisions at all. The concentration of mostly Asian migrants in neighbourhoods of Athens as well as the negative trend in media coverage describing irregular flows without putting numbers in perspective give the public an impression that the situation is out of control, and thus create a feeling of insecurity.”

There are signs already of this climate degenerating into racist and xenophobic attitudes. Last week president of the Pakistani community Tzaved Aslam listed 20 attacks against Asians over the last 30 days. The victims were mostly Pakistanis living around working class residential districts.

“These were organised, racist, motivated attacks, against foreigners,” Aslam told IPS. “The people attacked were peaceful, and were not involved in any kind of trouble; the only reason for being targeted was that they look foreign. The attacks have been carried out by gangs on bikes early in the morning on economic migrants on their way to work.”

“These developments contribute to a sense of insecurity among immigrants while legitimising a view of irregular migration as a crime,” says Triandafyllidou.

 
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