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(AFTER THE INTERRUPTION OF THE CONFERENCE)
MATRONI DIKEAKOU (Conference Chairperson): Now, we are moving into the third
discussion group addressing the issue of “Greek society and the inclusion of immigrants -
Discrimination and solidarity phenomena”. It is a most interesting section, Mrs. Kavvadia.
This session is chaired by SYRIZA MP, Mrs. Kavvadia.
Mrs. Kavvadia, would you like to introduce the next speaker?
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs): We welcome you back.
There have been a lot of interesting points raised throughout the previous sessions. I
think that we are conducting a lively discussion, as such discussions ought to be. After all, the
issue of today’s Conference leaves room for discussion.
In this section we will look into the phenomenon of immigration, as captured by the
interactive relationship and communication in social media, as well as in the specific aspects
raised by certain issues of immigrant inclusion especially in our country. We will also discuss
the challenges arising from the coexistence of migrant communities within the urban fabric,
especially in terms of infrastructure for the establishment of immigrants in Greek cities.
Another important issue of our session will be that of solidarity as a tool for social
inclusion, while we will also touch upon issues related to the exploration of the gender
dimension in the light of immigration and social inclusion.
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These are some of the most sensitive aspects of this multilateral phenomenon,
namely the inclusion process of immigrants into the social, economic, educational and cultural
fabric of modern European, as well as, the greek society.
It is worth mentioning that the inclusion process is usually met by policies and actions
adopted by a Government - in this case, a left-wing Government - in order to promote not
only a smooth coexistence but also the creative synthesis and osmosis of immigrant
communities withing the greek society . We are referring to legislative initiatives, namely
policies that are being drafted and implemented jointly by the Ministries involved - as already
mentioned earlier- and, of course, the funding of all of the above. These are certainly issues
of utmost importance that lay down the appropriate conditions for inclusion.
However, further than that, I imagine that everybody agrees upon the fact that the
social inclusion of immigrants, so as to be fully understood, must be seen as a dynamic, almost
natural phenomenon. Based on our own refugee past, one might argue that the old saying
that refugees and immigrants put down roots in one place, is absolutely accurate.
After this rather brief introduction, I would like to invite to the podium and present
the speakers of our panel, starting from Ms. Sona Kalantaryan, working for the Joint Research
Center of the European Commission. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of
Turin. She has worked at the International Labor Organization, the European Commission, the
University of Turin and the Armenian Ministry of Economy and Development. Her research
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focuses on econometrics, economic immigration, the housing market and real estate. The
Mediterranean, Caucasus and Eastern Europe are her main areas of research.
You are given almost fifteen minutes and we are going to be relatively flexible with
the time limits since we are already running late.
Mrs Kalantaryan, you have the floor.
SONA KALANTARYAN (European Commission - Directorate-General - Joint Research
Center - Knowledge Center for Immigration and Democracy): I stand here as a representative
of the European Commission's Knowledge Center for Immigration and Democracy,
established after the 1950 crisis. Our job is to come up with solutions and capabilities in order
to resolve emergency matters. But we are, also, given the opportunity to think about medium
and long-term solutions aiming at avoiding any potential crises and move ahead in a more
planned and well thought manner as regards the handling of such issues and the progress
made.
Today, I will speak more about the realities of immigration, the perception which
surrounds immigration and the role of social media.
On-screen you see two charts illustrating the evolution of immigrant populations from
the 1950s to the present day.
EP
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(AS)
And we see that unlike what happened in the 1950s, where the population of immigrants was
less than one hundred million, in 2017 it reached two hundred and fifty million, while the
population increased as well.
As a result, the percentage of those living outside the country where they were born
was 3% in the 1950s, the same percentage as now. This, in a way, dissolves the popular belief
that there is a massive outflow of populations. People residing in their country of birth remain
a fixed percentage.
Of course, this phenomenon is not the same everywhere. We know that the
destination of immigrants is mainly urban areas. Therefore, this 3% is not to be found
everywhere.
Here we see 3-4% of the current immigrant population worldwide, but in some
regions it is 11% while elsewhere, for example in Italy - which conveys a similar picture - it is
10%, as in Greece, another Southern European country that has recently dealt with
immigration.
Moving on to Lombardy, a rich, industrialized region of Italy, and there we see that
there are even more immigrants. In Milan we see that almost one in five has been born
abroad. Let's go over to Parazante, a region in Milan, where we see that immigration reaches
32%. Take a road for example, there almost half of the residents were born in another country.
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In other words, global immigration may amount to 3%, but this is not the case in every
neighborhood.
When we want to study immigration, when we want to look at simple indicators, such
as the percentage of immigrants present in an area, it is not easy with the statistics we have
at our disposal to get lower than a regional level. That is what we are trying to address in the
Knowledge Center.
We have received data from eight EU member states, Spain, Italy, Ireland, United
Kingdom, France, Portugal, Germany and the Netherlands, and these are the 2011 inventory
data. Based on high-configuration data, we have generated data regarding the territory of
these Member States and their presence taking into consideration the country of origin.
I am saying this, because the area we go to is a hundred meters per hundred, that is
to say, we make it to the smallest village that surveys do not usually “cover” neither do
workers care about. And then we proceed in a systematic and harmonized way since the field
within which we operate is the same. You see that in Italy we have differences, in Germany
we have a consistent image that does not impress us and in the Netherlands we have postal
code. We have immigrants in forty five administrative regions in eight member states. So we
went on.
This is an eloquent example that we can give of these forty-five thousand
communities and municipalities. You see the city of Palermo, the distribution of population
and the number of immigrants by country of origin.
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These circles represent residents coming from another country. There is a form, a plan
that is not negligible. We have people from Bangladesh who tend to gather in some areas.
Palermo itself also has a Chinese quarter, a china town. They are the blue dots on the table.
This has added value to immigration.
We know that diversity has positive elements. But negative elements can, also, come
about if not addressed timely. We are trying to deal with these data, which give us a first
glimpse of immigration in each country, even in the smallest town. No research would have
included the presence of immigrants on a small Greek island. Our own method, however,
records them given that we have the necessary data.
Therefore, we see the settlement of immigrants and compare it with the housing
market in Italy, Turin. You see here that they go to relatively inexpensive neighborhoods. This
does not surprise us, but it is worthy of more attention, because they may be initially attracted
to relatively inexpensive areas, but if the locals view them in a negative light, immigrants may
leave. And that is what we have to predict, because it can lead to the departure of locals or
the separation of schools and these are issues that we need to address.
We are also concerned about the fact that Europeans are not exactly aware of the
actual presence of immigrants. In a recent Eurobarometer survey people were asked: How
many third countries foreigners live in your city? And here you see the real situation and what
they thought.
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With the minor exception of the Nordic countries, in most countries the presence of
immigrants has been overestimated. Greece is the one with underlined red. Greeks tend to
overestimate the presence of foreigners and even double the number. The same applies in
Italy, Spain, Portugal and throughout the periphery of the Union.
Another Eurobarometer survey asked what are the most important issues that they
personally face as a country, and what are, in their opinion, the issues that Europe is facing. I
do not know if you see the chart, but when they ask someone, they are not personally
concerned about immigration. They are concerned about increasing prices, unemployment,
the economic situation, but immigration is not an issue for them.
But when we move into the issues that their country faces, more and more people
start to perceive immigration otherwise. Sometimes immigration appears first. And when we
say what are the most serious issues Europe is facing, immigration and terrorism have been
from one point onwards, the dominant issues.
"It's not personal, I have nothing against immigrants" one says, "but when we have
elections, when it comes to the country, to Europe, then I bring it up."
These are the three issues. Immigration on a personal level is a little worrying, it rises
when it concerns the country, when it is related to the country and even more when it has to
do with Europe.
So what we are trying to do is understand the role of social media, because it is
becoming more and more important. This distorted perception comes from somewhere.
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There may be something that the media says, perhaps resulting from the very influence of the
media.
We gathered and continue to gather the tweets that mention the word "immigration".
We have gathered these tweets throughout Brexit and the US elections, when President
Trump was elected, and we try to separate them into those that are more liberal or coming
from liberals and less liberals. We want to see how these tweets are repeated and who repeats
them.
(AM)
(EP)
We have a room, an echo room, an echo chamber. So if I am a liberal, I tweet
something and other people will retweet my post if they agree with me. So we are all part of
this circle.
On this diagonal chart you see that a message posted by a liberal, in 88% of cases, is
shared by liberals. This is all the more true in the case of conservatives. In 95% of these cases,
these posts were retweeted or commented or shared in some other way by people who were
also conservatives.
I'm not saying that is the perfect way, but it's a way of seeing how things are and of
knowing that this false conception may derive from social media. This information is
important.
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Our research on social media did not stop here, because in the Knowledge Center we
are trying to use as many forms of non-traditional data as possible, the so-called big data, to
better understand immigration. And, although I represent the European Commission, I think
that when I started working on immigration ten years ago, data was scarce. This data was
mainly provided by EUROSTAT. Since then, the information we collect has increased rapidly.
But there is always a delay.
In general, however, the presence of immigrants is delayed by almost two years. In
times of crisis this is may or may not be a problem. We are trying to use Facebook's
information to understand, in the Venezuelan crisis, the presence of the Venezuelans in Spain.
We have the 2017 data represented in the chart by the pink spots. We have more recent
information from statistical services and then we started collecting information from
Facebook.
Unfortunately, Facebook is a social media platform. We can not see what happened
historically speaking. However, we can gather current information on the presence of
immigrants at any time.
We absolutely accept that Facebook's penetration rate in the population is not
representative, at least not for all age groups. For example, this does not apply to the elder
individuals. Facebook is not everywhere. But it's hard to find a man around fifteen or sixteen
who does not, by the age of forty, have a second Facebook account and a fake account as well.
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Some preliminary assessments we have collected from Facebook are very similar to
the estimates provided by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics. However, neither the
Spanish National Institute of Statistics nor EUROSTAT recorded the presence of Venezuelans
in Spain, which is growing rapidly.
However, we are receiving information until the last minute. We are now in March
and we have at our disposal information until February 2019. We expect, of course, the official
data to validate whether this trend that has caught our attention is correct. It is very
interesting, however, because we can gather data in real time.
I now turn to the last point on the use of non-traditional data sources in relation to
immigration which concerns the issues raised both by Members of the Parliament and by
some of the previous speakers. This point refers to skills.
During the crisis, we know that great efforts have been made to accommodate these
people while little has been done to understand their full potential. But many of them had
studied in their country, had skills, brought them with them because they were working
before, but usually we have no information on that.
That's why we used LinkedIn. We have tried - and I bring you an example, we have
done it for many countries - to understand those who have studied in Syrian universities and
now reside in Germany, and to make out their profiles. Since we cannot find out more
information on their skills otherwise.
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And we deduct that the penetration rate of Syrians in Germany, who are on LinkedIn,
does not resemble that of Germans or Syrians in their country. But we are trying to gap this
difference and, nevertheless, we gather very important information, because we know the
profile of Syrian population in Germany per occupation which is very important for technical
professions, such as engineers and computer experts. This also applies to those involved in
education or health professions.
So, they arrive in Europe without us knowing their skills. No. Now, instead of waiting
for statistical data, we can gather this kind of information.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs): Thank you, Ms. Kalantaryan.
We continue with Mr. Antonis Kontis, Professor of International Economic Relations
and Director of the Master's Program "International and European Studies" and Director of
the Laboratory of Immigration and Diaspora of the Department of Political Science and Public
Administration of the University of Athens.
He studied economics at the University of Hamburg in the Federal Republic of
Germany. He has been a research partner at the University of Bonn and a lecturer at the Ionian
University. He was employed as a researcher at the Ministry of Economy and Finance and a
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scientist expert at the General Secretariat for Hellenic Diaspora, an independent
administrative department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The topic of Mr. Kontis’ intervention is: "Issues on the inclusion of immigrants in
Greece".
Mr Kontis, the floor is yours.
ANTONIOS KONTIS (Professor of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens -
Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences, Department of Political Science and Public
Administration): Thank you very much for the invitation and for the opportunity you give me
to put forward some of my views expressed at macro-level.
As a matter of fact, I will deal with the immigrants in Greece as a whole, with a long-
term view of the status quo and will use data and sources mainly from the European Union
and the OECD. I will answer the question of whether inclusion can be measured, how and
what results it generates in the case of Greece.
I am saying this in order to answer more scientifically, more objectively, more inter-
subjectively to various questions, such as whether or not we have achieved inclusion, to what
extent and in which field specifically, concerning what ethnicity etc... leaving these questions
exposed to judgmental considerations, which are usually unsubstantiated.
I should start off with a definition of inclusion. I do not know if you have ever reflected
on this question. My approach is that inclusion constitutes a dynamic path, a process free of
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economic, social and political discrimination between comparable demographic immigrant
and national population groups. Therefore, by the completion of the process of inclusion there
will be no such discrimination.
This definition gives rise to important methodological and political issues. For
example, some methodological ones are: Is the size of inclusion measurable? With what valid
and reliable method is inclusion measured? Is the appropriate statistical material available?
Do these empirical findings permit a transnational comparison? Do these findings allow us to
accurately diagnose achievements and shortcomings in our policy? There are other similar
questions.
This is also translated into political questions: What is or should the content of an
inclusion policy be? Finally, what are the objectives, tools and measures to influence the
process and the status of inclusion?
And finally, from these ontological questions derive some ethical imperatives. What
are these?
(PM)
(AM)
Hence, if we pose the questions this way, we see that there is a combination of
methodological and political questions that must be indeed answered in a scientific way. It is
precisely what we call an assessment of a public inclusion policy. First of all, we need an
evaluation of the inclusion policy to identify any possible gaps, shortcomings, omissions but
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also to measure whether the objectives have been achieved and to what extent, so we need
appropriate, valid and reliable indicators to measure inclusion. This has been the subject of
heated debate over the last two decades, and today I would say that this methodological and
political question has matured enough, and there are such indicators that we can use to make
a diagnosis and prognosis.
The inclusion study is a multidimensional study. If you can take a good look at the
chart, you will see that we have to operate at a "micro" or "macro" level of analysis. We will
examine the factors influencing the process and the status of inclusion, namely the public
sphere, the private sphere and the interim sphere of civil society.
Thirdly, should we move towards examining the nature, the form of indices that we
will use to measure what?
If that is the case, then the answer is that we need three kinds of indices.
The first set of indices is the access index, meaning to measure ex ante, in advance,
the level of difficulty of immigrants' access to the consumption of national public goods.
Secondly, we need the state index, that is to measure ex post the effects of the
inclusion policy in specific sectors, specific nationalities, at a specific time.
Thirdly, we need the attitude index, meaning inter-subjective perceptions of natives
and immigrants on the phenomenon of immigration.
Having presented to you the structure of my speech, I will make some comments on
the findings concerning Greece.
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The first index, the access index, has been used in the past under the general MIPEX
title and shows an assessment of the law of foreign nationals, meaning an assessment of the
institutional framework which allows, prevents or expressly prohibits immigrants, including
asylum seekers and political refugees - from accessing national public goods. Therefore, these
sets of indicators and several indices are used in a way that, in my view, sufficiently summarize
the situation.
In the past we have come up with such indices. The last one is that of 2014. It may not
appear clearly enough, but it is the best 2011 depiction available and you can probably see it
in this spider-shaped figure. You understand that blue, representing Greece in the middle, has
enough room to expand, so there is a distance between the blue of Greece and the edge of
the octagon. We can also see the areas where this distance exists. So we can intervene and
improve the situation.
I would, therefore, say that Greece falls short of the European average when it comes
to political participation, long-term residence legislation, access to the labor market,
legislation on family reunification, anti-discrimination legislation and lags marginally behind
Union’s average concerning access to citizenship and education.
I must point out that the latest figures are for 2014. Since then, there have been
several improving interventions that have facilitated access, but have not been newly
measured, so we can not compare this access index temporally.
Status index: Status indices measure actual inclusion, that is, inclusion generated by
the implemented governmental policies. Therefore, these indices are the best and we have to
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work based on them since they are ex post indices, meaning that they demonstrate what has
happened in the last five to ten years and what has produced this result.
These indices are measured by the OECD, by the European Statistical Office and give
concrete results. We can also proceed to a temporal comparison of the generated results.
However, I do not want to insist on that. I am heading directly to the indices published
a year ago for 2018. Here I want to get into more detail.
I start with the first key index, which is the percentage of participation of the foreign
labor force within the labor market. The observation here shows that prior to the 2008 crisis
the participation of the foreign labor force was higher, but after the crisis, the number is
declining. Today it ranges at about 70% and is almost similar to the percentage of the national
labor force.
