Search

Limited research has been conducted on migrants' decision making factors in transit and this is an important area of investigation that goes beyond the origin-destination country dichotomy most commonly represented in migrant decision making. This paper examines the decision making factors for onwards migration or stay of migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria in Greece and Turkey. This paper is based on a unique dataset of surveys collected with 1056 migrants in Athens and Istanbul from May- July 2015. The decision for onwards migration or stay is examined through a probit regression analysis. Four categories of influencing variables are discussed: the country of origin, current conditions in the transit country, the initial migration destination choice and previous onwards migration attempts. The results demonstrate that first; the majority of respondents in both countries seek to migrate onwards (75% in Greece and 63% in Turkey) and that conditions in the transit country are highly significant in influencing onwards migrate decisions including their current subjective living conditions, employment, experiences of abuse, and speaking the local language. This paper contextualizes the findings and highlight the complexity of factors influencing migrants' decision making in Greece and Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in recent debates on humanitarianism and security in migration by introducing the notion of 'pop-up governance'. It reflects on our two year-long fieldwork on Lesbos, Greece at the peak of Europe's migrant reception crisis (2015–2017). We present recent developments in border and migration management in the EU and we position these within recent migration debates. We then present the two main facets guiding migrant reception and governance in Lesbos, namely humanitarianism and security. Through our interviews with humanitarian and security actors we show how top-level government decisions followed and resembled the flexibility and adaptability of humanitarian and security operations. We define this turn as 'pop-up governance', which comprises a practice-based, abruptly introduced and retractable set of governance mechanisms responding to the situation at hand. We argue that the seemingly disorganised management of migration actually bore hallmarks of a new, flexible and adaptable mode of governance. Finally, we show how 'pop-up governance' can help move beyond present understanding of governance based either on the rule or its exception. This has important implications for our comprehension of migration, humanitarianism, security and the governance of vulnerable populations and contemporary socio-political crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined gender and immigrant status differences in stability and change in the Big Five traits in a sample of early adolescents in Greece from economically disadvantaged schools with a high immigrant composition (65% first- or second-generation immigrants). Youth in the sample (N = 1252, 46% female, ages 12–13 at time 1) self-reported Big Five traits annually for 3 years. Mean-level and rank-order stability were examined separately by gender and immigration history. Growth modeling of mean-level scores showed declines in all five personality traits for both genders between ages 12 and 14, followed by increases in conscientiousness for girls and boys, and increases in agreeableness and openness to experience for boys only. In sensitivity analyses, boys showed disruption at all levels of perceived economic stress, but only girls with high levels of perceived economic stress showed disruption. Trajectories were similar for immigrant and non-immigrant youth, suggesting that immigrant youth did not show greater mean-level disruption. However, immigrant youth reported lower means on all traits except emotional stability. Rank-order stability was moderately strong over 3 years and comparable across both genders and immigration histories. Results in this high-risk sample supported the disruption hypothesis and suggest that immigration experiences are associated with personality development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is European media framing sensitive to events such as refugee border crossing and irregular migrants' arrivals? While news outlets adjust the tone around immigration following ideology, do the contextual characteristics of these incidents matter? This article explores two factors that could explain the varying framing of these highly political events in European mainstream media. One explanation focuses on the role of migrants' conditions, such as migrants' way of transit and subsequent human sufferance (or lack thereof). Another emphasizes the role of geography, in particular the location of migrants' territorial identification relative to the receiving communities. Focusing on the case of sea migration and small boat arrivals in Southern Europe, I argue that the emotional triggers determined by migrants' transit and their geographical point of detection systematically moderate each other, and jointly affect how the media describe these cross-border immigration events. Empirically, the article presents original newspaper data from Greece, Italy and Spain that collates geospatial information on immigrants' sea transit and the related number of injuries and deaths during transit. Statistical results indicate that media framing is more sympathetic to events involving suffering migrants, but that this positive framing diminishes if migrants are located only at the border of the national territory and disappears if the migrants are identified in more distant, foreign waters. The results suggest nuanced conditions in which migration can be presented by the media aside from their ideological lenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the citizen–agent paradigm, the way street-level bureaucrats view their target population shapes their discretionary behavior. Applying this in the context of the so-called "European Migration Crisis," this article investigates how street-level actors make sense of their migrant clients and how these conceptual understandings of the "Other" shape their discretionary behavior. Focusing on the divisive issue of gender identities and beliefs, or gender perspectives, this research combines ideas from public administration and social psychology. It shows that street-level actors' discretionary behavior depends on whether they see the Self-Other difference as fixed or changeable, and as hierarchically organized or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pop, the Greek-immigrant owner of the Manchester Café, fires his counterman, ‘Pete the Greek’, for getting into too many altercations