Xenophobia is bad for the economy
Appointing Makis Voridis as head of the Migration and Asylum Ministry was one of the most striking elements of the recent cabinet reshuffle. The new minister already has a rich resume for his (anti-)immigration policy, albeit from a different position: As interior minister from 2021 to 2023, he was responsible for, among other things, legislation pertaining to citizenship procedures.
The naturalization exams established at the time are addressed to a very specific category of immigrants: foreign nationals who have lived and worked in this country for years, who have created a family here, and whose children have attended a Greek school and speak the language. The government of any normal country, regardless of political orientation, would look upon such candidates with congeniality or, at the very least, treat them fairly.
Not so here. Thanks to Vordis’ legacy at the Interior Ministry, these candidates cannot hope for citizenship unless they can answer questions like: What is Greece’s oldest paleolithic site, where the oldest human remains have been discovered? Or Constantine XI Palaiologos was crowned emperor on January 6, 1449 at the metropolitan church of Agios Dimitrios in Mystras – yes or no? What if, by the same reasoning, 95% of the population should be stripped of their Greek citizenship for not being able to answer such questions? His mission was accomplished – and that was proving that “you can be born a Greek, but you can’t become a Greek.”
The new migration and asylum minister now has to demonstrate how he perceives the task of “managing illegal migration” and whether this will continue to entail coast guard patrol boats turning away boats of men, women and children with maneuvers that occasionally end in them sinking. The wind of xenophobia blowing across the world seems to legitimize our homegrown brand of it. And as for the fact that our country has already been found guilty of systematic pushbacks by the European Court of Human Rights, well so much the worse for the court.
The wholesale rejection of migration not only undermines our country’s standing as a state governed by the rule of law, it also harms the economy – and significantly so. The prime minister’s recent statement on the need to “curb illegal migration and organize legal migration” may sound reasonable; the problem is that in a country which has failed to establish transparent and secure channels for legal migration, almost all migrants are effectively illegal. The Greek state recognizes only three exceptions: seasonal laborers (chiefly in the agricultural sector), who are allowed to stay in the country for up to nine months, and business executives and investors with a Golden Visa (almost all of whom have purchased real estate), who can stay as long as they like.
Are these two categories sufficient for covering the real and verified shortages in the labor force? Especially in an economy supposedly striving to break free from the poor performance to which it is shackled by its reliance on tourism and land speculation? In a country with a declining population – a clear sign that many young people are not very optimistic about the future?
Very few of the refugees who found themselves in Greece over the past decade stayed. The overwhelming majority, having endured the harshness of state authorities, left the country’s borders, endured various tribulations and eventually settled somewhere in Northern Europe. Some of them – a few – became scientists, inventors, even Olympic champions under their new homeland’s flag. Many others opened shops, generated jobs and are taxpayers. Do we reject them too?
In this country, politicians prefer to loudly lambast migrants “who do not abide by our values and identity” than to get to work designing assimilation policies that will cultivate respect for these values (or, even better, for the nobler of these values). Yet again, nationalism is doing this country a disservice.
Manos Matsaganis is a professor of public finance at the Polytechnic University of Milan, and head of the Greek and European Economy program at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).