The second index is the employment rate of foreign nationals. Throughout the period
preceding the current crisis the employment rate was also higher. During the last five years,
however, it tends to be equated with the employment rate of nationals. Nevertheless, overall
it is very small. It ranges from 50% to 55%, which is below the European average and one of
the smallest rates across Europe.
Unemployment: Key question. What unemployment rate does the foreign labor force
face in Greece? The answer is that by 2008 the unemployment rate for foreigners was much
lower than that of nationals. Since then, however, this unemployment rate has been rising
and now it exceeds that of the national labor force. Overall, it is one of the highest rates within
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the European Union regardless of the level of education or specialization of the foreign labor
force.
As far as health is concerned, here we have a very good result for the case of Greece.
According to their own statements - these are self-report declarations - 75% of immigrants
from third countries consider health care to be quite good. This performance is better than
that of nationals who are also measured in relation to this index and are above the European
Union average.
What is the difference between the income of foreigners and the income of nationals?
Here the answer is quite perplexed. The income of foreign nationals equals approximately to
62% of the average Greek income. This is due to many reasons, either because of their job
qualifications or the lack of assets, etc. However, 60% is the most up-to-date figure provided
by the OECD analysis.
(AG)
(AM)
The situation appears quite problematic with reference to what we call poverty, and
most specifically relative poverty. Here the results are overwhelming. 45% of immigrants
believe that they classify as ‘’poor’’. 19% of nationals and 33% of European immigrants in
Greece tend to believe the same. It is a very high rate of poverty, way above the European
average. If this is the case-and probably it is so- then immigrants are prevented from satisfying
their basic biological, social and cultural needs. This percentage of relative poverty has
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deteriorated by nine percentage points between 2007 and 2016. The crisis has obviously
adversely affected the situation.
When it comes to the long-term residence index, Greece is currently falling short of
the European average. Only 32% of the migratory stock retains this status.
The third set of indicators are the status indices. Status indices measure national and
foreigners’ inter-subjective perception of pertinent issues.
I leave the 2011 Eurobarometer behind, as well as the European Social Survey of 2009
- which shows a similar pattern - and I get straight down to the last figures of 2018. There is a
percentage that is very important and I would like us to have a closer look at. By self-report
declarations, immigrants themselves claim - and Greece is in the worst situation possible -
that about 39% of them has been discriminated against on grounds of ethnicity, nationality,
race. It is more than twice as high as the European average.
Now regarding the last Special Eurobarometer. It was measured by the end of 2017,
published in 2018, and is the most extensive and robust empirical measurement of nationals’
stance towards the immigration issue.
The findings are divided into four groups:
The first group concerns nationals' awareness of immigration. There are three
findings. A high information deficit along with lack of knowledge among the respondents is
duly observed. Secondly, the migratory stock is overestimated - as already mentioned by the
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previous speaker - over two and a half times in Greece. This is above the European Union
average. Thirdly, the proportion of legal and illegal immigrants is also overestimated, at the
expense of the illegal ones. Greece once again is above the European Union average.
The second group of findings concerns inter-ethnic social relations. The Greeks say
they have many contacts with immigrants. At the same time, they negatively assess these
experiences.
The third Eurobarometer findings concern the attitudes to the economic and social
impacts of immigration. Immigration is mostly seen as a problem rather than an opportunity.
The Greeks believe that immigration has a negative impact on the basic social, economic and
cultural dimensions of the host country.
The fourth group of findings concerns estimates related to inclusion. They believe that
the inclusion of immigrants has failed so far. This finding exceeds the European Union average.
At the same time, they claim that in order to have a successful inclusion, the knowledge of the
Greek language, appropriate education, the existence of cultural affinity as well as the active
involvement on behalf of the local authorities and the central government is absolutely
needed.
Following the juxtaposition of these three indices, I shall conclude by quoting three
conclusions:
Based on the access index, the overall picture is evaluated as satisfactory and
continuously enriched, thus the access to public goods is facilitated.
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Based on the status index, the overall picture is considered to be particularly negative
and requires systematic and immediate public intervention.
Finally, on the basis of the same status index, the overall picture is considered to be
differentiated, meaning that in some cases, contrary to others, there is an increased ratio of
inclusion, depending on the inclusion dimension.
Thank you.
(Applause)
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs): Thank you very much, Mr Kontis.
The data you presented are particularly interesting. I think they provide an incentive for
questions and stimulate further discussion.
Let's get to Mr. Vasileios Arapoglou. He is Associate Professor in Sociology, Social
Inequalities and Social Exclusion at the University of Crete. He studied Economics at AUEB and
holds postgraduate degrees from Panteion University and the London School of Economics.
He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of the Aegean, the
National Technical University of Athens, Panteion University, Harokopio University and the
University of Thessaly. His academic interests focus on social inequalities and social exclusion
within urban centers, urban social policies in Europe and the United States, psychosocial
approaches to urban problems, immigration, social inclusion and forms of belonging. Mr.
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Arapoglou will elaborate on the following issue: "The new geography of precariousness and
coexistence - Infrastructure for the settlement of immigrants in Greek cities".
Mr Arapoglou, the floor is yours.
VASILEIOS ARAPOGLOU (Associate Professor at the University of Crete, Department
of Sociology): Good evening.
First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation and I hope that I will be able to
contribute to this fruitful dialogue. We have already heard some interesting speeches
delivered by incredibly interesting and important colleagues.
I will deviate just a little from the text I have before me in my attempt to make use of
what I heard in the morning and what I have heard before, because one of my main goals is
to be able to discuss with you some concepts and to elaborate on whether these concepts
make it easier for us to understand the status quo and the current issues related to inclusion
and exclusion.
In this context, I would like to start by pointing out that in my area of expertise we
have a tendency to use some newly introduced and sophisticated terminology, such as the
concepts of diversity and diversification, which are rather unfamiliar to the Greek reality,
instead of the traditional concepts of exclusion and inclusion.
Today, I would also like to focus a little more on the notion of precariousness and
social capital, in particular, and to discuss a little bit whether they can help us gain a better
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insight of the current situation. Furthermore, I would like to enlarge the scope of today’s
debate - the previous speakers have already done so - from a temporal viewpoint, go a few
decades back and witness what is actually starting to change.
(SO)
(AG)
To this end, I will mainly use the results and the initial findings from a bigger project that I
conducted along with some of my colleagues - Thanos Malutos, Nikos Karadimitriou, Ion
Sayias - concerning deprivation as experienced within the Athenian environment and how this
has changed the past two decades, as well as smaller pilot surveys that I coordinated
throughout 2014-2016.
In this respect, I may as well warn you that some of the findings I am about to share
with you are a bit behind present debated policies. Somehow, some rather positive steps have
already been taken. Nevertheless, I think everyone is aware of the fact that things do not
change from one day to another, to put it rather simply.
Turning to the notion of precariousness, Bourdieu would ask some twenty years ago
where is to be found - well, today precariousness is everywhere. Yes, it is everywhere. It's not
everywhere in the same way. It is not everywhere with the same intensity. It concerns us all,
yet some are more affected than others. And we should be able to understand this and be
aware of the fact that, yes it concerns us all, but some people and some areas are way more
affected than others.
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And one of the reasons we use the concept of precariousness is, first of all, because
of its duality. In principle, it is an objective condition of material deprivation covering many
areas of everyday life. It starts from the field of work and goes further on. But we can also
perceive it as an intersubjective condition of symbolic deprivation. Symbolic and inter-
subjective meaning, in this case, that once the subjects are placed, there is again a side or an
aspect associated with a process of oppression and exploitation. It is not just a condition
where vulnerability arises as a natural condition or a random event. It stems from
relationships that are oppressive and exploitative.
And secondly, this inter-subjective condition or relationship means that it can change
not only signaling a process of oppression and exploitation, but also an attempt to reverse
and alter through solidarity and assertion practices.
We now claim that precariousness results from the impairment of labor rights,
especially considering the inadequate protection of employment, and social protection
mechanisms, such as the various welfare systems that have transformed across Europe and
the entire world, providing minimum benefits given under conditions of employment
availability, decentralization as well as through targeting vulnerable groups and often via self-
financing or "Do-It-Yourself" Welfare.
In support to all of the above, as an urban sociologist and after subsequently macro-
processing the so-called precariousness of the place, namely, the impossibility to settle in an
area, the forced movement and the risk of displacement or entrapment, the dual nature of
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this notion is once more attested. This is usually the result of the imposition of arbitrary
categorization among the displaced people and the restriction of immigrants' rights. These
categorizations are often administrative. I think in the morning we heard a number of such
weaknesses in asylum systems or relocation systems, and so on, and how they actually
produce this particular condition of entrapment, this otherwise called precariousness of place.
And precisely because this precariousness of place constitutes failure to achieve
settlement and not just reception, this is why the inclusion policies should or could or need to
contain a basic element of settlement.
And I foresee that precisely because of the degradation of welfare systems, we often
come to discuss in terms of infrastructure why? Why is it the only way to fund them anymore?
Because a number of other benefits are not considered investments and can not be funded,
this is also reflected scientifically along with a series of existing new trends.
Therefore, in order to tackle this inability to settle, it is, of course, necessary on the
one hand to lift the measures that generate the said inability and, on the other hand, to pave
the way for a number of new infrastructure which will not only facilitate the reception of
immigrants but encourage their settlement as well.
Let me give you an insight into the evolution of the notion of precariousness, in
particular within the greek society, over the past two decades.
We are making an attempt to classify a series of indices that can reflect susceptibility
to employment, education and housing. By producing a composite index, you see the results
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of its first application in the case of Attica. This implies a well-known division between the East
and the West, known at least to those involved in urban sociology. A differentiation is added
to this traditional East - West division experienced in Attica, the differentiation of center -
region.
Speaking precisely of this differentiation in terms of precariousness, we can see that
in the western part of Attica, we have far more unemployment, while in the eastern part we
have forms of self-employment or part-time employment, which does not constitute
employment on a stable basis, however it can often offer qualitative conditions and sufficient
income. So, we have a distinction from the very beginning here, which is good to be aware of.
Also, in relation to the region-center division, while in the periphery we have the more
or less known family ties built around the mentality of self-housing and home-ownership, in
the center we have a series of new types of ties, new forms of capital and selective ties related
to rental and forms of cohabitation. This information is also important when it comes to
devising settlement policies which will focus, among other things, on housing.
Over the past decade, what we see is that we have a social and spatial polarization,
that is to say that the gap between the more and less deprived areas has widened and that
this happened due to, I would say, three factors. One factor is the one leading to what I would
call "the result of uneven growth", meaning that these areas were developing but unequally
until at least 2008. There was an improvement, but it was not enough and that’s important.
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Where and what gets spatialized is of utmost importance, especially when it comes to
education.
Because while there have been significant achievements, there still are huge
differences and despite there is a rapid improvement in the wealthier, if you wish, suburbs,
the situation in the western districts has not improved sufficiently enough to bridge the gap.
Moreover, there are huge job losses. These figures are perfectly consistent and
compatible with what Mr. Kontis’ prior presentation regarding the employment conditions as
well as the material and financial conditions of immigrants in Greek reality.
(DE)
(SO)
And finally, as we will see later on, a new type of inequality, which has already made
its appearance, is expected as a matter of fact to hinder the inclusion processes through the
stratification of precariousness. Therefore, the rate of unemployment, especially within the
low qualified immigrant community, is far greater than the possibility of self-employment or
part-time employment - with emphasis on self-employment - of highly qualified professionals,
especially young Greeks who already their own personal difficulties. We know all about these
difficulties, they are also part of this process of precariousness.
Yes, I will say it again, we are all insecure, but some in a different way than others.
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In short, I would like to say that, precisely because housing is at the heart of inclusion
policies as regards the issue of settlement, the way society has always perceived self-housing
and home ownership as the key solution to a number of issues, is now far exceeded. This is
due to the fact that we are beginning to see that the intention of homeownership is not
enough to improve living conditions, since we have an increase in housing costs, we are faced
with the risk of energy poverty, especially within immigrant households, while we also have
an increase in overcrowding, in particular within immigrant households.
Prospects for the post-crisis era, emerging from the way the above-mentioned indices
are modulating accordingly, reveal an extraordinary difficulty. I try to reflect that by taking as
example the workforce and finding what percentage of it is unemployed, self-employed and
what percentage is employed part-time. What we are seeing eventually, and quite clearly if I
may add, is that the percentage of immigrants working as full-time employees has now
dropped from 80% to 40%.
So it’s not just unemployment. Furthermore, we also see that only part of the recovery
capacity is absorbed in terms of part-time or self-employment.
Since I am bound to time constraints, I would like to refer to two qualitative data on
how living conditions are in some of the most precarious areas, when they become places of
entrapment or hope. Any potential or process of transformation are of critical importance.
The first concerns what I call the shrinking of institutional social capital, as it was
reflected until the beginning of 2016, upon interviews and qualities. Possibly, this can be
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reversed. However, in a country where what we would call institutional social capital, and in
particular its statehood, meaning the relationships arising from citizens’ everyday interaction
with employment, welfare, health services etc., also constitutes a form of capital. I think there
is no need to understand only in terms of discrimination when these relationships can have a
positive impact on people’s lives by guiding them, helping them to get on with their lives and,
finally, by responding to their needs. Sometimes the institutional social capital is also referred
to as a link of citizenship in everyday life, because in this way the status of citizenship is
realized multilaterally and not only at a political level.
Hence, the first argument is that in a country where this institutional social capital
was insufficient already, chances are that it will continue to shrink. Part of these services, their
transformation and their everyday interaction with citizens has worn out and distressed
citizens, in particular third-country nationals, in the light of the precariousness of employment
and immigration. This is expressed in different ways and is highlighted in several interviews
variously.
We have heard some of them: Insufficient income, large loopholes in host
infrastructure, discrimination in employment services, health, education, the feeling of
prolonged displacement, along with a number of pending issues. It is, sure, very interesting
that we discuss it and even identify this situation as a problematic matter. However, it is
completely different being a citizen and having to personally interact with governmental
institutions. A diffuse insecurity, a feeling of abandonment of public spaces in particular. Also,
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a series of unseen precarious situations affecting long-term immigrants, a thing that is usually
forgotten and which unfortunately, according to surveys, starts to reappear.
There are many typical examples. One that comes to mind right now is that a shelter,
for example, used previously by homeless people is not intended for immigrants but for
people who have been in this country for a decade. Percentages are disproportionate to what
we would expect. I bring to your attention only one of the unseen aspects of this situation.
There are many others.
Secondly, and I am to conclude for I do not want to presume upon your time, is that
we also have new forms of capital or new bridges at the same time. These are forms of social
capital and I would even say everyday cosmopolitanism, which go beyond already known
ethnic or family bonds. It was shocking to see these forms appearing many times in the field
and in the interviews that we conducted. The available samples are not large enough. But it
was exciting to see, even in these small samples.
Concluding, I would just like to mention a few of them: Connections between women
of different origin, emotional capital taking the form of engagement, incredibly stable support
and outcome, ties with the country of origin, which, unlike what is sometimes implied, foster
inclusion, transfer of resources from abroad or savings which aid those residing here, forms
of solidarity, and moving from one place to another in order for the parents or relatives to
exercise their parental responsibility, forms that have to do with job sharing- sharing even
wages, even in precariousness - forms that have to do with the house sharing - as people share
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houses with others they are not even related with - forms that have to do with access to
services offered by welfare associations, new collective residences such as taking over of
buildings, new forms of hospitality - some of them are already known despite any mishaps,
such as ESTIA - forms of daily coexistence within public spaces of cultural coexistence.
Finally, allow me to tell you, perhaps because it is one of the things that, while I was
in the field, would always impress me and keep me on my toes and optimistic. Because, you
know, even for an urban sociologist, it is an exciting thing to say that public spaces are
beautiful and that coexistence, among many other things, is finally making its appearance.
(AD)
(DE)
Refraining from any unnecessary sentimentality, it is shocking to see how thinking
about a better future, how everyday questions that have to do with whether a child is out
there playing safely, how the expectation of considering a place your hometown can be so
closely linked even with a well preserved playground, or how the said playground can trigger
an entire debate on living conditions and the inclusion of immigrants.
Thank you very much. I hope this will be food for thought.
(Applause)
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IOANNETA (ANNETA) CABBADA (1st Vice-Chair of the Special Standing Committee
on European Affairs - Chairwoman of the Workshop): Mr Arapoglou, please sit on your right
for the debate, if you may.