with customers. To appease some of his long-time patrons, Pop, then, decides to hire Linwood Lots, a local native, as Pete's replacement. Pete and Irene, Pop's daughter, get married and, later, have a son, Pop's first grandchild. After catching Linwood drinking wine filched from the café's wine stock, Pop fires Linwood and immediately rehires Pete. Pop's action ignites a bitter rivalry between Linwood and Pete that is charged with ethnic hatred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two tales about confrontations between Whites from different ethnic back- grounds that took place in Virginia during the twilight of the Jim Crow era are told here. In both tales, Pete Aegean, whose parents are Greek immigrants and who works as a counterman in a Greek-immigrant-owned café, gets into conflicts with the patrons who are White native Southerners. The conflicts turn violent after they trade ethnic slurs. Although Pete emerges as the victor, it creates a serious dilemma for him. On one hand, he maintains his pride and gains the begrudging respect of the White mill hands who patronize the café. On the other hand, Pop, the café's owner, fires Pete for placing his false sense of ethnic pride above their mutual economic interests. Pete's firing raises the question of what is the right and wrong way for immigrants and their offspring to win the respect and admiration of their host country's native inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights how the social and economic situation of immigrants changes after their formal legalization and discusses what they have to go through for their complete integration. Legalization can hardly solve the problem of immigrant employment, nor can it pull all immigrants out of the underground labor market and integrate them into the Greek economy and society. The process towards complete integration is painful and involves a series of successive phases of various durations. During this period, apart from economic conditions, various institutional and cultural factors can hinder or delay integration. With respect to economic integration, immigrants seem to fare rather well. Their official unemployment rate is only slightly higher than the Greek unemployment rate, the two rates converging over time. This suggests increasing relative opportunities for immigrant employment, precarious or stable as it might be. Immigrant jobs come as a result of their flexible adjustment to the needs of the labor market--official or underground--compared to the inflexibility in the supply of Greek workers, due to labor mismatches and relatively high reservation wages. Wages of immigrants are generally lower, but are approaching the wages of their Greek counterparts. Educated immigrants much more than educated Greeks are forced by the circumstances to exercise jobs not measuring up to their qualifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I show how groups and individuals maintain racialized symbolic boundaries at the micro-level of personal interactions. Using data collected during an ethnographic study in Athens, Greece, where I worked as a fruit vendor in a street market, I detail how local Greek vendors and immigrant workers use language, gesture, olfaction, along with their interpretations of faith and sexuality to reproduce patterns of social distance that allow for racialized stigma and discrimination. I apply the framework of symbolic interactionism and draw from literature on symbolic boundaries to explore how immigrant street market workers experience and resist racialization throughout the interaction order. I show that racialization underlies perceptions of the immigrant "other," especially in the case of Greece where race is often ignored as a crucial factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of "alterity processing" to account for the simultaneous enactment of individual "Others" and emergent European orders in the context of migration management. Alterity processing refers to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into "European-legible" identities. By drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy and the Hellenic Republic from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that different registration and identification procedures compete to legitimize different chains of actors, data, and metadata as more authoritative than others. Competing procedures have governance implications, as well, with some actors being included and others being excluded. Furthermore, there is evidence that—despite procedural rigidities—applicants themselves propose alternative chains of actors, data, and metadata that are more meaningful to them. In this tension, it is not only the individual Other that is enacted but also specific bureaucratic orders cutting across old and new European actors and distinctive understandings of "Europe." From a technology studies perspective, this article engages in a dialogue with the emergent debate on Hotspots, the scholarship about the infrastructural construction of Europe and political sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the treatment irregular migrants have received in Greece since the early 1990s, this article seeks to advance critical scholarship on how European countries have responded to migration from impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged parts of the globe over recent decades. The article first draws attention to ways in which purportedly exclusionary approaches to irregular migration control may be imperfect by design, insofar as restrictions are imposed on outflows to secure an exploitable workforce that serves important labour market needs and, by extension, dominant political interests in the ‘host’ state. Moving on to address the precise ways in which labour exploitation of irregular migrants is brought into effect, the article demonstrates how seemingly unrelated state policies and practices regarding matters of migration, welfare, employment and criminal justice, as well as certain manifestations of anti-migrant violence by non-state actors, may act in combination with one another to this end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The smuggling of migrants is not a new phenomenon but in recent years it has attracted increasing international attention. Within the European context, Greece represents a unique case because of its social, economic, political and geographical location. Drawing on a variety of information sources, such as interviews with the police, official statistics, informal interviews with migrants in the country, and interviews with two retired migrant smugglers, this article examines the social organization of migrant smuggling in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]