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The reception and protection system in Greece in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis produces a geography of specific mobility restrictions and accommodation types for migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees. These restrictions create a multi-layered landscape of displacement, dominated by three socio-spatial figurations: the forced containment of displaced people in 'hotspots' on eastern Aegean islands; staying in isolated and segregated camps in the mainland; and the accommodation of the most vulnerable in urban centres. At the same time, the mobility practices of displaced people often disrupt the above figurations, stemming from their survival practices and life aspirations, and largely relating to their translocal social connections. These mobilities include, but are not limited to, unregistered movements from hotspots to the mainland, mobilities from camp to camp, mobility negotiations between camp and city. This paper explores the figurations of displacement related to the impact of governance regimes on the livelihoods and mobility of displaced people in Greece. Within this frame, it focuses on the ways through which migrants and asylum-seekers negotiate, resist or transcend the geography of multiple restrictions, through translocal mobility practices that intervene and therefore reshape dominant socio-spatial figurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars concerned with the use of ICTs at the EU's external borders have mainly focused on practices of control that draw on sophisticated surveillance technologies. In this paper I address migrants' use of ICT itself, arguing that it has fundamentally transformed how undocumented border crossings are actually accomplished. In late 2015, when every day thousands of migrants crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, GPS-enabled smartphones played a pivotal role during their journeys, allowing migrants to navigate the sea and to get in touch with transnational support networks. Based on my own work for one of these networks, the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone, I demonstrate how migrants made emergency calls or alerted supporters via WhatsApp, who in turn mapped and tracked their positions and movements at sea and intervened in situations of distress in real-time. The paper contributes to debates on 'data politics' (Bigo, Isin, and Ruppert [2019]. Data Politics. Worlds, Subjects, Rights. London: Routledge) by drawing on the concepts of viapolitics and tempo-politics. While the former captures how journeys, vehicles and routes of migration become means and sites of contestation, the latter addresses situations in which the time-spaces of migration become matters of concern in border struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers borders as ubiquitous and pervasive social relations and as sites of struggles, which are shaped through and transformed by social antagonisms and contestations. While much discussion of border struggles focuses on migrants' resistance and various forms of activism, this paper provides insights on the micro-resistance of those who, instead of overtly opposing and contesting the biopolitical power of border regimes, are integral to their operation: asylum caseworkers who filter and select border-crossers. The paper presents data from interviews with self-identified leftist asylum caseworkers in Greece who, through their work, seek to create cracks in the so-called 'Fortress Europe'. By exploring the somewhat unexplored occupational culture of leftist asylum caseworkers, we show how, while trying to resist bordering regimes, leftist asylum caseworkers both critique and reproduce the power relations they seek to subvert. Essentially, we provide valuable insights on the limits of resistance due to the workings of powerful technologies of government – informed by neoliberal managerialism – that are operational in day-to-day life of the asylum process. The paper thus provides a novel exploration of the complex and entangled relation between technologies of power and micro-resistances within border regimes in the significant context of Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well documented that post-1990s migrant labour supported Southern European families over a period of social and economic change which challenged their capacity to mobilise and accrue welfare resources. Drawing on empirical research in Greece, this paper explores the trajectory of a particular group of migrant care workers who moved on from the insecurity of the informal labour market of domestic work to work as exclusive bank nurses in hospitals. It reveals how during the crisis these care workers seek refuge back to the informal labour market where their journey started, and discusses what this trajectory reversal implies on a theoretical level. Are we witnessing change in the prevalent pattern of migrant incorporation or rather its continuation under a familiar, and perhaps more precarious, ground? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case of the Turkish minority in Greece, a ‘beached’ diaspora and vestige of the Ottoman past, is a peculiar case where the tensions of transnationalism and nationalism intersect and where boundaries are continuously created and negotiated. In order to understand communication in this politicised environment, this article, which is based on interviews with, and participant observation among, Turkish speakers living in Athens, draws on Barth's theory on ethnic groups and boundaries. The paper argues that the media, both national and transnational, often create boundaries for inclusion and exclusion, and eventually participation in a ‘common culture’. The first part of the paper highlights two themes: the first is that gender and generational differences contest the idea of a homogenous Turkish minority and suggest the importance of social change; the second is that media consumption in Turkish households is ordinary, shaped by social rather than ethnic parameters. In the second part of the paper, however, the banal consumption of media is disrupted by instances when tension prevails. Three such cases are discussed as examples of the media raising the boundaries for exclusion from a common communicative space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief paper introduces the special issue of JEMS on Albanian migration, which collects together revised versions of a selection of papers first presented at a conference held at the University of Sussex in September 2002. The uniqueness and complexity of Albanian migration are first spelled out. Although the main focus is on post-1990 migration, some interesting historical precedents are noted. Attention then turns to the two main contexts of reception, Italy and Greece, where host-society reaction has been characterised above all by stereotypes and the stigmatisation of Albanians. The remainder of the paper introduces each of the subsequent articles under a series of thematic headings - historicity, agency and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on two immigrant populations and their relationships with their native neighbours in Thessaloniki, Greece, this paper highlights that immigrant–native relations are not only cultural relations but also power configurations unfolding through a symbolic contestation over defining the nation and who belongs to it. In everyday interaction, immigrants' behaviour is judged by natives according to the degree of their compliance to the native norms. Immigrant categories are endowed with different resources in resisting the pressure exerted by the native society. Categories that have more resources in symbolic and substantial terms are less eager to comply, thus appearing more ‘different’ in the eyes of the natives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on former-Soviet Greeks' experiences of cross-border movement to Greece, this paper sheds light on the impact of this migration on the social identities of Russian Greeks as a transnational community. It draws on informants' narratives and ethnographic observations recorded among Greek migrants in their home communities in southern Russia, and shows how their motivation, in their transnational movement, is determined by the 'push-and-pull' forces of socio-economic and political transformations in post-Soviet space. In these conditions, Greek identity becomes a resource which facilitates the organisation of transnational migration. The cultural, social and economic differences between the former-Soviet Greek migrants and the native-born population of Greece result in the emergence of a Pontic-Greek cultural identity which emphasises migrants' connections with the former USSR. The difficulties of economic and cultural adaptation for migrants to Greece are examined in relation to the Russian Greeks' economic strategies within their home communities and their perception of the 'homeland' as a constantly contested and relocated social construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present findings of a qualitative study of Albanian immigrants in Athens and Mytilene (on the island of Lesvos) in Greece. The study investigates the role that various forms of social capital can play in the social, economic and institutional incorporation of Albanian immigrants in Greek society. The paper focuses specifically on immigrants' interpretations and experiences of social incorporation processes in Greece, placing emphasis on the significance of family, kinship, ethnic and other social networks for immigrants' working and life trajectories in the country. Finally, the investigation of the impact of three main forms of social capital - bonding, bridging and linking - on the social incorporation of Albanian immigrants, leads to the question of Greek migration policy formation and reveals the need for its radical restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the construction of categorical distinctions and the negotiation of category labels in interview accounts given by a sample of the majority population (Orthodox Christians) in Thrace (Northern Greece) concerning their co-existence with the Muslim minority. Employing a rhetorical approach to categorisation, we argue that category labels constitute argumentative positions which reflect culturally specific assumptions around which Greekness and Otherness are constructed. Analysis points to the ways in which the rhetorical invocation of certain category labels may be treated by social actors as potentially open to the charge of racism. However, what counts as racism or discrimination in relation to various category labels is not unproblematic and straightforward. As the meaning attached to particular categories shifts, the meaning attached to 'racism' also changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent migration flows to Greece include some very highly educated people, who are employed as unskilled and manual workers. This paper examines the extent of overeducation of university graduates—both Greeks and immigrants—in recent years. It is found that overeducation among immigrants is about twice as high in comparison with Greeks. Probit regressions indicate that for Greeks the frequency of overeducation is related not to personal characteristics but to the profession