Unfortunately, I have to urge you to strictly respect time limits. I understand that the
issue we are dealing with today is so interesting that cannot be exhausted in the context of
just one workshop. I imagine that there will be follow-up initiatives in the future.
Therefore, since time is putting pressure on all of us, we will move one to our next
speaker Mr. Dimitris Parsanoglou, who is a lecturer of Sociology in "Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales", Paris. He teaches at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion
University while at the same time works as a principal researcher for the Gender Studies
Laboratory of the Department of Social Policy of the same institution. He has taught at the
Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete and has worked in
numerous research projects on immigration, racism, discrimination, education and the labor
market as a partner of national and European institutions, NGOs and companies.
His main research interests focus on the history and sociology of immigration,
employment, urban space as well as on gender issues.
Mr. Parsanoglou, the floor is yours.
DIMITRIOS PARSANOGLOU (Researcher, Panteion University of Social and Political
Sciences, School of Political Sciences, Department of Social Policy): Thank you.
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I do not want to take up much of your time by stating the obvious, so I will refrain
from thanking you for the invitation and for the honor I feel to be here.
I will make it clear from the very beginning that I will not take a timeless approach to
the issues we are discussing. I will focus on the recent events regarding immigration mobility
in Greece. Secondly, I will not have an objective approach. But I will take up where the
previous speaker Mr. Arapoglou, whose speech presented some optimistic data, left off.
More specifically, the recent or even current, if you may, "refugee crisis" - in quotes,
I always put these two words in quotes, because there is a major debate on whether it was,
indeed, a refugee crisis or a European crisis, in terms of management of an otherwise acute
mobility in the European area, for it assumed suchlike features - has generated a series of
displacements concerning both the European border regime as a whole and the forms and
expressions it takes on in specific locations and time periods.
I believe that one can detect these displacements of the European border regime
taking a hybrid but also exemplary form in Greece. In other words, this can be a magnifying
mirror of the future.
Two concepts will be used here as interpretative vehicles. One concept is new
humanitarianism - or, better yet, solidarity - and the other is state national sovereignty. The
summer of 2015, in addition to the emergence of tragic pictures, produced and triggered an
unprecedented rise of humanitarianism. In some cases, we could say that the rise of
volunteering for refugees as a de facto manifestation of solidarity reached massive
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proportions highlighting that - I am citing here two German colleagues who carried out the
research from which I drew material in preparation of today’s workshop - while in Brussels,
Strasbourg and in many other capitals emphasis was placed on rules and principles, rather
than on local circumstances, in order to reconstruct an organized asylum system, either by
forcing countries to abide by the already existing criteria or by coming up with a new system
altogether, on the other hand many residents in Sicily aided immigrants to continue on with
their trip through giving instructions, buying them train tickets or even transferring asylum
seekers or volunteers to 'transit hotspots' - which are nothing like the ‘’hotspots’’ we have in
the Greek islands and Italy - like in Milan, Athens and Kale, or they simply showed them
support by distributing clothes and food and offering legal support or medical assistance. End
of quote.
In Greece, since the beginning of the so-called "refugee crisis", and in particular from
the spring of 2015, this outburst of humanism has led some, such as Efthimios Papatachiarchis,
professor of Social Anthropology at the University of the Aegean, to talk about the emergence
of a new patriotism of solidarity. Again, I quote some points from an article he published in
2016: "2015 has been the year of major overthrow. The enormous increase in the number of
refugees and immigrants who came to Greece in the second half of 2015 once again tested
the cultural reflections of Greek society and this time something miraculous happened. In the
context of accepting foreigners, where for a long time there was a fierce confrontation
between the two aspects of hospitality, heterophilia and heterophobia, a hegemonic stance
emerged that seemed to overcome the contradictions and divisions that characterize the
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historical consciousness of difference in our country, which is no other than solidarity with
refugees.
Despite the imperfections and delays, despite contradictory behaviors and negative
examples, Greece passed this test, which many described as a crisis within a crisis, with
unexpected success. Openness was imposed on mild reactive closeness. Assistance to
refugees, often spontaneously born at the base of society, has won fair and square - not
everywhere and not with the same intensity - the war on impressions. The country that has
failed to respect human rights, has been repeatedly championing xenophobic trends in regular
Eurostat polls and has been a traditional subject of stigmatization in international
organizations' reports, has evolved and set the example when it comes to solidarity, an
example to be followed throughout European Union". End of quote.
This solidarity, which Papatachiarchis talks about, was expressed individually through
the voluntary initiative of residents and non-residents of the country as well as collectively
through the interventions of local, national and supranational bodies. Indeed, multiple bodies
and subjects, local and international, governmental, intergovernmental and non-
governmental, technical and humanitarian, have been involved in the country when
extraordinary circumstances have arisen.
If I attempted to classify the subjects who were and still are largely present today in
the extensive field of refugee management, we could distinguish a number of groups coming
from representatives of national and local authorities, such as staff members and officials of
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relevant agencies - for example, the Asylum Service, the Reception and Identification Service,
Municipalities, Regions, etc. - executives of European Union institutional bodies such as EASO,
FRONTEX, as well as international organizations such as UNHCR, UNICEF and the International
Organization for Migration, to name but a few.
A third category would be the members who are employed by a non-governmental
organization under a paid employment relationship. This generated a parallel economy
operating within a Keynesian-like regime, where many of unemployed individuals got a job. I
am not hinting anything political.
A fourth category is the volunteer members of non-governmental organizations,
including old immigrants and refugees among others. We always use this distinction between
old and young immigrants in immigrant studies. Older immigrants are more active. For
example, since we are talking about inclusion, one of the most successful inclusion
mechanisms, one of the "success stories", is a place called the MELISSA network, in Feron St.,
in the center of Athens, where old immigrants and refugees play an active role in providing
services that help the inclusion of the "newcomers", and again I put newcomers in quotes.
Another category is the individual volunteers, without a fixed relationship with a NGO.
It is impressive that even now in structured hospitality infrastructures such as Eleonas, the
Services are basically provided by volunteer groups coming from as far as North America to
Oceania or other countries in waves with different motives and for different reasons.
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Another category is activists, members of a political or social organization or
movement. Here I am not talking only about the anti-racist movement, which was mainly
initiated through the taking over of public buildings and other forms of solidarity, but I am also
talking about a wide range of movements stemming from different areas of the political and
social spectrum.
Another category is the non-attached activists who often experience conflictual
relationships with other movements.
Finally, there are members of local initiatives, communities, which have been
established to a certain extent in order to address whatever this fiscal crisis has left behind
the past years, such as local assemblies, community kitchens, social pharmacies, associations,
and so on.
(NP)
(AD)
What is interesting here is not so the classification - which, in any case, is subject to
control and criticism since another type of classification could be welcome - what is interesting
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to think about in the long term is that in this particular space-time context that we
experienced in Greece, meaning the double crisis and the multiple crises, all these subjects -
as we have enumerated them above - co-existed for some specific moments in very specific
places where the modern-day refugee drama unfolded.
The rescue off the coast of Lesbos was not carried out only by the Coast Guard but
also by Catalan activists acting independently on their own boats. Indeed, I have interviewed
American volunteers who thought they were the Spanish Coast Guard and were wondering,
"why should there be a Spanish Coast Guard?", when in fact it was an activist organization,
PROACTIVA, and not the Coast Guard. From the rescue off the coast of Lesvos to Mytilene, to
the port of Piraeus and to the camps of Eidomeni, a plethora of people who until then could
not have imagined - and surely hadn’t imagined - that they could coexist in such a condensed
space-time context became integral parts of a heterogeneous and heterodox continuum. The
anarchist activists, for example, handed refugees over to the UNHCR, then to the International
Organization for Migration, then to a camp that was run by the Municipality of Mytilene, and
so on.
The question is which was or could be the impact of this osmosis as regards the
provision of services to refugees, asylum seekers, immigrant men and women in terms of
drafting an immigration and refugee policy overall, if you wish? So, we are moving on to the
second part of my presentation, meaning the issues of europeanization, NGOs - which we
often talk about - and issues of state national sovereignty.
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From the very beginning, a key element of the Greek Government's argumentation
since the outbreak of the so-called crisis has been the double crisis, meaning that a country
already plagued by a long-term fiscal crisis has or, to put it better yet, is bearing the burden
of a new humanitarian crisis. What may have been more interesting was not how these two
crises were linked, but how they are intertwined with the issue of national sovereignty as a
means of resolving or exacerbating any crisis.
The country's prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, speaking in Paris in March 2016 at a
meeting of European Radical Left and Ecology executives under the title "Europe needs to
change," said the following: "The logic of national sovereignty can not prevail over the
common European rules when it comes to the refugee problem, meaning that some people
can still deny Europe the possibility to impose on each of the 28 member states what to do
with their borders, because it is a question of national sovereignty. But when it comes to the
economy, the question of sovereignty and, consequently, democracy is out of the window. "
He refers to what happened in 2015. And he concludes "Since today we are faced with a crisis",
that is March 2016, just a few days before the country's northern border with the then
FYROM, now North Macedonia closed, "that goes beyond Europe, there are no common rules
and some countries can in the name of national sovereignty to close their borders."
As it is highlighted above, the tension between the European and national response
to the crisis as well as the border and asylum and immigration policies, in general, has been
and remains an issue of pivotal importance for the European Union and its future. On the
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other hand, one of the key questions raised during the investigation that we conducted, both
with representatives of the Greek Government and the administration in Athens, as well as in
Chios and Lesvos, and with representatives of European and international organizations, was
the question of whether the refugee crisis has had an impact or, rather, how important the
impact of the crisis has been on national sovereignty concerning both issues of first reception
and of rudimentary inclusion of refugees and asylum-seekers.
At first sight, there was a convergence between representatives of the Greek
authorities and representatives of European institutions acting on the refugee issue. The
motto of assessing the needs and overseeing all the relevant actions "Responsible is the Greek
State", which was reported by consultants of the Ministry of Migration Policy and members
of other governmental ranks, was accompanied by the motto "we simply offer consultancy
assistance, consultancy. Greek authorities are responsible." This motto was echoed by almost
all experts and executives of European bodies such as EASO, FRONTEX and international
organizations such as the UNHCR.
Apparently, both within reception and identification centers, the so-called hotspots,
as well as hosting infrastructure both on the islands as well as the hinterland have been some
sort of modus vivendi among the different national, supranational and international
stakeholders involved. On a second level, however, this osmosis was not as painful as the
direct or indirect criticism that was recurrently targeted to the international organizations and
which had to do with the financial element, in other words with the fact that the entire funding
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went directly to the international organizations, but also with a sense of inequality among
Greek officials, in that their foreign colleagues received a better income and experienced
better working conditions.
On the other hand, while officially the role of supranational organizations and even of
European organizations had been to assist Greek Authorities, they have been known to
provide more than auxiliary services since the beginning of their massive presence at points
of interest. For example, from the very beginning of mass arrivals, the process of the
identification of nationality, at least in Lesvos and Chios, was carried out entirely by FRONTEX
executives, while EASO (European Asylum Support Office) executives interviewed asylum
seekers at the time, before this was even legislated, by amending the Asylum Act, no.
4375/2016, in June 2016, which had two main elements: the first one was the change in the
composition of the secondary asylum committees, where the UNHCR and the Hellenic League
for Human Rights representatives were removed and replaced by judges and the other one
was that for the first time - what an Asylum Officer described as a first tangible step towards
a common European Asylum System - the possibility for EASO officials to interview asylum
seekers was provisioned.
With all these alterations that I have just described, I wanted to establish so as to
conclude, if you may, the shift of the very question I raised all along, that is to say, what did
the refugee crisis leave behind. The question, therefore, is not so much whether the
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definitions of both the European border regime and state or national sovereignty have
changed. The question or questions that are now raised are the following:
First of all, if solidarity, as expressed in the "long summer of immigration", as many
people are used to saying, can be a guide or even inspiration in the management of future
refugee, immigration - with or without quotes - crises, let alone on issues of social inclusion
of refugees and immigrant men and women.
Secondly, if the displacements we have witnessed, driven by the Greek example, are
confronted with the future of Europe or the national obsessions that have been the main
guide of the European regime, at least from the point of view of some states, will prevail in
the future many times over. The not so distant future will show.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs): Thank you very much Mr.
Parsanoglou.
I am now calling to the podium Ms. Maria Gassouka, who will refer to the issue of
"Greek Society, Immigration and Gender".
Ms. Gassouka is Professor at the Department of Preschool Education and Educational
Design at the University of the Aegean. She teaches traditional and wider cultural and feminist
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studies, with lifelong and distance education, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
She, also, teaches ethnography and feminist qualitative research methods.
At the same time, she is a researcher on gender issues, education and the labor
market. She is a special scientist in the field of European programs and Union initiatives. In
this context, she has collaborated with various Cypriot public and private stakeholders,
including the Ministries of Justice, Labor and Education, for the last seven years.
(SS)
(NP)
She is the editor of the National Action Plan for Gender Equality during 2006-2013 as
well as evaluator of the educational reform of the Republic of Cyprus and Chairman of the
Scientific Committee of the Cyprus Gender Equality Observatory.
Miss Gassouka, the floor is yours.
MARIA GASOUKA (Primary Professor at the University of the Aegean, Faculty of
Humanities, Department of Preschool Education and Educational Planning and Chairwoman
of the Scientific Committee of the Cyprus Gender Equality Observatory, ‘’Greek Society,
Migration and Gender’’): Good evening. I warmly thank you for the invitation. I hope this is
only the beginning of such exciting initiatives.
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And if I may, Mr. Belia, on a friend’s behalf from the General Secretariat of the Aegean
I would like to stand in favor of an event in one of our islands with the assistance of the
University of the Aegean. We remain at your disposal.
Since the President requested so a while ago, but mainly after the inspiring greetings
of the Vice-President of the Parliament, Mrs Christodoulopoulou and the representative of
the Greek Ombudsman Authority, several issues regarding Greece, which I had the intention
of mentioning, have already been covered, so I will confine myself to outlining the profile of
the woman immigrant, which is also widely recognized in Greece.
Allow me, my friends, to dedicate this speech to the refugees murdered in Evros -
mother, 37 years old, daughters 17 and 18 years old - and to the murdered on sexist grounds
student of my school, Eleni Topaloudi. And to remind you that in Greece, as in Europe and the
whole world, femicide, which term is found throughout international bibliography, is alive and
well.
Friends, although women account for about half of global migration flows, there has
long been a serious lack of data regarding the gender dimension of immigration. Women were
absent both from research on the immigration phenomenon and from the public speech
articulated on this very issue. In the past few decades, however, research has begun to focus
on women and immigration, raising questions and producing new data, while at the same
time highlighting the fact that immigrant women are to a large extent subject to double
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disparities throughout immigration process both as women and as members of the group they
belong to.
Certainly, migration and gender research has significantly changed its orientation
nowadays, and has moved from the focused studies on migrant women and their sexuality in
the 1980s to the interdisciplinary analysis of gender relations. Thus, since gender is
approached as fluid, changing and relational, the subjects of research now are femininity and
masculinity, sexuality, as well as the multiple ways in which gendered power is expressed in
order to understand the phenomenon of migration.
It has now been accepted that gender, as it happens with race or social class, is an
integral component of every social dynamic, human relation and institutional structure.
Consequently, all elements of the migration process have a gender dimension.
So today, in our analysis, we are dealing not only with the diversity of the social
stratification of migratory flows, as already mentioned, but also with its strong gender
dimension. We understand that a person's sex, gender identity and sexual orientation play an
important role at each stage of the migration experience. We also understand that gender
affects the reasons of migration for women and men, men and women, their places of origin
and destination, the way they migrate and the networks they use, the opportunities and
resources available at the destinations, but also the relations with the country of origin.
Dangers, difficulties and needs are also affected to a large extent by the gender of the
individual and often vary crucially among migrant groups.
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Roles, aspirations, relationships, and power dynamics are related to whether one is a
man, a woman, a boy or a girl, or whether one identifies as lesbian, gay or homosexual,
bisexual, transgender, etc. and significantly affect all aspects of the migration process, and
may also be influenced in new ways by migration.
In particular, with regard to the women that this communication focuses on, it is
obvious that understanding what it means to be a woman in the migration process is not just
about getting the most valuable data about gender but primarily about understanding how
gender relations work in every aspect of the migration cycle.
Women migrate more and more on their own, looking for financial opportunities, jobs
or education. Evidence shows that the rate of female migration is rising faster than that of
male migration in many countries. This trend is commonly referred to as “degeneration of
migration”.
The International Labor Organization confirms that women account for half of the
world's migrant population, but in some countries this percentage reaches 70% to 80%.
