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Greek Study: Illegal immigrants at 470,000
Posted by keeptalkinggreece in Politics
Suddenly everybody in Greece has started to tangle the issue of illegal immigrants. I believe that this is due to several reasons: It’s a bit the racists’ attacks in certain Athens areas, a bit the fence that is to be built at with border with Turkey, a bit the news that immigrants eat cats and dogs, but most important the economic crisis that left thousands and thousands of hopeless people stranded in Greece without income and food.
How many are the illegal immigrants in Greece? A study claims they are at 470,000 – roughly estimated, I assume… Here is the study:
The number of non-legal migrants in Greece has risen some 60 percent to 470,000 in the last two years, according to estimates released by the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). This represents a huge jump since the last estimates released by ELIAMEP two years ago in the framework of the EU’s Clandestino programme, which then placed their numbers at around 280,000.
During a discussion on “Migration and the Economic Crisis” organised by ELIAMEP on Thursday evening, researcher Thanos Maroukis said that 280,000 of the non-legal migrants were Albanians and other Europeans while the rest were from Asia and Africa.
Presenting the data from research conducted with fellow-ELIAMEP researcher Anna Triantafyllidou concerning the movements of migrants and refugees from Asia and Africa to Greece.
As key factors encouraging migration he cited political instability and huge inequality in these countries and he predicted that the only change would be to the specific routes taken by migrants, which were proliferating along the EU’s eastern borders.
“Traffic through the islands was not reduced because of FRONTEX but because the mines were removed from Evros and the cheaper prices for passage from there (3,000 euro for passage using the Aegean and just 300 euro via Evros),” he said.
(study source: Athens News Agency)
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