Greece has been shaken during the last week by the hunger strike of 300 undocumented immigrants who came to Athens from Chania in Crete and found refuge at the Athens law school.
This new Greek drama has ended uneventfully as the hunger strikers were transferred to a less central building where they will be allowed to stay for the next fortnight at least. However its outcome was negative for all sides concerned.
The Minister of Interior revoked a previous ministerial decision which allowed him to concede permits to the hunger strikers in consideration of their frail health conditions. The public prosecutor has pressed charges against members of the ‘solidarity committee’ that organised the trip from Chania to Athens as well as the Rector of the University and other people for ‘smuggling of irregular migrants into Greece’ and for abuse of their position and power.
The Greek media have contributed to a rising feeling of insecurity over the last week among Greek citizens who saw the centre of Athens ‘once again occupied’ by ‘illegal migrants’ and who feared that the overall issue would lead to violent clashes between extreme left wing and extreme right wing groups with the police in the middle.
Some journalists have remembered the Sans Papiers at the San Bernard church in Paris in 1996. That mobilisation also led to nowhere. The police raided the church. The migrants did not get papers. And the overall issue contributed to an increasing securitisation of irregular migration in France.
As a scholar and as a citizen I have some questions (and answers) on this last Greek drama.
First, is a hunger strike the appropriate means for exerting pressure to policy makers to change a law? or the entire migration policy? have migrant organisations and other civil society actors involved exausted all other means of pressure to this government? My answer is NO.
Does it make sense to organise such a hunger strike when for the first time in 20 years you have a government in power that is taking concrete steps in the right direction towards addressing important immigrant integration issues (the citizenship law reform in March 2010), the asylum policy (the law was passed on 27 Jan 2011) and also declares its will to facilitate the renewal of stay permits for legal migrants acknowledging the problems of the current system? my answer is again NO.
on the other hand, is it surprising that in a country where for the first 10 years of your legal stay you have to keep renewing your permit every 2 years by proving that you are legally employed as a full time worker (when in this country about a quarter of the GDP is estimated to be produced in the informal economy), some migrants get desperate and adopt extreme course of action? No it is not surprising.
Isn’t there an unfair burden on the shoulders of migrant workers and their families who if they fail to prove a high enough income see the permit of their spouse annulled? I think it is.
Perhaps there are a few concrete steps that could be taken away from the media spotlights that would concretely imporve the situation:
Scrap the income test for renewing the permits of family members. They will not go away. This just creates unnecessary hardship in the families and the children in particular.
Lower the required welfare stamps to renew the permits to at least 300 working days in 2 years (instead of 400). The current crisis is hitting hardest the immigrant labour force.
Migrants who are currently living inGreece with a permit have been in the country since 2005 at least – i.e. more than 5 years. The government has taken steps to facilitate the procedure for applying and obtaining a EU long term resident permit. Please advertise among migrant communities and stakeholders.
Adopt a silent regularisation procedure in the way Spain does: if a person can prove a 3 year irregular stay in Greece, has not committed a crime, is currently employed, and can prove that s/he is well integrated in the country (by means such as that her chidlren are going to school, that her colleagues would be willing to come and testify, that she participates at some local NGO) they can regularise their status. Spain has been applying this rule since 2005 and nobody has contested it. France also used to apply this type of regularisation for people who had lived in France for 10 years as undocumented migrants. Sarkozy scrapped it in 2006 when he was Interior Minister. Such measures have little call effect while they protect the country from many unnecessary evils that irregular migration brings (informal employment, no insurance, children who fear to go to school, people who are seriously ill and fear to go to hospital, exploitation, unfair competition to local workers and legal migrants, instability in families and phenomena of social anomie).