Female migration can be voluntary, for work or involuntary, such as for trafficking and forced
prostitution.
Voluntary migration is most often attributed to economic and work reasons, but also
to marriage or family reunification. As far as the latter is concerned, it is worth mentioning
that historically women used to migrate mainly for marriage or family reunification both
internally and abroad. And indeed, although married men were able to move to join family
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members, women were those who moved to their husbands and decisively contributed to the
reunification of their families. And the experience of Greek immigration at the “embarkment
to the New World”, as the author Papadiamantis states, confirms this.
It should be noted that international migration for marriage continues to include
brides on demand by mail, a process through which men from wealthy countries marry
women from the developing world and beyond.
In any case, migration may be due to individual factors such as marital status or
reproductive status and skills but also to family or social factors such as political and financial
statues or social class.
Surveys show that the level of education and current employment are positively
linked to migration, while gender expectations and standards have a significant impact on
deciding to migrate.
(PE)
(SS)
In some countries intra-family strategies lead the oldest girls to migration, in order to
be able to educate younger siblings. In other cases, migration of married women with children
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is preferred. There are many cases where women may migrate due to gender-based structural
inequalities or intra-family discrimination, and we currently have a number of surveys that
show that in several regions girls are mainly migrating to escape their social status or
phenomena such as genital mutilation and forced marriages.
Dear friends, migration research in general is often based on economic cost benefit
analysis. However, gender-conscious female researchers insist that research should include a
social interpretation based on prevailing gender standards and culture. In particular, gender
norms may, and usually do limit the rights and opportunities of women. Therefore, it is vital
to understand how gender interacts with migration.
Given the specific nature of migration, it is no coincidence that the International Labor
Organization promotes rights in the field of employment and mobility; combating
discriminatory practices related to understanding how migration affects the roles and
relationships between genders, and how gender affects different types of migration; analyzing
how gender affects access to social services, economic development, skills, dangers and
inclusion problems; ensuring diversity and participation of migrant women in consultations;
ensuring their participation in activities etc...
Anyway, migration has both positive and negative impact on the lives of women. It
can empower them by allowing them access to employment and education, improving their
gender social situation and enhancing their ability to make independent decisions to achieve
desired outcomes.
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On the other hand, migration can also exacerbate their already vulnerable position,
including abuse and trafficking, especially when immigrant women are under-skilled or have
no legal documents.
In any case, education, work experience and economic independence in host
countries can liberate women from traditional roles and allow them to exercise their rights
more effectively. The truth, however, is that migration has more dangers for women than for
men. For example, they are more vulnerable to physical, sexual and verbal violence during the
migratory journey and are more likely to be victims of human traffickers for the sex industry.
As women and foreigners, migrant women often face double discrimination in the
labor market, and it is not rare for their status as dependents to limit their access to
employment, social welfare and health programs, and their stay may depend on their
relationship with a man who works.
The report on the achievement of the Sustainable Development goals 2030 goes on
to make an interesting assessment of relation between gender and migration by finding that
migration can improve women's autonomy, human capital and self-esteem and expand power
and value of women in their families and communities. It can promote more gender-friendly
social standards and help improve women's rights and access to resources.
However, although migration can have beneficial effects on women, a number of
obstacles, limitations and prejudices diminish these effects. Social standards, laws,
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perceptions and stereotypes, cultural and religious traditions and similar practices remain
powerful and accompany women to destination countries.
The report concludes, recommending the protection of migrant women's rights, their
access to services and resources, and also recommends that governments ratify international
treaties and conventions promoting the rights and protection of migrant women. They insist,
in particular, on the fact that migration can improve autonomy, human capital and self-
esteem, as well as the power of women in their families and communities.
When migrant women return home, they often retain their own autonomy and bring
new rules, skills and expertise. With these new skills, when they return, they often start their
own businesses.
At the same time, even when women are not migrants themselves, they can benefit
from the migration of their relatives. When women, for example, stay behind when their
husbands migrate, they often gain more control and authority in their households, acting as
decision-makers for family choices and finances.
Migration often leads to remittances to families. Women are more likely to receive
remittances regardless of the gender of the sender.
Remittances have led to an increase of the women who set up a business. It has also
been proven that when women receive remittances, family welfare improves, as well as the
health and education of the children of the family. On the other hand, migrant women also
send remittances home. Generally speaking, women give a higher percentage of their income
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than men, although in total the remittances may be lower because they are paid less. They
also demonstrate greater stability and frequency in sending remittances to their families that
improve its welfare, and through them the family ensures the healthcare and education of its
members.
However, we must be very careful and cautious when it comes to the consequences
of migration for women, because alongside the positive effects there are very important
negative ones. For example, upon returning to the country of origin,a group of migrant women
must or is forced to return to traditional patterns and gender roles, which may be against their
social, political and financial situation and preferences.
Migration of women can also cause tensions in families with potentially harmful
consequences for children. In addition, when men and women with a high degree of
specialization leave their country, the results may also be negative in the communities of
origin.
We should not neglect the fact that legal restrictions prevent women from migrating
more than men. In some countries employment and mobility of women from their homes,
communities or the state concerned are both legally and socially restricted or banned.
Dear friends, however, we could not discuss female migration and its negative impact
on women's lives and ignore that phenomenon that emerges as part of the gender political
economy of migration in Europe. And I am referring to the trafficking and forced prostitution
of women.
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(PH)
(PE)
Although the United Nations’ definition speaks of people, let me use the term
"women" when I refer to trafficking instead of "people" not only because they constitute the
majority of the migrant population, but above all because the term "people" obscures the
asymmetry of gender relations and the particularity of the female immigration experience.
More specifically, it is it is obvious that migrant women without the necessary
legitimate documents are an prey for exploitation and mistreatment from the moment when
they cede their fate to the traffickers' hands. This is mainly due to coercion, deception and
violent exploitation, elements which reveal a universal infringement of human rights.
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Of the hundreds of thousands of women that are being trafficked within the European
Unionjust 1 to 2% of the victims are rescued and only one in a hundred thousand Europeans
that are committing human trafficking is condemned.
Trafficking constitutes an extreme form of violence against women, not only of the
women that are subject to it, but all women and me personally.
It also signals the debasement of the society as a whole. The female body is commercialized
by the international criminal gangs, which obtain tremendous profits.
In organized women trafficking, usually there is a transaction between businessmen and
customers, while the female body is just a means of pleasure for the first ones and source of profit for
the latter, it loses its autonomy and only serves the others. On grounds of patriarchy and demand many
businesses flourish just by offering the body of a woman as product, of a woman who does not define
it anymore, but simply engages in the transaction.
In conclusion, you will allow me to highlight that many international conventions and laws on
the protection of migrant women have been enacted. Many countries have taken steps to improve the
benefits of immigration and reduce the risks and the difficulties of migrant men and women. Although
these efforts are important, migrant women continue to face the already known risks while the full
benefits and immigration opportunities aiming at the promotion of gender equality have yet to be
achieved.
Society can and must be sensitized and acutely aware of the benefits and the contribution of
migration to a country’s development, thus reducing xenophobia, racism and sexism.
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Personally, I insist that in order to better promote the rights of migrant women, the political
engagements of migrant men and women within their host countries should be further advocated. At
the same time, conducting more surveys in the light of gender dimension is considered indispensable
to bridge existing gaps concerning the relevant knowledge and to analyze more
comprehensively the fundamental relationship between gender and immigration.
In conclusion, I want to tell you that I come from a university, the University of the
Aegean, which is at the forefront of the migration flows and its people, the entire academic
community, is giving its own battle in order to help and demonstrate,what our friend and
colleague, Akis Papataxiarchis, referred to as ‘’patriotism of solidarity."
Especially in Rhodes - on a lighter and more optimistic note - the University has set up
language learning schools for immigrants, who we forced to bring the women immigrants
along with them, because they had left them in the camp to take care of the children. And
whenever it is needed, academics, administrative staff and students baby sit so as to help the
parents learn the language.
This is also good practice, for the students of the Faculty of Education: We have
organized, educated and motivated students to adopt children from the immigrant and
refugee community, accompany them to school, read with them, help them learn the
language. At the same time, they help parents strengthen their communication with school.
Take care. Thank you.
(Applause)
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IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs) With the risk of being accused that
I was quite partial for letting Ms. Gassouka speak for so long, because the truth is that she
largely exceeded the time limits, I would like to warmly thank her.
The last speech will be delivered by Mrs. Geli Aroni. You will not find her in today’s
schedule . She was added later on. Mrs. Geli Aroni is Head of the Department of Refugee
Education at the Ministry of Education. She will refer to education as a key tool for inclusion.
Mrs. Aroni holds a PhD in Social Psychology and was a permanent physical education teacher
since 1999 in intercultural schools until 2016, when seconded to the Ministry of Education
due to her experience in the field. She is a trainer of the Council of Europe and educates
teachers concerning democratic citizenship and human rights. An interesting detail in her
resume that showcases how something, at first glance, random can surely impact our lives, is
the fact that Mrs. Aroni got her Master’s degree, as I was informed, thirty years ago in New
York, where as a gymnast she was the only white woman to play in the group. This was the
reason for her to begin her training in anti-racist education.
Mrs. Aroni, you have the floor.
GELI ARONI (Head of the Department of Refugee Education at the Ministry of
Education): Thank you very much. I will not take up much of your time. It will only take me
five minutes and this is why there have been too many interventions and questions about our
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educational policy. Since we should leave no room for ambiguities, I just want to say a couple
of things.
The issue of refugee education was brought about with the greeting of the President
of the Parliament, Mr. Voutsis, highlighting that the Parliament's enormous contribution to
the educational infrastructure for refugees, namely the money given by this House and the
cooperation with the latter, was decisive. Then Mr. Psychogios and Mr. Clapas reported on
actions taken by the Department in which I serve as Head of, as well as stating in numbers the
amount of refugee children going to our schools.
I want to say two things: One is that without synergy, nothing can be done. What we
have achieved is the result of an incredible collaboration with the Ministry of Migration Policy,
the Ministry of Health, the Parliament, along with a truly outstanding cooperation with
universities. When it comes to children, universities have helped us in a variety of ways. Last
week a training of 1020 teachers from six universities across the country involved in the
education of refugees was completed, alongside the previously mentioned programs of Greek
language.
And we could not have reached the result we have achieved without the contribution
of international organizations such as the International Organization for Migration, the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees and UNICEF. You will hear more about this at the next
session.
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The second thing I want to bring to the table - and I will close it - is that for us, when
we talk about refugee education and when they ask me to talk about refugee education,
people generally think I'm talking about how we train refugee children. Refugee education
also concerns the training of natives. We can not educate and provide quality education and
training if we have not been trained ourselves in what Mrs. Madouvalou mentioned - and I
really liked it - the development of our thought, attitude and emotion.
I could say a great deal about what we do, but it is not the time or place to go into
specifics.
I want to make it clear that the twelve thousand children who went to our schools are
now part of these institutions. If we want them to feel included, we must educate them
properly and educate ourselves. So far, we just got them to school. Whether they will be
included or not is, first of all, our issue and then their own.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs) Let us thank Mrs. Aroni for her very
substantial intervention. We will thank you all for your interventions later on.
(AS)
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(PΗ)
Based on our schedule, this would be the time to take a break. I imagine, however,
that there are some questions that we should entertain at this point.
Mrs. Madouvalou has the floor.
SOFIA MANDOUVALOU (Author and Executive of the Educational Television of the
Ministry of Education): I would like to pose a question to Mrs. Gassouka.
You made a brief reference to the phenomenon of femicide. Can you give us a little
more insight into the murders of women and immigrants that were committed in our country?
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs) Mrs. Gassouka, you have the floor.
MARIA GASOUKA (Primary Professor at the University of the Aegean, Faculty of
Humanities, Department of Preschool Education and Educational Planning. Chairwoman of
the Scientific Committee of the Cyprus Gender Equality Observatory, ‘’Greek Society,
Migration and Gender’’): The phenomenon of femicide has to do with the murder of women
on sexist grounds. It does not concern every murder of a woman, but the murders that were
committed because of the victim’s gender.
Internationally, we use the term femicide, which is currently at the top of the agenda
of international organizations such as the United Nations, UNICEF and other organizations. An
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international dialogue has developed, especially with Latin American women, where the
phenomenon is particularly intensified.
I have to tell you that this is a global phenomenon. It is not new. It's ancient. It has
been imprinted even on the traditions describing women built alive within bridges. Besides,
women's genocide in the Middle Ages, dowry murders and honor crimes are known
throughout history. There are so many unbelievable kinds, varieties and forms of femicide
that the UNICEF Office of Research in Florence has not been able to complete recording them
so far. Lately, we have a slight increase of femicide in Europe as well.
In Europe there has been a survey by Eurostat, that, unfortunately, does not provide
any data related to Greece, which shows that twenty countries experience serious numbers
of femicides. These are by every means hate crimes on sexist grounds, exceptionally heinous.
We demand from Justice to call upon them and lay down a legal framework, the way it did
with anti-Semitic and anti-racist crimes and so on.
As far as Greece is concerned, only the past year, we have had eighteen murders of
women on sexist grounds. I will insist. Not every murder of a woman is a femicide.
In this context, there is another term, namely female infanticide, which refers to the
deliberate murder of embryos and neonates - because they are girls - by members of their
family, many times even by female members. And this is still the case today for Chinese
populations and those coming to Europe, but also the case with European countries. And I
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must say that this very phenomenon was even present in Greece until the beginning of the
20th century. Chadoula, Fragogiannou, was real.
Eighteen of these killings were even massive. They were not just individual. I referred
to the three women refugees of Evros. These were others. They were strangers. They were
consumable. The journals ‘’Avgi’’ and ‘’Efimerida ton Sintakton’’ dedicated three and a half
lines and one and a half to their murder respectively. I remind you of the mass murder
committed by the former Prime Minister's guard who killed his mother-in-law, his wife and
his daughter.
Lately we had the murder of Eleni Topaloudi at my university. It was a brutal, sexist,
terrifying murder, to be followed by the assassination of Angeliki in Corfu by her father and
yesterday’s murder of a woman in Crete, Sitia. It is a newly-introduced issue. It is a major
theoretical, research and kinematic issue.
Let me tell you that last night there was an excellent mention of this at the Panteion
University. A tribute to the Vouli Channel will follow. And we as the University of the Aegean
will very soon come and have a direct interest in what has happened.
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs) Thank you, Mrs. Gassouka.
Unfortunately, in fact, the term femicide has entered our vocabulary in the most dramatic
way possible lately.
Is there any other comment or question from anyone else?
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As far as I can see, no.
At this point, we would like to thank you very much. I think it has been a very
productive discussion.
We'll do, I imagine, take a brief break.
MATRONI DIKAIAKOU (Conference Chairperson): We'll take a fifteen minute break
based on our schedule, let's be back at 17.15.
IOANNETA (ANNETA) KAVVADIA (Conference Chairperson and First Vice-President
of the Special Standing Committee for European Affairs) So at 17.15, please everyone be
back.
Thank you.
(TIME OUT)
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(AS)
(AFTER INTERMISSION)
MATRONI DIKEAKOU (Conference Chairperson): We are starting the final part of the
Conference with the fourth and last session, which includes an interesting meeting of
representatives of local authorities, international organizations, the former Minister for
Migration Policy, the man who was in charge of that really challenging ministry, especially at
that time when the refugee exit escalated.
The chairman of the panel is Mr. Antonis Syrigos, President of the Standing Committee
on Public Administration, Public Order and Justice. I give him the floor with great pleasure.
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (President of the Standing Committee on Public
Administration, Public Order and Justice - Conference Chairperson): Thank you very much.
I would also like to thank the organizers for the honor to chair this fourth panel, whose
subject is the implementation of policies and actions for the social inclusion of migrant men
and women.
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I would like to highlight that science meets the parliaments, in particular the Greek
Parliament with today's Conference, and that also, we will share the knowledge, experiences,
thoughts and suggestions of each speaker who will speak from his or her current or previous
position, stemming from the occupation he had with these specific issues, and he or she will
offer us and share with us that experience and his or her thoughts.
So I stop here, and I give the floor to the first speaker who is the former Minister for
Migration Policy. Ioannis Mouzalas. I think that further recommendations are unnecessary.
The subject of his speech is: “Inclusion and economic crisis. Inclusion and the war of
civilizations. The new racism”.
I invite the Minister to the podium.
IOANNIS MOUZALAS: Ladies and gentlemen, I know most of you rom the days we
spent together working on the immigration and the refugee issues.
