Greece - Korina Miller [33]
Greece’s main population growth has been the flood of migrants who have arrived since 1991 – about 1.5 million migrants are estimated to be living in Greece legally, illegally or with indeterminate status. Immigrants are estimated to make up one-fifth of the workforce. Greece’s inadequate migration system and painfully slow asylum processes have failed to cope with the massive influx of new arrivals, drawing international criticism.
Greece’s remote islands have seen an increase in new arrivals (such as economic migrants, as well as asylum seekers). It’s reported that these significant increases are causing major social problems, especially on smaller islands unable to cope with the number of arrivals, which can exceed their resident population.
Family Life
Greek society remains dominated by the family. It’s uncommon for Greek children to move out of home before they are married, unless they are going to university or find work in another city. While this is slowly changing among professionals and people marrying later, low wages are also keeping young people at home.
Parents strive to provide homes for their children when they get married, with many families building apartments for each child above their own (thus the number of unfinished buildings you see).
Extended family plays an important role in daily life, with grandparents often looking after grandchildren while parents work or socialise. The trade-off is that children look after their elderly parents, rather than consign them to nursing homes. This has become increasingly difficult in villages, where foreign women are brought in to look after elderly parents.
Greeks attach great importance to education, with the previous generation determined to provide their children the opportunities they lacked. Greece has the highest number of students in the EU studying at universities abroad, though many end up overeducated and underemployed.
Greeks retain strong regional identities and affiliations, despite the majority having left their ancestral villages for the cities or abroad. Even the country’s remotest villages are bustling during holidays, elections and other excuses for homecomings. One of the first questions Greeks will ask a stranger is what part of Greece they come from.
The Greek church is vehemently opposed to gay marriage and a widely publicised 2008 attempt to challenge a loophole in civil law (that a 1982 law does not specify that a civil union must involve a man and a woman) was later annulled by a Greek court.
Multiculturalism
Greece has been a largely homogenous society and not so long ago the concept of multiculturalism was tantamount to regional differences. The disparate xenoi (foreigners) living in Greece were mostly the odd Hellenophile and foreign women married to locals, especially on the islands.
But with the influx of economic migrants, Greece is becoming an inadvertently more multicultural society. Bulgarian women look after the elderly in remote villages, Polish kitchen-hands work on the islands, Albanians dominate the manual labour force, Chinese businesses have sprung up all over Greece, African hawkers flog fake designer bags and CDs on the streets and Pakistanis gather for weekend cricket matches in Athens car parks.
Migration and multiculturalism are posing major challenges for both society and the State, both of which were ill-prepared for dealing with this inward wave of people (boxed text). Economic migrants exist on the social fringe, but as they seek Greek citizenship and try to integrate into mainstream society, community tolerance, prejudice, xenophobia and notions of Greek identity and nationality are being tested.
Albanians make up roughly two-thirds of the migrant population and have become an economic necessity in the agriculture and construction sectors, and in the menial labour and domestic work that Greeks no longer want to do. Many have settled with their families