and branch of economic activity of individuals, whereas for immigrants the frequency of overeducation is related both to some personal characteristics and to the profession where they are heavily concentrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the complex issue of Albanian migrants' economic and social incorporation in a Greek city, Thessaloniki. The empirical base of the research is 30 in-depth interviews with Albanian migrants. Migrants' integration is seen in a dynamic perspective, which examines different contexts of incorporation: the policy framework, the labour market context, the socio-spatial environment, and the role of social networks. Exclusion and integration of migrants in the host country are seen as dynamic processes, which may be contradictory but operate in parallel. Incorporation thus becomes the process through which immigrants, despite structural and institutional obstacles, build their lives in the host society; it is strongly conditioned by time and it may also take place-specific characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of globalisation and labour-market restructuring, a new mode of implementing immigration control in Greece is emerging. Based upon a changing economy and society, welfare organisations and staff members rearrange, negotiate and construct new controls for welfare services and for the distribution of social rights to immigrants. These new ways define anew the economic and cultural boundaries for the immigrant population in Greece, as well as establish new values concerning the work and values of civil servants. Within this general context, the article confronts the issue of welfare management of labour migration into Greece. It investigates the role organisational culture and work values play for the management of immigrants' status, and in particular how both act as mediators between the state and the market. In the light of global economic restructuring and the Greek government's policies on flexibility, the study asks the important questions of how and in what direction current changes affect welfare employees' immigration control practices, ideas and professional alignments. In turn, the Greek case study asks how they affect the implementation of state immigration policies and benefits given to the immigrant population in the country. Through the presentation of the cases of the Social Insurance Institution (IKA) and the Manpower Organisation (OAED), the paper offers a reflexive cultural account of how officials construct an organisational culture and work values in order to regulate immigrants and the Greek labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a case-study of the actual impact of Schengen implementation by the Greek state security apparatus, and its implication for basic and new rights of Greek citizens and foreigners, vis-à-vis European integration. It is based upon an analysis of special data records, including surveillance of national and alien suspects, asylum and deportations, 'border repulsion of undesirable persons', etc. provided to the press by the Greek Schengen Bureau. Some comparisons are made with other Schengen counterparts. The analysis illustrates those particular geopolitical and sociopolitical control imperatives that actually affect the efficiency of the Schengen Agreement in Greece. Based also on other documented evidence, I conclude that Schengen's impact is a mixed blessing for Greek and European citizens as regards both their free movement, and also potential violations of their privacy and civil liberties. It is clearly an 'immigration anathema' to build a 'Fortress Europe', especially as regards Third World immigrants' and refugees' rights and life chances in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a unique cultural politics of identity affirmation and resistance enacted in the rural spaces of Greece by male migrants from India and Pakistan through the game of Kabaddi, a rural indigenous sport. Drawing on interviews with South Asian migrant men and observation of Kabaddi tournament in Greece, it argues that the play of Kabaddi offers deliberate performative acts of masculine resistance against the emasculatory bordering regimes of illegality, deportability and racial otherness. Kabaddi tournaments occur as highly masculinised, public, collective, celebratory, yet potentially subversive spectacles. Kabaddi allows South Asian migrant men to acquire culturally specific masculine capital through displays of muscular masculinity. As spectators and participants, they collectively engage in cultural affirmation and wresting subjectivity against bordering regimes that subjugate racialised migrant men into (im)mobility, enforce labour disciplining and invisibility and emasculate them into abjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of the informality double-bind, arguing that informal citizen volunteers must choose between helping border crossers in less formal and more intimate ways due to the lack of formal response, or leaving them to receive the inadequate aid of state-sponsored and formal organisations. Either choice entails multiple risks to both border crosser and volunteer. Drawing on fieldwork in Athens, Greece, in 2017–2018, we expose how volunteers engaged in 'intimate solidarity' with border crossers, giving out personal phone numbers and inviting them to stay in the volunteers' personal apartments. The article argues that (a) the cause of the informality doble-bind was the very lack of formal service provision which propelled volunteers to get involved in the first place, (b) organisational bureaucracy shelters government actors, aid workers and more formal volunteers from