I believe that one should start today by referring to the far-right and racist crime that
took place in New Zealand, and I will use this opportunity to go further. In New Zealand a far-
right extremist killed Muslims. He left his letter and killed Muslims. We must pay attention to
the following: He did not kill black people, he did not kill brown people, he did not kill yellow
people. He killed Muslims who were part of the New Zealand society. His letter did not include
any christian extreme message. Therefore, this is not a religious war. So, he did not kill them
because he was a fanatical Christian and the Virgin Mary told him to do it anyway.
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I will take this opportunity to tell you that as far as inclusion is concerned, we should
take very seriously a phenomenon, which I wrongly call “culturalism” because this word was
established from other notions, however, for reasons of better understanding, I will use this
word.
I think that in the recent years we live in an era when the form of racism has changed
and if we can not understand this, we will not be able to move on to the inclusion and the
reception. We see a transition from biology to culture.
From 1890 to 1930 - and probably, if Hitler's Holocausts had not taken place, for a
little longer - racism was a biological phenomenon. Black people were inferior because there
was something missing from their DNA. Chinese were stupid and had to be a “coolie” because
his genes had a problem. This was the basis on which racism was developed as a biological
phenomenon. All countries were involved in this. That is, it was developing in Great Britain,
America, Australia, other European countries. It was a scientific issue. It was scientifically
justified until it was rejected, and it was rejected scientifically after World War II.
Since then, racism is being slowly eradicated in its biological form, but this does not
mean that it is not still there; however, this is not the prevailing racist wave any more, and
another type of racism is developed, which is based on the important differences between
cultures.
(AM)
(EP)
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That is, I do not like black people, and I'm against black people or Chinese, or the Chinese are
against white people, because they do not wash their hands. I can not tolerate Afghans
because they do not dance to rock music. I am mentioning innocent things. You can put them
at whatever level you want.
This racism creates some conveniences and some difficulties, and in my view, it is a
covered racism and if we do not name it, if we do not look into it, both us and them will be in
a difficult situation.
The main difficulty is that, contrary to biological racism, which was proven to be an
unscientific theory, an unscientific bias, the arguments of culturalism can be valid because
they are subjective, for example “I like this culture, you like the other culture”. And from there,
we can easily go to Huntington's “War of Cultures”, which, in my view, is a reactionary book
that feeds this culturalism, the new racism; however, through studying it, we can gather
elements to see how we can deal with it.
While biological racism is compact and has been fought, the racism of culture is fluid.
Some of its elements are valid, some are not, I like some of them and I do not like others,
some elements are part of the rule of law, and others go beyond the rule of law.
Therefore, our struggle against this racism must be much stronger than against the
previous one, because this racism is much more insidious than the former, and can thus circle
different good people who do not understand that this perception of theirs constitutes racism,
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therefore they deny that they are racists, because they tell the truth when they say that they
do not identify themselves in this term.
Therefore, we must take this very seriously in our efforts for inclusion. I guess you
have already said it. There is no point in telling how serious it is, how important condition is
to have a proper inclusion, although what is “right” and all that remains undefined.
This becomes even more difficult if one takes into account three new things. The first
is the new racism. I explained it before. The second is the incredibly big flow of the migratory
and refugee wave. We have discussed them. This flow was the biggest after World War II and
all that. The third issue is inconspicuous, due to the culture, between inclusion and
assimilation.
And it is clear that no treaty, no non-racist person, no progressive person speaks of
assimilation but they speak of inclusion instead. However, it is too difficult to tell these things
apart. It is too difficult for the migrant, the refugee and yourself all at once to understand
when what you ask from them is assimilation, which they have no reason to do, and when
what you aim for is inclusion, which is good for them to do.
We thus have a field that moves, it is a moving sand, and we have to step into it. This,
in my opinion, will take a long time to be theoretically investigated further.
I forgot to say that in the previous wave, besides being the largest refugee and
migratory wave, it was entirely of a different culture. It was not like after World War II, when
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there was a huge, purely refugee wave though of roughly similar cultures. Therefore I am
placing this among the difficulties.
There are many practical things that one can do. It is pointless. I will bring you a few
examples. I will tell you a few things.
Considering that I believe that the biggest obstacle we and these people have to face
is racism based on cultural difference, I believe that a very basic key, which for economic
reasons, but not exclusively, has been underestimated both in Europe as a whole and here as
well, is social mediators, who, however, are scientists fulfilling their role. In Greece we did not
have any. Also, people who worked as social mediators were simply a little better than others
who had nothing to do with it, either because they wanted it or because they had done some
short courses, and they were too few.
We did an experiment out of which we produced very positive results in relation to
pregnancy in either refugee or migrant women. And in this experiment we hired a large
number of midwives or obstetricians, depending on the area, out of those same people, whom
we managed to include in employment. When I say a large number, we are talking about an
experimental stage. The vision that we realized we now seek to spread across Greece, because
we found that the main problem of these women was not to give birth -they knew to do that-
but to accept the western mode of medical practice. It was for them to accept a different
culture in childbirth, to be able to integrate at that level. Now take this and apply it at all levels.
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I also want to tell you that inclusion starts with very simple and practical things. That
is, leaving the jungle of Idomeni or Calais and entering the tent is a step towards inclusion.
Getting out of the tent and entering the container is another step towards inclusion. From the
container to the apartment is a huge step towards inclusion.
Practically we did that. Others might say faster, slower. I have an insider’s view. I think
that we did it too fast compared to the circumstances.
To that, we also added other inclusion steps. What are those? Apartments, vaccines
to children, schools, kindergartens. This effort continues. What problem was created?
I want to tell you that I am not trying to attribute any responsibility, to accept any
responsibility or to blame or anything of the sort. I am trying as objectively as possible,
although, as you understand, there is a lot of subjectivity to what I am saying because I was
one of those who created it.
An enormous difficulty is that you have to proceed with the inclusion, while the
reception continues. This is something that has never been done in our country.
I remember that I had happened to be in a couple of missions with Guterres. We had
an acquaintance. In 2015 we made the program for the apartments. Philip is here. His
contribution was enormous. So in 2015, we had money, but we could not find any apartments.
It took us a couple of years to find them, because Greeks would not offer them. They were
slowly persuaded and offered them. I participated in a round table in New York with Guterres,
and there Guterres analyzed the new line of UNHCR. I am talking about the beginning of 2016,
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I think, and he was saying that it is the duty of the countries, along with the reception, to
proceed with the inclusion.
(PM)
(AM)
This is too difficult, but it is quite right. We did not do well in this thing. There are
many reasons. I think that it was not due to a lack of will. It was a matter of possibilities, it was
bureaucracy, it was several such things, but that matters little.
So we had made three programs. They did not go through. We then said this: There
was a strange inclusion going on in Greece, that is, a scheme was made which was funded so
that sixty-three Afghani women learn hairdressing, another scheme that was funded so that
seventeen from Pakistan and twenty from Nigeria learn another trade.
Here we had one hundred thousand people. We decided, therefore, to make three
programs to cover the greatest number. We reckoned that we would cover about sixty
thousand people. The first program was language, IT and English, in collaboration with
universities at a pan-Hellenic level, that is not with the logic of e.g. a private tutorial or a
vocational training institute [IEK] in the municipality of Egaleo or something. Another question
is why it has been happening all these years.
You can not make a scheme for one hundred people when you have sixty thousand,
nor can you make six thousand schemes for one hundred people. That was the first program.
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We made contacts with universities. Daniel and Philip remember that we even announced the
program.
We have not made very good progress in this and having an insider’s view, I am
convinced that it is not a matter of will, but it is weakness, it is bureaucracy, it is things like
that.
The second program, which -as far as I hear- is running well, was to give TINs and
Social Security Numbers [AMKA] to all. This I think is in progress, though not over yet.
The third program, which was not carried forward, was to start finding work to people.
We then had a meeting with the Ministry of Rural Development and we saw that we have
about eight thousand foreigners a year, who come to Greece to harvest the kiwis. They go and
another eight thousand come to harvest the oranges. They go and others come for the
peaches.
We, therefore, made an effort to organize this through the existing migration, without
having to call new ones, to call people from other countries to help us. I left and this program
had not succeeded yet. We were not able to implement it. Again we had difficulties, etc. I
honestly do not know now whether now it progressed or not.
By that I mean to say that the programs that one will make for the inclusion in this
phase that we are going through, and while the reception continues, must be bold programs
and must be properly and boldly funded because inclusion now is exactly the “button” to
enable us to deal with both culturalism and this new racism, but also the very large number
of people who come to Europe and go through Greece.
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As you know, I have a clear position that there must be legal routes for refugee flow
and that the flow of sans papiers, the flow of economic migrants must be controlled. This is
sometimes confused with the fact that it should be small.
For example, the proposals I had formed in the European Union referred to 200,000
legal transfers of refugees and migrants a year, for openings of this size of routes, referred to
permissions been provided by embassies, so that they do not follow the paths to smugglers
and to those who exploit them and lead them to death in the Aegean or the Mediterranean.
That did not happen. It must be done.
There is a huge issue for Europe. I will conclude with this. It must bravely proceed with
the inclusion for humanitarian reasons, but the migration and refugee issue is not only a
humanitarian issue. It will only benefit from it. Studies say that Europe, which is aging, by 2080
will be in need of fifty to sixty million migrants or refugees. Of course, it does make efforts to
bring them by creating wars, coupes, but this is not what I am referring to. I am referring to
legal routes for these people to come here. They must be included.
Culturalism is a bigger obstacle than biological racism. I am not saying this meaning
that we should submit to that. I am saying this so that we see exactly what we are really
fighting for, because you may call Kostas an idiot when he says “look here, this one’s DNA has
something missing” but you can not call him an idiot when he tells you “well man, I do not like
him because he does not wash, I do not like that he goes in front and his wife follows” or even
the opposite, because he does not like us either.
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Therefore inclusion is a very important thing. It can only be connected to reception. It
requires a great effort. I hope that other proposals will be heard as well, but the problem is
not the proposals. The problem is their implementation. I believe that we had sound
proposals. We implemented at a small level. That massive vision we were not able to realize.
I hope that subsequently we will.
How is inclusion also connected with reception? Do not expect any inclusion with one
million arrivals. Do not expect any inclusion with ten thousand new arrivals each month. All
that will be set back. This needs a regulation. It is a very difficult thing.
Let me tell you something that might seem pessimistic to you, but it is mathematics:
Full inclusion takes three generations to be achieved, therefore we are always talking about
the most meaningful and faster steps to inclusion possible until the full inclusion that takes
three generations. But look at New Zealand. It was five generations. For some, they remained
foreigners.
Thank you.
(Applause)
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (Chairing the Conference - Chairperson of the Standing
Committee on Public Administration, Public Order and Justice): We, too, thank the Minister.
I retain two points. He will forgive me that. The first one is that we have a variant-
mutation of racism from racial-biological to cultural racism, with the main feature being its
ability to disguise itself. The second one is that Europe must bravely proceed with the
inclusion.
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I now give the floor to the next speaker, Mr. Christos Kapatais, who is Deputy Head of
the Region of the Southern Division of Athens, and is representing the Head of the Region of
Attica, Mrs. Rena Dourou. He is an economist with a specialization in business organization
and administration. During the period of 2011-2014 he was Regional Councilor in the Region
of Attica. His topic is: “Local Authorities and policies for the social integration and inclusion of
migrants in Greece”.
Mr. Kapatais, you have the floor.
CHRISTOS KAPATAIS (Region of Attica - Deputy Head of the Region of the Southern
Division of Athens): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dear Sirs and Madams honored guests, migration as an actual fact in both its
traditional and its contemporary form, whether temporary or permanent, group or individual,
irregular or regular, is an integral part of the Greek, European, and world history as well.
(SS)
(PM)
I think that the work of the central or the local authorities has to do with the intensity
of migratory flows and with events such as the ones that we have experienced from 2015
onwards. That is essentially, at least for the local administration, -within quotation marks- it
was “forced” to take some steps.
For our country, the decade of 1990 was decisive, when there were very large flows
from the neighboring countries, the Balkans for the most part and the former Soviet Union. I
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think it was then the beginning that reversed the “migration model” -within quotation marks-
for Greece as well.
For many decades the migrants were Greek citizens, who were leaving in different
directions. And the big change, of course, the substantial change in both the mentality and us
beginning to understand what is happening was the great flows from the beginning of 2015
onwards. And then, of course, it was the overwhelming majority of some people, our fellow
humans who sought international protection, coming from areas of conflict. And a very
important feature of those flows was that most of them considered Greece as a corridor, with
the purpose of course to go to the countries of Central and Northern Europe.
Thus from the beginning of 2015, the first formal or informal hospitality
infrastructures for Attica are created. In the rest of the country of course -although you will
allow me, as Deputy Head of the Region of Attica, to talk more about Attica, where we have
more experience in this- initially these informal or formal infrastructures could only provide
the very most basic services.
Here I would like to say that was the time when the previous speaker, Mr. Mouzalas,
was essentially trying to set up a Ministry, because we all remember that until then there was
nothing. Those were the first steps, the very difficult steps which, as we experienced, of
necessity, I can tell you that they were extremely difficult, painful and in some cases the
impossible became possible.
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Later, of course, these infrastructures, both informal and formal, began to improve.
And I think that this is due to the great contribution of people from the Local Authorities as
well as people who are much more specialized than us, from International Organizations etc.
That was also the time of the involvement of the local community, namely the small
society that saw -possibly for the first time- massive flows of refugees. In small municipalities
-a typical example is the Municipality of Agios Dimitrios, Brahami, which saw -possibly for the
first time since decades- refugees and migrants.
Thus, talking about the Local Authorities, the first thing that comes to my mind and
what made us a great impression at that time was the fact that the framework law governing
the Local Authorities had not then had any provision based on which the Local Authorities
could have done even the most basics, even at the reception stage.
As for the inclusion stage of course, that was out of the question during that period.
All municipalities and Regions were absolutely unprepared, without infrastructures, without
resources and, of course, without a framework. And I think something similar happened to
the other levels of administration in our country as well as in several countries in Europe.
A number of legislative interventions took place in order for the Local Authorities to
respond to the most elementary obligations, in between other laws and with great efforts by
the then-established Ministry of Migration Policy and other Ministries. In this context, the
Region of Attica initially contributed to the creation of these formal or informal
infrastructures, contributed to their operation, their equipment, even in the early days to
matters such as catering etc.
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It also operated at a supportive level later on, with the typical example of the Center
for the Management, Storage and Supply of Emergency Supplies at the residence locations of
refugees. The Logistics Center of the Region of Attica, while it was established to assist the
Attica infrastructures, was “forced” -within quotation marks- to intervene in forty one
Refugee Hospitality Centers throughout the country, always in cooperation with both the
Ministry of Migration and the Ministry of National Defense, but also with the municipalities
and with Organizations that were active in those infrastructures.
And this Center of the Region is a typical case of collaboration of many bodies having
similar or the same subject matters. This above practice was adopted and recognized as good
practice by the Congress of Local Regional Authorities of the European Council.
Today, we are at another level and it is fortunately that we are at another level. The
discussion has gone into what we call integration and inclusion policies. And, as we all
perceive, the role of the Local Authorities, the Municipalities and the Regions is decisive in this
process. Inclusion is an integral part of the everyday life of the local community, and both
policies and actions can only be in harmony with it.
Local communities, Municipalities more so because of their subject matter and
Regions less, already have a structured cluster of social structures for service provision. Local
authorities are de facto better acquainted with the living conditions of migrants in their area.
Here we have to look at the different levels of Municipalities as well as Regions,
especially the financial ones, as well as at the big differences among Municipalities in terms
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of populations, unemployment rates, local development etc. I think that is one of the points
that need particular analysis at a local level.
We have not yet entered into the discussion on the positive results that such a process
could possibly bring for the local community.
(AG)
(SS)
The fact is that Local Authorities Organization in the past eight, nine years, have all
suffered a huge reduction in resources, reaching 67%. This underfunding is a serious inhibiting
factor in any inclusion policies that might be chosen whatsoever. Therefore, it is necessary to
provide all the necessary tools which will make feasible the policy for the inclusion of migrants.
The first change in the framework law governing municipalities and communities,
“KLEISTHENES I”, unfortunately did not make it possible to incorporate the necessary changes
that could help us, which had been identified since 2015, thus creating a huge problem in us
being able to basically do the essentials.
However, we rest assured that the existing legal framework will soon be harmonized
in order to facilitate local authorities in this field. The Coordination Centers for Migrant and
Refugee issues, in short CCMRs, as well as the Community Centers of various Municipalities
are excellent examples of up and running initiatives.
