A Study On Greek Immigration And Related Policies

Immigration is one of the core issues in the process of social development in Greece. Greek immigration, which is large, comes from different areas, and many of them are illegal, play a significant impact to the entire Greek society, economy and politics. Meanwhile, as the most southeastern end of the EU, Greece serves the role of transit country for the immigrants who want access to other EU members. Due to the special geographical location, Greek faces a lot of management problems. Therefore, the study of Greek immigration and related policies is of academic significance, which can not only show the historical process of Greek immigration clearly, analyze the situation of immigration in today's Greece, but also look at problems in the development and implement of the immigration policies.Like most other southern European countries, Greece has gone through an experience from a migrant-exporting country to a migrant-importing country, and further to a immigrant-influx country in modern history. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a larger number of East Europeans, especially Balkans swarm into Greece because of the political and economic changes in both domestic and international environment. Greece had become a nation of immigrants.The large number of immigrants made benefits to Greek economy, but meanwhile, it caused a lot of problems and contradictions to the Greek society. Those problems have been testing the Greek community and the government, which was forced to take various measures to solve the immigration problem, especially those rooted in the illegal immigration. Since the late 1990s, the Greek government had implemented the legalization of illegal immigration for three times, which resolved part of the problems caused by illegal immigration, but many issues still remain. The Greek government still has a long way to go to solve these illegal issues completely.This paper analyses the Greek immigration and the related policies from history theory and international immigration theory. The first chapter introduces the history and trends of international migration study, and analyzes the main theories. The second chapter focuses on the immigrant history of modern Greece; the third discuss the lives of immigrants as well as their present social status in Greece; the fourth analyses the tough issue of illegal immigration specifically; the fifth focus on the immigrant policies of the Greek government. The last part shows a conclusion that the Greek has made a significant effort in resolving the immigration issue, though, the problem of illegal immigration has not been completely resolved.