GREECE: And What an 18th Birthday Gift

By Apostolis Fotiadis Reprint | | Print |

Apostolis Fotiadis

ATHENS, Jun 16 2008 (IPS) - Eighteen years after their birth in Greece, children of immigrants are suddenly made migrants, and asked to prove their right to live in a country where they were born and raised.

The Greek state puts up with migrants' children, accepts them in the educational system, and provides them with health and security – but without ever offering them Greek citizenship. When the moment of adulthood comes, these people find themselves in a legal vacuum, without citizenship and thus without political and social rights.

"Many of us, children of migrants, have no idea what is going to happen when we grow up," Marianthi (who gave only her first name), speaking in fluent Greek, told IPS. "We discover the problem suddenly when we became 18 years old. It is completely irrational to ask my parents to bring my birth certificate from Nigeria. I was born here, and they should be able to give it to me."

Once she manages to prove her existence, she will need to embark on an adventure just like any other new migrant to acquire a residence and work permit.

Anyone who fails to provide documents from the parents' country of origin will get trapped in the space of semi-legality, always running the danger of being treated by authorities as an unwanted alien.

"An unwanted alien that came out of the blue," Christina Ziaka from the group Youth Against Racism in Europe tells IPS. "It's been almost two decades of mass migrants and refugees influx in Greece, the kids growing up or born here approach 200,000, and still the government policy is planned and implemented as if they all are just passing by."

Since 1996 only 26 multicultural schools have been created that provide for promotion of multilingualism and integration, in a total of 15,000 public schools around the country. This amounts to 0.17 percent of school facilities for the children of migrants. Migrants' children are about 10 percent of the school going population.

In many neighbourhoods around the capital, children of migrants are 70 percent of the pupils, according to the Athens-based Institute of Migration Policy. The children have parentage mostly from other Balkans countries – 66 percent from Albania, 10.6 percent from Bulgaria and 4.1 percent from Romania.

"Ethnic issues in the Balkans are a major excuse used by governments for opting for discriminatory policies," says Ziaka. "Their effect is not restricted to depriving second generation migrants from rights they deserve, they even manage to reverse the process of natural integration they are engaged in during the first 18 years of their life."

Greece is the only country in Europe without a regulation for citizenship attribution to children born inside its territory. Together with Austria, Greece requires ten years of legal residence, the longest in Europe, as a formal requirement for a citizenship application.

But migrants' children born and permanently residing in Greece often lack several requirements to qualify for citizenship when they become adults. The application fee is 1,500 euro, the most expensive in Europe.

Acceptance rates are below 1 percent, and the fee is not returned in case of rejection. And Greece is one of the few remaining countries where failed applicants are not given any explanation.

"According to the state's logic, citizenship is a special property which should be kept safe and clean," says Ziaka. "According to us, it is a fundamental democratic right which offers access to other political and social rights."

But it is not just ethnic discrimination Ziaka objects to. "The problem is more complicated than just confronting the ideological mythology of ethnic purity. The more people without rights become adult, the more the mass of unprotected people facing an aggressive labour market will increase. Easily exploitable and guaranteeing good profits, this is exactly the workforce every good neo-liberal dreams of these days."