The above operate by bringing together the central government, the Municipalities
and Regions. Fifty five Community Centers and four Coordination Centers for Migrant and
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Refugee issues operate in the Attica Region as of today, two of which are located in the
Municipality of Athens, the other in Piraeus and another one in Kallithea. All are funded by
the ‘’Attica’’ Regional Operational Program.
CCMRs operate essentially in the large municipalities of Attica and have very targeted
objective. In the smaller municipalities, where there are no CCMRs, Community Center of each
Municipality is legally obligated to take up this role. Essentially, we have one-stop-shop at
migrants’ disposal as well.
These points also act as reference points that could serve as drivers for the reception
and inclusion of migrants. They could also provide support as well as interconnection with
already running programs either by the central government, local authorities or by other
organizations.
Another point, which needs to be debated upon is the reason why Migrant Inclusion
Councils, which have been institutionalized since 2010, did or did not work. It is a local body
whose role, among other things, is to propose and come up with local inclusion action plans.
I repeat that, unfortunately for many reasons, these councils, in which immigrants should have
been involved, did not successfully operate. These councils are scarce and I think it is up to
local communities to get them to operate once again since they are deemed imperative.
It goes without saying that the local authorities need to be actively involved in this
inclusion process and that integration and inclusion policies for migrants progress at different
paces. Unfortunately, today local authorities fall short of meeting these expectations. I think
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we have a long way to go. Issues such as housing, education, employment, bureaucratic
procedures, issuance of legal documents, etc. are key issues remaining to be resolved.
Concluding, I would like to make a brief reference to the bigger picture, the events
that we have seen taking place today in a country where we least expected to, but also a
reference to our common European family.
We are saddened by seeing that some of our fellow Europeans are positively inclined
towards a xenophobic and racist mentality. I think there is no choice but to take responsibility
and action at multiple levels, local, national and European. We have no choice but to
rationalize the issue of immigration and refugee crisis. We have no choice but to take action
while respecting human rights.
Regardless of the objective difficulties that the local authorities are faced with, I am
convinced and I hope that this institution will soon be able to respond to the great challenges.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (Conference Chairperson - Chairperson of the Standing
Committee on Public Administration, Public Order and Justice): Thank you, too, Mr. Kapatai,
who is representing the Attica Region.
I have come to two optimistic conclusions. The first one is that, even from the very
beginning, thanks to the cooperation with the local authorities the impossible was rendered
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possible and the second conclusion is that we are now in a position, regardless of any
problems, to discuss integration and inclusion policies.
Our third speaker is the Vice - Mayor of Immigrants and Refugees of the City of Athens,
Mr. Lefteris Papayannakis, responsible for exercising the municipality's competence regarding
immigrants and refugees. It is noted that from February 2018 until the end of August 2019 he
will be also responsible for the Department for Support and Social Inclusion of Immigrants and
Refugees of the Directorate of Social Solidarity and Health. His intervention refers to the role
of local authorities and the implementation of social inclusion policies.
Please, you have the floor.
LEFTERIS PAPAGIANNAKIS (Municipality of Athens, Vice - Mayor of Immigrants and
Refugees and Municipal Decentralization): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to thank the organizers for the invitation.
Allow me to begin with some observations in relation to what has been heard,
because some things should be highlighted.
The Migrant Inclusion Councils did not operate successfully because they were part
of a process that unfortunately, due to unforeseen reasons, could not be completed. They
were meant to be part of the journey of a person who wanted to have access to nationality
and citizenship as part of civic engagement. When the Council of State declared the law
unconstitutional, Migrant Inclusion Councils were rendered ineffective and immigrants
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themselves wondered, "Why do we even bother coming, when they provide us nothing." It
took us a good deal of time to convince them that this is a useful step, whether or not
compulsory, that it is a reference framework which may be proved useful in their attempt to
be visible or a communication channel that can help them convey their views.
The new law helps. The process has started over. Nevertheless, the Inclusion Councils
have no legal personality, no budget, no staff. Support depends on the department. And of
course, to tell you the truth, there are no active councils, beyond five or six, in any
municipality. I know that there are in Athens, Thessaloniki, Agios Dimitrios, Ilioupoli, Zografou
and maybe one in Crete and I also know that they want one in Chania while they are thinking
about having a Council in Heraklion. The Councils are not enough and obviously these are not
the only municipalities with immigrants and refugees. This is one observation.
I do not want to repeat what has already been said about CCMRs. I just want to say
that CCMRs are a very useful tool, but unfortunately they are equally insufficient in number.
(SO)
(AG)
There were municipalities that should have them and they do not, because they failed
to ask for them, take Giannena and many other municipalities as an example. In my opinion
every municipality should be obliged to have CCMRs. The process should be different so as to
show its importance for the municipalities. Of course, there is a lot of work to be done, and
that's not a problem. But the fact that CCMRs are useful is out of the question.
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Local authorities, in order to implement what we are discussing - and forgive me, but
I was not present from the beginning of the Conference, so I do not know what has already
been mentioned - needs support and guidance, meaning political decisions, budget, staff and
of course the necessary experience, which we do not have right now.
I guess it has already been noted from other speakers, that the country was
unprepared and had to manage a very difficult reality, but, nevertheless, there were
municipalities who did things before they were even asked to do so.
And since I speak on behalf of the Mayor of Athens, Athens was alone when this
difficult reality took shape. I remind you that the Eleonas accommodation facilities began in
August 2015 and were built within fifteen days in August, as paradoxical as it may sound to
the Public Administration. Within fifteen days in the summer an accommodation facility was
built hosting seven hundred people at the time! Now it hosts one thousand and six hundred
people.
I will now make a couple of general comments to see where we stand.
The phenomenon of immigration is not new to the country. 22% of the inhabitants of
Athens have an immigrant background. So it is not a never seen before phenomenon. This is
not the first time we are coming face to face with immigrants. Let’s not get crazy. According
to the 2011 inventory the percentage reaches 22%. We will see in 2021 what the Hellenic
Statistical Authority will have to say. But that is the reality.
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I remind you that we all use the Albanians as an excellent inclusion example, who
made it on their own, without any help and without any support. Nobody said anything to
them. They made it on their own. These were different times. There were jobs, etc. before
the Olympics and all that. And now most of them are now going back leaving their children
behind. That is their second expatriation. They came as children, gave birth and now they are
leaving their own children here and go back as parents. We can only imagine how traumatic
this process can be. And of course, what do we expect them to do when we do not offer them
a complete way of life, a completed journey?
You know very well that the inclusion process, if you break it down in pieces, is not
connected, the wagons on the train are not joined, some basic things are missing or there is
no understanding of the singularity of the process. And at the end of this process, we tell
people "join us, we want you" - of course, not too much, but we try anyway - we are telling
them that we will do so with the Ministry of Migration and suddenly when the hour to get
what they are waiting for comes, which is no other than get recognized as Greek citizens, we
tell them "now you will go to another ministry and it will be police procedure". That is to say,
the procedure is not uniform, complete. We tell them that the will join the Ministry of
Migration, language etc. and then in the end, we will go to the Ministry of Interior and we will
ask you who Justinian was. Ok, neither do I know! So there is a problem there.
I know that the three hundred questions have changed and that they will be more
modern and correspond to a more reasonable reality, but anyway, so far, it takes over twenty
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years to become a first-generation Greek. It is not solely Greece’s problem, since it is a
nationalist approach on how citizenship is granted across Europe - we are not alone - but we
are also particularly tough.
Now things have improved a lot, although we do not assist the process
administratively. And if you talk to those working at the Directorates of Immigration - who are
fewer and even the remaining ones want to leave - they will explain to you that the existing
delays are very reasonable. Why? Because there is - I will say it - a political will to facilitate the
process.
Already because of the elections, as you know, we are talking about naturalizations in
Greece and this also constitutes a major political argument. The parties are using it. I imagine
you hear them here, too, in the Greek Parliament. Without saying that we did not do so before
and, thus, the numbers are great, at least now we are somehow doing it, even fundamentally.
The previous governments did not so before for a variety of reasons. Now that we somehow
handled it better, we can get a more clear picture of the numbers. Oh, suddenly the
government is doing naturalizations in order to vote and to hurt the electoral rolls! Okay, you
will allow me - of course this is my personal opinion and no one is required to stand by it, but
I think these are exaggerations that only manage to spoil and intoxicate the discussion.
Have I already mentioned what we have done besides the Elaionas facilities? Soon
enough we found out that there were many organizations active in Athens dealing mainly with
issue of refugees. All of this happened in response to the refugee crisis. And we also said that
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we would like to have a picture and a perspective of what is going on, not with a view to
influence it, because we do not have the competence to do so, but somehow to coordinate it
and know a little bit about it.
Because, as you know, Athens at the moment - and I am talking about the City of
Athens, not about the Region, because as my colleagues know very well, we usually talk about
Athens but everyone has Attica in their minds - does not have four million residents, but six
hundred and sixty-five thousand. The Municipality of Athens hosts about 30% of the refugees
that are in the country at the moment. Analogically speaking, this is too much. This is not a
large number and I do not grumble about the number, but about the ratio.
I have already mentioned that we should somehow have a perspective of what is
going on with these organizations that are actively involved in the City of Athens. So, with
private funding - a donation - we have set up a Coordination Center for Migrants and Refugee
issues, currently gathering over ninety-five organizations, from the UNHCR, IOM, Ministries to
small NGOs that have been recently established. And, of course, the center is open to anyone
who thinks that the Municipality can help him/her and vice versa.
Then, through this Network, we built a local strategic inclusion plan, which was voted
upon by the City Council two weeks ago. Essentially, this is an emergency plan in case of a
possible increase in refugee flows. The situation is different now from what it was in 2016 - I
remind you the situation in Victoria Square, Pedion Areos and in the streets - when we hardly
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knew who did what, but now we are far better since we somehow co-ordinated with the
Ministry and the services of the Municipality.
As you know, because the municipalities have never dealt with similar issues in the
past, making the decision that we will start handling immigration and refugee issues at a
bureaucracy and administration level was something that required pressure. And we have
been greatly assisted from the international organizations which helped and educated us and
that cleared the air and deepened the understanding of these issues.
The Department for Support and Social Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees, which has
already been mentioned by the Chairman, is the first one to be established, I think within a
Greek municipality, and now Thessaloniki has done it, and we try to consult with other
municipalities to create similar departments. Because it is very important at an administrative
and institutional level for people to hear that the words “immigrant” and “refugee” are part
of the policies of the local authorities.
We are not the competent authorities, we have a general responsibility for inclusion
but we do not have the political responsibility and -I don’t know how to call it- the every day
responsibility to make this subject heard. And in this context I would like to say that, in
cooperation with agencies, we provided interpretation in the services of the Municipality.
That was unprecedented.
If you talk to colleagues in the Civil Registrar - as the Athens Civil Registrar, which is
the largest registrar as you know, is in my jurisdiction - they will tell you that due to the fact
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that too many parents go to register their children and declare their names, we had too much
trouble with the transfer of names. So we placed an interpreter who helped a lot. We also put
an interpreter to other services, to some Citizens’ Service Centers, etc. This changed the
atmosphere a bit, because it helped to understand each other and to understand that these
people are not from another planet, they simply speak another language and have some other
needs, maybe more than that we have, and that it is helpful to help them.
The next thing we did was that we greatly strengthened our social services. As you
know, the social service of the Municipality of Athens is too big, it has social clinics, hostels,
social workers that are not enough, but in the end we have slightly strengthened their number
and we also put the immigrants and refugees in our municipal clinics , which are now also
called Multipurpose Centers and also offer social services.
Finally, at national level, along with Thessaloniki, we have taken an initiative and
created a network called the Network for Inclusion, which includes thirteen municipalities at
the moment, that are not only the municipalities that offer housing, the UNHCR, but also some
other municipalities that have a special interest.
I will tell you that the last member, which is very symbolic, is the Municipality of Tilos.
The Municipality of Tilos has a very small program compared to the rest, but big for Tilos as it
is a small island. This is a very successful program for housing, inclusion, etc. and for us it was
very critical for Tilos to be a member of the network. And we are trying to give this network a
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more formal character to convince other municipalities to come, explaining that this is the
future for Local Authorities, that this is one of the things that they will deal with.
I will not come back to CCMRs and the Migrant Inclusion Councils mentioned, but they
are very useful tools and valuable to us, and, of course, we connect them to each other.
Because we are talking about inclusion, but we are talking about inclusion at two levels:
inclusion for the refugees who came after 2015, but also inclusion of people who have been
here for many years. The first communities in Athens were created in the 1970s and maybe
even before that. One of the oldest communities is the Philippine one since the mid-1970s.
(DE)
(SO)
Now we have too many organized Communities with statutes, with Administrative
Councils, which have developed a plethora of actions and are taking too many initiatives not
only at cultural level - because that is the main one - but they are now taking initiatives of a
more political character , if I'm allowed to say so, because many of their members become
Greek citizens, and there are different needs and different requirements. So, the Communities
must adapt to a new reality.
This is what we did and we are trying to develop and persuade other municipalities to
do so, and we also provide know-how to other municipalities through the Coordination Center
because there is a technical team that has traveled to several of the municipalities mentioned
and made exchanges, and according to the needs of the municipalities, we offer them our
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own know-how. With the help, of course, at this moment of IOM, the International
Organization for Migration, and UNICEF and the UNHCR, we have officers who have set up a
joint team for capacity building, as we call it.
What is missing? On the occasion of the last procedure that the Ministry has begun,
which is the departure of the people from the apartments, you have heard a great deal on
that topic and I do not want to come back to it because there are other aspects that it is not
appropriate to discuss at this time, social housing is missing. That is, we have taken the first
step, which is the reception, we have taken the second step, which is the temporary
accommodation of asylum seekers and now the third step, which is the social housing for
recognized refugees, is missing.
Social housing, of course, is also missing for Greek homeless people. It is a wider
framework that aims to ensure also social cohesion, and protecting social cohesion is the key
role of municipalities. This is really missing a lot. It is one thing in which I think in general, as a
state, we are late and I do not know at which level we are now.
Because I have to tell you - and here is, if you allow me, a point - that all the discussions
you may have heard from ministry officials or MPs or government representatives, all these
discussions on the National Strategic Plan, the role of Local Authorities, etc., etc., all this has
been done without discussing with the Local Authorities. So, Local Authorities are mentioned
and - believe me - at no level no municipality has participated in any process. When the
National Strategy was being written, we did not participate in the writing. We took it when it
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was ready and we had to make comments. You know very well that this National Strategy took
a while to pass through all the competent Ministries - to “pass”, be read, have changes - and
then be published. Do you now think that the municipalities will propose changes and all this
process will start again? We will never finish. So, the initial involvement is missing.
Also, the municipalities have not been involved at any level of discussion before,
during the temporary reception or in the discussions with the European partners. I have been
to Brussels several times and I have said to the Commission: “Who are you discussing with?”
They tell me: “With the Government”. I tell them: “With us? Because you ask us to do things.”
This is a very important point and please allow me to make a small parenthesis: we,
the municipalities, are called to manage the results of the policies implemented by the states
and the European Union. That is, when someone is trapped on an island and comes to Athens,
for whatever issues he has or already had - because too many people get problems because
of the entrapment, pressure, etc. etc. - we tell the municipalities “now you manage it”. So, it
is a self-fulfilling prophecy, we say that we will create poor reception conditions so that they
do not come, but if they come, if something bad happens, we will handle it. We have to invest
much more after the fact, than to invest in prevention. You understand that it's like the
hamster on the wheel that turns around but remains at the same point, and this story never
ends.
Therefore, I think, that the perspective and - how to say - the way we see things is
totally wrong. It has to change altogether not on the part of the municipalities or the country,
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but I mean globally. The management is not right. It only reproduces problems. It reproduces
contiguous problems over and over again.
And on the occasion of New Zealand, when we say that people are bad and become
bad, we say “Oh, I told you that they are bad”. Guys, they did not become bad by themselves.
The hatred that exists against Muslims right now did not happen overnight. There is a
narrative that had been being built slowly and in the end we have what se saw. We are very
lucky in Greece that we have not had such an event.
There are very unpleasant events that have happened and I do not want to
underestimate their significance. But think about an event that will have the size of the attack
in Barcelona, for example. In Barcelona the following day, three hundred thousand people
took to the streets and said “we are not afraid and we are with the refugees.” No one said to
persecute the Muslims. Imagine this happening in Athens. I'm not very optimistic that three
hundred thousand would take to the streets Probably the opposite. And we have the example.