facing such ethical dilemmas, and (c) while these bureaucratic procedures appeared to produce precarity, they may have at the same time protected the border crossers and aid workers from risks associated with informal aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since becoming the largest refugee-hosting country in the world following the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, Turkey's border policy has been increasingly characterised by the use of sophisticated security technologies. Turkey's south-eastern border with Syria has been continuously upgraded with walls and fences incorporating advanced security technology. The border with Greece has witnessed a similar bordering process particularly under pressure from the European Union. Drawing on critical border studies and adopting a Foucauldian lens, this article explores these bordering processes, taking security technology as a heterogonous ensemble of practices that consists of discourses, regulations, institutions, threat perceptions, scientific knowledge etc. Finally, the article comes to two important conclusions. First, it suggests that the detection, filtering and prevention of 'illegal' border crossings, smuggling and terrorism are the key reasons advanced for the adoption of technologically intensive border control practices. On the other hand, a more 'humanitarian discourse', namely 'saving the lives of migrants' is also at play. Second, these security technologies are now increasingly embodied in practices of 'inclusion'/'exclusion' that distinguish 'risky' (i.e. illegitimate) from 'safe' (i.e. legitimate) mobilities and that create spaces where inequality and injustice are experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances understanding of how transnational welfare has emerged in practice within and in relation to the nation-state framework, focusing on the responses of civil society actors to the European migration crisis in Greece. It draws on in-depth interviews with different types of civil society actors engaged in activities in Greece during and since the 2015 period of the migration crisis, including national and international NGOs, local solidarity groups, and international volunteers. The findings point to the ways in which transnational welfare through civil society actions arose in relation to the perceived crisis of the national state and inter-state system, in failing to address the needs of migrants and refugees but also Greek residents. However, transnational welfare also emerged through forms of collective action and identification that sought to counter the social boundaries of nation-state systems in relation to migration and welfare. It is argued that analyses of transnational welfare require attention to both those dimensions – that is, how civil society actions forge new meanings and ways of 'doing' welfare that may be trans-national in contesting the boundaries of nation-state systems, but also the limits to those actions in relation to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residence by investment (RBI) programmes, or 'golden visa' schemes, are now found in half of European Union member states. Yet no empirical studies have tested the economic drivers or impacts of these programmes. Filling this lacuna, this article supplies the first comparative quantitative evaluation of the economic origins and outcomes of so-called golden visa programmes in the European Union. Utilising new data, we show that governments across the political spectrum are more likely to begin RBI programmes after a decline in economic growth, especially during an economic crisis, and that the programmes are generally targeted to address failing areas of the economy. Furthermore, we show that wealthy investor migrants are better conceptualised as mobile populations akin to tourists or investors, rather than as immigrants, and that countries price programmes in response to both demand-side and supply-side forces. We also find that the programmes represent a miniscule proportion of foreign investment in most countries, and that the vast majority of the investments go into real estate even when other options are available. However, the impact on real estate markets is trivial, with the sole exception of Greece. The results suggest that states turn to golden visa programmes to plug short-term economic gaps but with negligible national-level economic impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates the Foucauldian theorisation of self-surveillance to the contradictory (non)presence of racialized labouring bodies of South Asian men in rural Greece. The disciplinary mechanism of temporary labour and migration regimes, exercised through migrant illegality and threat of deportations, works efficiently to make the men conform to a certain set of societal behaviours, erase their presence from Greek public spaces, and extract productive labour efficiently from them. By drawing on interviews of undocumented Indian and Pakistani male migrants in Greece, the article shows how 'illegality' and potential deportability shapes their strategies of staying in the country. The men self-surveil and regulate their movements by 'containing' themselves in their dormitories after work. This self-imposed isolation, through spatial segregation, deflects attention away from Greece's restrictive immigration and labour regimes, based on differential exclusion based on class, skills, and professional education. It prevents local Greeks from building solidarity with them and, in doing so, avoid dismantling deep-rooted and widely prevalent discourses of Islamophobia and xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the modes of (contested) control that are at play at the Mediterranean frontier for containing, dividing and discipling unruly mobility. Building on ethnographic research conducted on the island of Lesvos and of Lampedusa, it focuses on the implementation and the functioning of the Hotspot System in Greece and in Italy, analysing beyond the fences of detention centres and by looking at the broader logistics of channels, infrastructures and governmental measures deployed for regaining control over migration movements. The article argues that more than control in terms of surveillance and tracking, the Hotspot System contributes to enforce forms of containment through mobility that consists in controlling migration by obstructing, decelerating and troubling migrants’ geographies - more than in fully blocking them. The article takes into account migrants’ refusals of being fingerprinted, showing how migrants radically unsettle the association between seeking refuge and lack of choice, enacting their right to choose where to go and claim asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After two decades of immigration, contemporary Greek society is characterised by cultural and religious diversity. We argue here, however, that the challenges posed by migration-related diversity are not yet sufficiently addressed in institutional or normative terms. Rather, dominant national self-understandings remain mono-cultural and mono-religious, while accommodation of this diversity is not yet approached in inclusive and integrating ways. Media and parliamentary debates regarding the construction of a mosque in the capital, Athens, are explored in this context. Dominant understandings of Greek national identity are discussed in this article, together with the ways in which difference is framed in current public discourses, and the actors and values that structured the debate on the accommodation of the religious needs of Greece's Muslim immigrant population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses how spaces of inclusion and exclusion encountered during the relocation and adjustment processes of second-generation Greek-Americans to the ancestral homeland produce multiple constructions of self and nation as well as fragmented discourses of ‘Greekness’, ‘Americanness’ and ‘Europeanness’ in forging a narrative of belonging. Narratives of (be)longing express competing discourses of cultural disruptions and ruptures of identity in the interactive space of ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries. Furthermore, the transformation of Greece from sending to receiving country as well as the politics of European integration and identification pose additional challenges to the current metamorphosis of Greek society. Interestingly, the ambivalent character of Greek national identity provides an additional layer of subjectivity through which second-generation Greek-Americans attempt to redefine their sense of self and belongingness to the ancestral homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with the other Southern EU member-states, Greece has moved from a country of emigration to become a migrant-receiving country. The influx of migrants occurred during the 1990s, following the dramatic events in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, with the majority of immigrants being clandestine. The bulk of the immigrant population are nationals of neighbouring Balkan states, predominantly Albanians. Coinciding with the influx of immigrants from the Balkans into Greece were flows of Greek foreign direct investment, or FDI, in the opposite direction. Both phenomena are to be understood as sides of the same coin, and reflect the search for cheap labour on the part of Greek enterprises. In this article, we examine both phenomena. We present empirical material on Balkan immigrants to Greece, focusing on the demographic, housing, employment and other characteristics of the principal immigrant community in the second largest Greek city, i.e. Albanians in Thessaloniki. And we examine Greek investment to the Balkan countries, pointing out complementarities where appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the administrative procedures and results of the two legalisations in Greece in 1998 and 2001. Although the massive inflow of foreign immigrants had started in the late 1980s, the number of foreigners granted residence and work permits was restricted, causing a large stock of undocumented immigrants and creating the mentality that these economic immigrants are a new source of low-cost unregistered labour. Following the two legalisations, an increasing number of foreigners have progressed towards integration. Little has changed, however, in the other main aspects of immigration to Greece: not all undocumented immigrants have applied for legalisation; for various reasons many do not renew their green card when it expires; new or previously expelled migrants flock in, attracted by the demand for their flexible labour and facilitated by the large underground economy; around 230,000 expulsions continue to take place annually; and there is no indication as to how things are likely to develop after the new extension given to all permits until 30 June 2003. Under the present conditions of high unemployment, increasing economic uncertainty and political tension in the country, a third legalisation within a short time-frame may cause serious social reactions. The main challenge to migration policy now is how to effectively control migrant inflows and prevent legal immigrants, who also help to redress the serious demographic imbalances in Greece, from lapsing into illegality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]