So, social housing is missing. Let me remind you that Amsterdam is building several
thousand units per year, that is, apartments, and offers social housing, and yet the waiting
period is seven years for the Dutch and there is no one dissatisfied and there are two thousand
refugees a year entering this process. Still, Amsterdam - and this is a political comment - has
a more leftist municipal authority than the previous one, which was already quite leftist. Now
it is even more leftist, because people feel safe with these policies and they understand and
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are fully informed. I say so due to the outcome of the elections. We will see later how it will
evolve.
I would expect from the Regional Municipalities' Unions and from the Central Union
of the Municipalities of Greece (KEDE), our trade union body, to do much more. Unfortunately,
I think that the Unions of Municipalities and the Regions did not do enough. From a political
point of view, we have far too little to show.
I remember a conference of KEDE in Samos in 2015 and two meetings of the Mayor
of Athens with the President of KEDE and the Minister at the time, for the creation of a
Committee, etc., which was never repeated.
I know that migration is a very difficult issue. Dealing with people usually bears a
political cost. I understand this and, of course, this period with the election campaign is the
worst possible to talk about these issues, but unfortunately - for those who believe that
“unfortunately” - it is not an issue that will end in a year, or two or five.
This is the new reality and we should all go ahead, demand much more. CLEISTHENES
was indeed a great opportunity which I do not think we missed because we were too late. I
think we missed it because we didn’t go after it. Mayors and regional authorities did not ask
for it. They did not come forward. They did not want it. That's what I am saying, obviously.
They did not step forward to demand it, because it is a competence that we must take. We
shouldn’t wait for them to give it to us. We need to ask for it, demand it along with staff,
budget, etc. Apparently.
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I'll conclude with a funny story. Some time ago, representatives from Seoul, South
Korea came here. A large delegation of twenty people came to see how we are temporarily
housing refugees in Athens. I did not understand why they came and after an hour of talk, the
head of the delegation told me: "You know, one morning the country woke up and it had a
hundred and fifty people from Yemen waiting on its border."
I laughed. It was not really polite of me to laugh. I told him: "One hundred fifty, yes.
And?”. I think South Korea is world's fifth largest economy. South Korea ceased to operate for
one hundred and fifty people who came from Yemen.
The first question was how they came. I asked: "How did these people make it to
South Korea?" We can find it. I think it was by plane through Indonesia. Only two flights away
and there they were.
The second is what we will do. I told them: "Welcome to the future. We would be
delighted to provide you with all the help you may need. The housing team is here. You can
take it on the plane with you. It will take them three months to help you out." I explained to
them that this is the future. People will immigrate and will always find ways to move around.
Allow me to conclude by saying that human mobility, as we call it, is part of human
history. It is human history, it is a human right - dragging the conversation a little - and we can
not treat it as a problem. Because when we act like it’s a problem, people will immediately
search for the solution to it. There is no solution.
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If you think that the solution would be to close our borders etc., practice shows that
deterrence does not work and never works in any case. Deterrence does not work - we have
seen it, we have observed it - not only now, but a few years ago, when we had done worse
things perhaps.
This is not the way to deal with human mobility. There is a lot to take into
consideration. Unfortunately, there is no time to talk about it. But I'm sure that what we are
doing right now is not working.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (Conference Chairperson - President of the Standing
Committee on Public Administration, Public Order and Justice): Thank you too, Mr.
Papayannakis.
The bottom line of his intervention is that the inclusion of refugees and immigrants
must enrich and become part of what we call a local affair. I think this is the kind of
administration he is looking for. Thankfully, this is the will of the local authorities. I also hold
on to his observation that in order to get to what we call ‘’integration’’ we are in absolute
need of an organized action plan.
Therefore, thank you, Mr. Papayannakis.
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We will now give floor to the Special Envoy of the Director General of IOM to the
Government of Greece and Advisor of the Regional Director in matters concerning the
Mediterranean area, Mr. Daniel Esdras. The issue he will address is "European Asylum and
Single Migration Policy, Utopia or Future Reality".
(AD)
(DE)
Forgive me, if I briefly go over his resume because I think it is necessary for us to have
a better insight into your experience as well.
Mr. Esdras has been working in the International Organization for Migration since
1987. He served as Chief of IOM Greece from 1998 to November 2017, when he undertook
his current duties. Under the presidency of Mr. Esdras IOM Greece took leading humanitarian
action in 2015 through the implementation of projects across the country. These projects are
still running today.
Up to 2012 he was the Head of IOM Cyprus. Since 2007 he has been a regular member
of the Special Preparatory Committee for Combating Human Trafficking, set up by the Ministry
of Justice, tasked with proposing legislative amendments with the aim to improve the
assistance provided to the victims of human trafficking.
He is also actively involved in parliamentary proceedings in the Subcommittee for
combating human trafficking and exploitation.
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From 1987 up to 1998, he was Head of Operations in IOM Greece and he has a vast
international expertise on refugee issues commencing on the event of the war in Yugoslavia.
You will forgive me for having trouble with my enunciation before.
Mr. Esdras, you have the floor and I apologize for the delay, but it is due to your
remarkable experience.
Thank you very much.
DANIEL ESDRAS (International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Greece, Special
Envoy of the Director General of IOM to the Government of Greece and Advisor of the
Regional Director in matters concerning the Mediterranean area): Thank you very much.
Probably all this was needed because I am not as known as the previous speakers,
the Minister, the Vice - Mayor and the Deputy Head of the Region of the Southern Division of
Athens. Nevertheless, I thank you very much for the invitation.
The story on inclusion is a very big talk. We are talking about integration, inclusion,
assimilation, call it however you want to. All these years I've been working on the
Organization, we've seen a number of models, such as America's so-called "melting pot"
where everybody comes together in a ‘’pot’’ and emerges as an American, or the Canadian
model named the "multicultural model", where everyone kept his/her cultural identity being,
of course, a Canadian citizen at the same time.
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In any case, we have seen too many models, such as the model of European states
with foreign workers, the problems arising from colonization, the people who went to France,
if you remember, when Sarkozy was Minister of Interior at the time, and third generation, not
even second, immigrants took part into the first major street protests. I think they were third
generation immigrants. Therefore, what the Minister said earlier, that it takes three
generations to achieve full inclusion, is not either the case. It depends on the inclusion. It
depends on how much does the child who is not only a first, but also second and third,
generation immigrant and who was born in that environment, feels an integrated part of that
country. It depends on how he/she grew up, how he/she feels, and whether he/she considers
himself/herself an equal citizen. That was the case in France then, and I think it should have
troubled us all.
What are we doing in this case? First of all, in addition to the large migratory flows
from 2015 and onwards, do not forget that for twenty years we have had a very large increase
in immigrants without any legal documents. There were also several refugees coming from
states with a certain refugee profile, mainly from the Middle East, as well as from Africa, and
many others who did not belong to this category.
What's the big difference? I remember at one point that there was a debate about
the sixty thousand people who eventually stayed here when the borders were closed, when
European Union and Turkey issued a joint statement and the huge numbers declined.
Suddenly there was a great debate about how all these people - sixty thousand people - which
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were considered a big burden on the country - could be integrated. So, a journalist asks me,
"Well, here in Greece, a few years ago you had half a million foreigners and now suddenly
sixty thousand are the problem?"
Yes, but the fundamental difference was that this half a million were people who, as
Yannis Mouzallas rightly said, if I am not mistaken, made it on their own. In fact, no substantial
step was taken. First of all, most of them did not have legal documents, so they could not get
into a project. You know, European projects are quite specific. You can not include someone
with no legal documents in a European program.
Then, these people, due to the fact that they did not have papers, they kept a very
low profile, they were working with a few money and sometimes without money because the
employers deposited the money later, so, as a result, these people did not create any burden
at all. Instead, they offered a lot to the Greek economy, which we have all experienced and
seen how it is.
However, for the sixty thousand who remained here after the war in Syria in 2015,
there was a need for housing, food and, in general, someone, that is the state, should have
arranged the accommodation of these people. We were talking about hospitality that did not
exist for the five hundred thousand mentioned by the journalist in the previous years.
I say this to make things clear. Therefore, talking about sixty thousand asylum seekers
and possibly other refugees is not the same as talking about five hundred thousand people
who did not have any claim because they did not have the papers or in any case, they did not
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have the possibility to have any claim. That's the big difference. We have experienced it. They
were integrated on their own and they became what they became.
Later - and through one of the European programs, I remember - with regard to the
so-called influx of Pontians of Greek Pontian origin, somebody made some attempts of
inclusion. In my view, nothing has been done as it should. There were indeed some programs,
and indeed there was an inclusion program including language teaching, technical training,
etc., but I do not think they helped much. There was an industry that actually consumed this
money.
In any case, we should not have arrived here. In my view, we should have already
begun the inclusion process. So, regarding the statement of Giannis Mouzalas that we should
examine inclusion upon entry into the country, he is absolutely right. The inclusion programs
should have started, but they have not yet.
As IOM, in addition to the hospitality at the Reception Centers, as well as at the hotels
for minors, etc, that we have undertaken, for the past three years we have started the transfer
of children to schools. You know that, you've heard it, I imagine. This is still going on and I
think that it will continue for at least another year until these children can be fully integrated
into a regular school. That means that they go to schools, but you know, after the hours of the
normal schedule. There we also faced a lot of problems, but that's very good, because three
thousand five hundred children go to school and that's very important to me. There are other
inclusion programs that have begun. They show us how to move forward.
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Another big part is about integrating all the rest, not just all children. As a rule,
inclusion programs take place after the persons are granted asylum, when they have to leave
the apartments or the Reception Centers where they normally reside and they have a work
permit, as stated above. That is, the program to follow, which has not yet taken place.
So, we recommended to begin Greek language lessons as well as anything else
needed, before they finish with all the papers and the bureaucratic process, in order to win
time so that when they get the papers they are ready to enter the labor market, to the extent
that this is possible.
Also, there is the subsidy program, because how easy is it to say to someone who is
currently in an apartment as an asylum seeker when he takes his asylum card “Now get out of
here, because another one must come?” I mention that because we should not forget that in
the meantime more people come to the islands and then to mainland Greece.
(NP)
(2AD)
This means that we can not know how many more hospitality centers will be constructed, how
many more hotels and how many apartments we can provide. Therefore, those who actually
end the process must leave, so others can get in - this is not happening until now and must
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happen sometime - even though there are voices against it. There should not be a reaction,
because that is how it should be done. It can not be done otherwise. You got the asylum
status and also a card for the food you get. However, you should leave the place where you
live, whether it is a hospitality center or an apartment for the next one who should also come.
You will tell me, of course, how easy it is to get out of there? Very difficult, not easy
at all. And I myself would not leave. You are there, you get used to it, you have a house, your
card, you take food, etc .. If, however, we have the possibility - and this is our proposal as an
Organization - to offer a rent subsidy to those who will leave and go to another apartment,
now as "socially integrated" - as much as they can be integrated up to that point - then that
transfer might be easier.
That is what we have already proposed - and I think it is also within the National
Strategy - and at the same time as IOM we have piloted a program with the Municipality of
Thiva and the Municipality of Livadia. These municipalities have not been chosen randomly,
they were chosen because the Municipality of Thiva has the hospitality center and the
Municipality of Livadia has apartments where they live. That's where we started a pilot project
for work so we can help some of these people in these municipalities find a job. Of course, I
repeat that the program is a pilot. It is a program that is funded by IOM, just to see the process,
what problems appear, what will we have to face in the future if this is implemented generally.
So this gives us an idea of how to move forward.
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The network of municipalities, as Mr. Papayannakis said, is really great. We as IOM
help in the support and in whatever else the network of thirteen municipalities needs and that
network must become bigger - and let’s hope that it will.
Also, in the Special Secretariat of Citizenship we have translated instructions in many
languages so that people can read the information on acquiring the citizenship in their
language.
The issue of minors is huge. And it is a huge issue, because we are talking about
unaccompanied minors who are currently either in security zones in hospitality centers or in
hotels. Hotels are a very temporary solution, but what can you do with these children and
where can you take them?
VASILIKI KATRIVANOU: To the detention facilities.
DANIEL ESDRAS (International Organization for Migration in Greece, Special Envoy
of the Director General of IOM to the Greek Government and Regional Director of the
Mediterranean): Exactly, in order not to go to the detention facilities and because they must
come from the islands. Because, let’s not forget that all these children come from the islands
and there is a geographical limitation due to the joint statement of the European Union and
Turkey.
So what about this case? Children who are excluded because they are vulnerable
groups can come to mainland Greece. In order to come to mainland Greece, there must be
space. Where will they go? Unfortunately, there are not enough centers or rather all
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guesthouses belonging to non-governmental organizations are full. We even took on a large
weight when PRAXIS, a non-governmental organization that had a series of guesthouses, was
unable to continue. We got them as IOM, so that they do not close, because there is a huge
need by unaccompanied children. We created the security zones in the hospitality centers,
where there are only unaccompanied children and these zones can not be accessed by the
rest of the world. And of course, the next solution was hotels, which - I repeat - is a very
temporary solution. That is, time here is pushing us too hard to find solutions. Here is there is
nothing more general, but it is a substantial issue, because there is a problem.
There is a problem and also let me tell you that there are too many children who are
waiting in the islands to come here and the reason they do not come is because they have
nowhere to go. There is no space.
These are the issues that are "running" at the moment. It is clear that inclusion is not
just necessary, but it is essential to be completed as soon as possible and that the programs
included in the National Strategy should start at some point. Of course, we as IOM have
offered, as we have said, all the support needed. We are here with UNHCR and we are trying
to help as much as we can also in the post-crisis era, which is actually the inclusion, the
integration, you name it as you wish.
Let me just say, concluding, that we in IOM say that migration is clearly not a problem
that needs a solution. My friend Lefteris is right. Migration is a reality that needs to be
managed and it needs to be managed by states and not by the traffickers' networks as is the
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case at the moment. You know very well that right now, migration, whether it involves
refugees or any other category of migrants, takes place through traffickers. There should be a
security corridor for conflict areas for immigrants so that they do not pay traffickers and get
drown, and there should be programs for migrants, non-refugees I mean, who will be able to
have a legal program to go.
What has been mentioned before about the demographic issue is true. If you go to
UNFPA website, the UN organization on demographics, you will see that in Africa, 65% of the
population is under the age of thirty and the largest percentage is under the age of twenty.
On the other side, in the West, in the rich North, in our countries people are over sixty-five.
In addition to the humanitarian aspect - forget the humanitarian aspect- I ask you
practically who are going to work so that you and me and all of us get our pension. Yiannis
Mouzalas was right. The European Union will need fifty million workers. I am talking about the
European Union only. So you understand that there should be a dialogue between countries
of origin and host countries, because this dialogue serves everyone. That is why the UN
organized the Global Compact in Marrakech recently, where we, as IOM undertook all this
support and effort. I have to say that it is the first time that the UN holds a General Assembly
on Migration after the Second World War.
It is very important for the countries of origin and the host countries at least to come
together and to have a dialogue. This is the only way that we will really be able to help all
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people in all countries. If we do not enter into a dialogue, there is no solution. Thank you very
much.
(Applause)
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (President of the Standing Committee on Public
Administration, Public Order and Justice - Conference Chairperson): We would also like to
thank Mr. Esdra.
Let’s keep this last one, the dialogue as a precondition for the issue that has been
raised to us and let’s keep as a conclusion that these conditions must be met so that neither
European asylum nor the single migration policy become utopian.
The next issue that will be developed is entitled “From Emergency to Sustainable
Solutions: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects for the inclusion of Refugees in Greece”.
The subject will be presented to us by Mr. Philippe Leclerc, who has been the
representative of the UNHCR in Greece since December 2015. He holds a degree in
International Law. He has served as a cultural attache at the Embassy of France in Albania and
since the 1990s he has been working for the UNHCR through several positions and in many
countries, such as Afghanistan, Syria, the Central African Republic, France, Monaco and
Geneva.
Mr Leclerc, you have the floor.
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(PE)
(NP)
PHILIPPE LECLERC (United Nations High Commissi for Refugees
in Greece - Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees in Greece): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much for the invitation to UNHCR. It's a great pleasure
to be here today. I will make a shorter presentation than I expected for this
subject, but you can still have my presentation in Greek in writing in a while.
I was delighted to see that many of the issues I wanted to mention have
already been mentioned by the previous speakers, whether they come from the
Local Authorities, from the central administration or from the Regions.
I would like to start with some developments at the global level
concerning the specific category of refugees for which the UNHCR has a
particular responsibility and mandate, especially as their numbers are
increasing, since the international community has not been able to find neither
the solution to situations that create refugees, to armed conflicts, nor viable
solutions for those who eventually leave their country and end up being
refugees, regarding what they will do in the future.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has a mandate
and responsibility not only to protect refugees but also to find viable solutions.
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Traditionally, there are three viable solutions to the situation of refugees.
The first is the voluntary repatriation of refugees to their country, the second is
resettlement in a third country and the third is the inclusion in the country they
are located as refugees.
Twenty-nine years ago, when I started working for UNHCR, there were
huge, very large voluntary repatriation programs for refugees. And that,
because there were safe countries to which refugees could return. Today, this
becomes more and more difficult, as it is increasingly difficult to achieve peace
in the countries where refugees are created. There is no peace in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan. Peace efforts have not succeeded and, as a result, voluntary
repatriation is difficult to be achieved.
For those who can not repatriate to their own country voluntarily,
inclusion is probably the most appropriate solution. But inclusion into the local
community is a very complex and painful process. It has social, economic and
cultural dimensions and often the ultimate stage is the acquisition of citizenship
of the country where the refugees are hosted.
UNHCR estimates that around 1.1 million refugees around the world
have managed to reach this ultimate stage of inclusion, which is the acquisition
of the citizenship of the host country.
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In a way similar to the one mentioned by Mr. Esdras on the Global
Compact on Migration, there is also a Global Compact on Refugees. The States
were gathered this time in New York to discuss and adopt the Marrakech Global
Compact on Migration.
The purpose of the Global Compact on Migration is to create a
framework for assistance to States, since no state can cope itself with the
refugee flows that it receives or which concern its region.
(PH)
(PE)
The situation in Greece in 2015 and 2016 was slightly different from the past. Greece,
as already mentioned, was traditionally a transit country. Nevertheless from March 2016, when
the implementation of the Joint Statement of the European Union of Turkey began, Greece a
condition to it has to organize not only the reception measures of the people who arrived in
the Greek territory but also in the second year the measures for accession.
As of 2015, as other speakers have already pointed out, Greece has managed to take
a number of measures regarding the reception of people who arrived. Twenty-seven thousand
places were created in apartments under the ESTIA program, fifteen thousand places were
created in camps in the mainland, six hundred and a half additional places are in temporary
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hotel-type accommodation, and fifteen thousand places are in the five hotspots, at the five
centers of first arrival on the islands.
Despite the efforts and the important achievements regarding the creation of places
and reception areas - the figures I mentioned earlier are important - again these are not
enough to accommodate those who need housing as newly arrived asylum seekers.
In addition to the question of the first reception, the efforts that have been made and
the gaps that still exist, there is also the new issue of implementing a strategy that will ensure
that the approximately fifteen thousand people recognized as refugees per year can be
included.
The pace of recognition of refugee status by the competent Greek service, which is
the Asylum Service, is too high and goes above the European average. 70% of Afghans seeking
refugee status receive it. They are accepted. This figure rises to 90% when those seeking
refugee status are Syrians. And they, for the most part, get it, as they are entitled to.
The legal basis and the legal description of inclusion has been provided in Law
4251/2014 since 2014. One can see that the current legislation provides that the legal
residents who are foreigners and refugees as well as other profiles of foreign nationals who
are legal residents have a right of access to national social welfare systems.
I therefore emphasize that the issue is not so much about the existence of legal
provisions and the safeguarding of this access, but about the practical measures to be taken,
the positive actions that will ensure inclusion.
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We welcome the very positive direction of the National Inclusion Strategy as adopted
by the Government Social Policy Council in July 2018, chaired by Mr Dragasakis.
We welcome the Prime Minister's speech on 5 March, here in the Parliament before
the Plenary, where he effectively, practically and literally proclaimed the inclusion of
immigrant refugees as well as the acquisition of citizenship by immigrants’ and other
foreigners’ children born in Greece, as the third pillar of the national strategy for the
demographic issue.
In terms of priorities, the first priority we have proposed is the correct
implementation of existing legislation, which, as I said, ensures a protection net for refugees
and other profiles of vulnerable people. It is very important for refugees to be able to have
effective access to this protection net.
UNHCR, together with IOM - UNHCR in the apartments, IOM in some camps in
mainland- have long been working to facilitate the achievement of specific procedures such
as the issue of social security registration number (AMKA), the registration to OAED (Labour
Employment Organization), the registration in the register of the tax authorities, with
significant results. 92% of people living in the apartments and hosted there have managed to
have an AMKA and 29% of people have managed to register to OAED. Only 2% of people have
managed to open a bank account.
(AS)
(PH)
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You have already heard several speakers mentioning the exit from the ESTIA program.
It is, therefore, even more important to have effective access to this safety net. We welcome
the very strong efforts of both the Ministry for Migration Policy and the Ministry for Labor,
Social Solidarity and Social Security, together with the Municipalities, the UNHCR and the IOM,
to ensure real access to this social safety net provided by the legislation for those who are
going to exit the "ESTIA" program.
Second order of priorities and interventions: It is necessary to move forward the so-
called "positive actions": Greek language for adults, certification of professional qualifications,
promotion to work. These are - among other things - some of the actions that must go on,
together, of course, with the necessary resources. These resources should also come from the
Greek budget, but mainly from the different European funding available.
We all know very well that one can not rely on legislative action, regulation and
legislation by the state. It should involve civil society, it should activate the private sector, the
Church, the Non-Governmental Organizations, so that everyone becomes a participant.
I would like to conclude with my remark, noting that not all inclusion stories are
similar to those of various personalities, such as Mrs Foureira, Antetokounmpo, even Zachir,
the cook from Afghanistan in MasterChef. There are hundreds - thousands to be accurate -
stories of anonymous refugees and anonymous migrants who contribute to the development
of Greece, the economy, and society. We should speed up their capacity, we should do it more
quickly to allow them to contribute.
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UNHCR will continue to work and try to help the authorities to ensure that access to
social inclusion and access to social participation is increasingly possible.
Thank you.
(Applause)
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (President of the Standing Committee on Public
Administration, Public Order and Justice - Conference Chairperson): I would also like to
thank Mr. Leclerc and apologize for the issue that has arisen.
MATRONI DIKEAKOU (Conference Chairperson): We would like to thank Mr.
Matakas, who is excellent in interpreting.
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (President of the Standing Committee on Public
Administration, Public Order and Justice - Conference Chairperson):
Of course.
I would also like to keep, as has been said, that no state alone can solve the problem.
All the states in the area in which the phenomenon manifests should deal with it together. Co-
operation and solidarity are conditions which the European Union must take into account,
because this is the area in which we have watched the issues between the various states.
Now I will give the floor to Mr. Lucio Melandri, who is the Senior Emergency Manager
for the Migration and Refugee Crisis in Europe and the UNICEF Refugee and Migration
Response Coordinator in Greece. He is actively involved with issues concerning immigrant
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children, refugees, such as the protection of unaccompanied children who are excluded from
camps, their unification with their families and relatives, full participation in the education
system.
His topic is: “From Policies to Action, Working Cooperatively to Ensure Protection and
inclusion of Refugee Children”.
Mr Melandri, you have the floor.
Lucio Melandri (Senior Emergency Manager for the Migration and Refugee Crisis in
Europe and the UNICEF Refugee and Migration Response Coordinator in Greece):
Thank you very much.
Considering that it is now too late and because there are people who stayed here for
so long, I would suggest to deal with the issue for a short time. If you allow me, I'll start with
something that will not need translation. So I will begin by presenting a short film.
(At this moment there is the screening of the aforementioned movie)
(EP)
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(AS)
Thank you very much.
It is the story of two children. A seventy-five-year-old child of the Second World War
and a child of the Syrian war. Different faces, different seasons, but the same story. That is
why the issue of social inclusion, the inclusion of migrants in Greece and more generally in
Europe - globally - is one of the key issues of our time. It requires cooperation, partnership,
and involvement of all relevant stakeholders - national non-governmental organizations,
national authorities, independent authorities - in cooperation with state and European
organizations.
I do not know if I will speak Greek well, but the term "integration" [ensomatosi] in
Greek I understand it means that everyone is coming and connected to the same body. I think
it is a good expression to make this work. I mean that “integration” means “connection”.
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I represent UNICEF, namely the United Nations Children's Organization. We believe
that children do not have stereotypes and prejudices, and that is why they are very basic
inclusion factors. They can come from anywhere else in the world - they still do not speak
Greek - but after a few minutes they get in touch. Despite the language barriers, despite the
different cultures, children always manage to communicate and find common ground
between them. And that goes beyond their differences. This change can escape the classroom,
including parents, teachers, and ultimately the whole community.
That is why Greece today is and remains one of the main gateways for children who
are immigrants and refugees. By 2018, we had only fifty thousand, and in the early months of
2019 we had over two hundred thousand. And we have seventy thousand immigrant and
refugee children, that is, we have an increase of 32% compared to last year.
“Children on the move”. This is an expression we use. And these are always exposed
to risks, such as violence, physical violence and exploitation, and we must give them a safe
platform for inclusion and integration. This is the “number one” way to support the European
principles of solidarity. It also requires respect for the Child's Convention.
UNICEF welcomes the adoption of the Compact on Migrants, which proposes a series
of coordinated actions to fill the gaps and other needs that children have when they reach
Europe: identification, reception, security, as well as a viable solution, a lasting solution , as
Philippe said. That is why we need to have a long-lasting solution for children and their
families.
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The European Commission proposes the principles for a comprehensive child
protection system.
Greece has made great progress in protecting and integrating refugee and migrant
communities and has moved its policies to adapt to the new context. There have been
important moments, like last year's new guardianship law, which extends the system to
include unaccompanied children. The new system for adoption will allow Greece to make
things easier.
Those of us who stay here are representatives of state organizations, the academic
world, civil society or international organizations. What I want to ask you, who are still here,
is this: What are the responsibilities? What is our role? How can we work together to make
existing and comprehensive policies effective and implement them? We have to work. We
believe that cooperation, partnership, is one of the key strategic elements of facilitating
inclusion.
We as UNICEF were and continue to be partners of various organizations and
agencies, starting with the European Commission. We work with the ECO Directorate General,
JUSTICE Directorate General, to support the establishment of an independent authority with
DG Home, to prepare the ground for the development of these inclusion strategies. There is
a partnership with the European Institutions, as well as with the local Organizations, with the
municipalities.
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We also provide technical consultants, cooperation on education. I also referred to
the need for the Ombudsman of the Child.
Today we hear some of the amazing results. Today, twelve thousand migrant and
refugee children have been enrolled in public schools already. It is the first important step not
only towards inclusion but also beyond that, towards integration.
Today, Greece, in the middle of huge challenges, should be considered as a model and
example for many other member states. That is why we must work together.
So, at present, children, through a real road of integration, not only have the right but
can become a productive force for society. A new generation of young people keeps society
alive. Diversity opens society.
And before I close, I want to put three issues as a form of proposals.
Firstly, migrants’ and refugees’ children can be considered a critical point of entry and
promotion of social inclusion and integration. If we invest in them, the value of the investment
can not be underestimated. Children are more adaptive than adults. They learn foreign
languages, they are hungry for knowledge and contacts and have tremendous endurance.
They can actually act as a bridge between immigrant and refugee communities and local
communities.
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Also, these children should have access to high quality services and education. And
this should be at the top of any agenda for social inclusion. They need to learn, but also they
need to have opportunities to develop cultural awareness.
Finally, social inclusion is linked to a wider strategy of promoting and protecting
children's rights. We believe that social inclusion must be a process that will start from the
very first moment that a child arrives in a country. From the moment they arrive on an island,
from the time they cross the river, the process of social inclusion has to begin from that
moment.
Ladies and gentlemen, the integrated, inclusive, long-term policies exist both at
national and European level. All we have to do is work together to turn them into action,
implement them.
I will ask all of you and all of us today - the Government, civil society, academia,
international organizations, non-governmental organizations - to work together, to think
creatively so that this policy becomes action which will strengthen and enable children to be
included in a strong society.
Children are the future of our society. We have a duty to give them power to be able
to fulfill all their capabilities.
(AM)
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(EP)
I want, as I started with a video, to show you an even shorter video, an example of
what we mean when we are referring to “partnership” between the European Commission,
UNICEF and the Historic Foundation of the National Theater of Greece, which created an
excellent play with Greek and immigrant children. They did something amazing!
(At this moment there is the screening of the aforementioned video)
Thank you.
(Applause)
ANTONIOS SYRIGOS (President of the Standing Committee on Public
Administration, Public Order and Justice - Conference Chairperson): Thank you very much.
Mr. Melandri for his succinct and vivid presentation. I would like to say that through that
something that I believe everyone has touched was concluded. It has been shown that
children and justice - because it was said - are identical concepts. One cannot be without the
other. Justice, really, is identical with the children. When they suffer when they are being
abused, there is no justice. It is a way to perceive, perhaps, the reality, because the children
are the ones that have suffered too much.
Thank you all very much.
I would now like, if there are questions for the speakers, to address them.
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There is no question.
Thank you very much. I think it was a fruitful discussion.
Now, the Coordinator of the European Programs Implementation Office, Mr. Christos
Belias has the floor.
CHRISTOS BELIAS (Coordinator of the European Programs Implementation Office):
It's late. I am the last speaker. I will not be too late. As the Coordinator of the European
Programs Implementation Office of the Hellenic Parliament, which exercises the powers of
the Parliament upon the order of the President of the Parliament, as the beneficiary for the
implementation of projects funded or co-funded by the European Union and obviously today's
event, I would like to thank all the contributors, who I believe contributed decisively to the
successful, in my view, implementation of today's event.
First of all, I would like to thank the protagonists, you, the speakers, who offered
information, I think, both for political and for parliamentary dialogue, with your very
important speeches and interventions, the participants in the room, and also online from the
transmission we make from the web channel of the Parliament and from the social networks
and, of course, the chairpersons in the sections of the Conference and the person in charge of
the event, Mrs. Matroni.
It would be an omission, however, not to mention, in addition to my Office, the other
offices of the Greek Parliament, the staff of which, indeed, embraced this event and without
its participation it could not have been successfully implemented, as I think it was.
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I am referring to: Speaker’s Office, Secretary-General’s Office, Scientific Service, Press
and Parliamentary Info Office, DG of Public Relations and Observance, DG for European
Affairs, Security Service, DG of Stenography and Practice, DG of Information and
Communication, TV and Radio Station, DG of Publication and Printing and the Foundation of
the Hellenic Parliament
All of them give real meaning to the expression in any event that takes place under
the auspices of the Hellenic Parliament.
I would also like to thank the Joint Research Center for financing the event, but also -
and this is the most important, in my view - for giving an additional incentive for an event,
whose goal is to bring together participants, stakeholders, the scientific community and the
public in order to develop policies based on scientific facts.
Of course, my thanks - I mentioned the main people involved - include the sign
language department, which has enabled people who can not hear your speeches, attend the
Conference and, of course, the translators for the very good work they did. We sincerely thank
them.
Therefore, listening to the proposal by Mrs. Gassouka and by several participants, that
this event could happen in the future on an island from those that accept refugee flows, I want
to say that we as a Parliament, we will examine it in order to implement it, but we will go one
step further. We want today's Conference to be a first step towards institutionalizing an
initiative - perhaps we could call it that - where the Parliament participates in the public
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dialogue, taking into account not only the migration issue but also other initiatives on issues
of national interest, social interest.
I want you to know that this event does not end here today. We have the Minutes,
which we will issue and we will share not only with you, the participants, but also with libraries
and scientific bodies, at universities all over Greece.
We also intend with the Foundation of the Hellenic Parliament to edit minutes for
children, who come through the institution of Hellenic Teen Parliament and observe per
thousands the Parliament's Meetings. So, the results of this Conference could be summarized
and given to them.
And, of course, I want to think I'll see you again. That's why I will not say “goodbye”. I
will say “until the next time” and wish “good evening”!
Be well! Thank you very much!
(Applause)
MATRONI DIKEAKOU (Conference Chairperson): Let us thank Mr. Belias and say that
from here we will take the thread to give an extension and make a show on the TV Channel of
the Parliament (Vouli TV).
CHRISTOS BELIAS (Coordinator of the European Programs Implementation Office):
This is very important.
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MATRONI DIKEAKOU (Conference Chairperson): Already, some of the speakers have
been very willing to accept and we thank them for that.
CHRISTOS BELIAS (Coordinator of the European Programs Implementation Office):
My omission, perhaps, I did not remember that. We also have this event. And we have thought
of it beforehand, so that we can have one more podium and a summary, and maybe what we
did not have here, the possibility that the different sessions can be made one and have an
exchange between the different sessions.
(Applause)
ENDING TIME: 19.43
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