Short term survival, long term game: asylum-seekers in Greece

Situation

The Institute for Human Security is currently in its second year of a two-year, $1 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for its Migration Crisis and State Fragility project. This multidisciplinary effort examines the impact of recent crisis migration flows on society and governance structures in two key transit regions - Europe and the Americas.[1] In Europe, the project has focused on Greece, and in summer 2017 fieldwork was conducted on the islands of Lesvos and Crete with asylum seekers who were awaiting intake interviews with Greek authorities, the first step in an asylum process that has been overwhelmed by the crisis and that is currently experiencing significant backlogs. The research was focused on learning how asylum seekers were navigating this process and managing their daily survival, particularly in the general absence of a formal service structure and a de facto encampment policy.

The Greece project team, made up of IHS staff and faculty and a researcher from the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, are currently reviewing the next phase of the project and planning follow-up fieldwork. Since the project was initially conceived, the nature of the migration crisis in Greece has changed considerably. Of the over 1 million asylum seekers who entered the country since January 2015, between 45,000 and 62,000 are currently thought to remain.[2] Many of them became “trapped” and prevented from onward movement within Europe following the closure of Greece’s northern border with Macedonia in March 2016, which coincided with the announcement of the EU-Turkey agreement facilitating the return of migrants to Turkey who do not petition for asylum in Greece or whose claims have been denied, in exchange for aid and political concessions.[3] Those trapped on the mainland have largely been relocated away from the northern border to a number of camps spread throughout the country, while those already located on or arriving to the islands have been held there in temporary reception centers.[4]

Complication

For asylum seekers and Greeks alike, Greece was always intended as a transit country and not a final destination in the migration crisis, and both are needing to adapt to the new reality of staying put for the foreseeable future. Despite over $800mil in funding, Greek authorities are struggling with the timely processing of asylum applications and asylum seekers on both the mainland and the islands are being held indefinitely under insecure and inhospitable conditions while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated.[5] The situation on the islands is especially dire, with severe overcrowding giving rise to what MSF has identified as a looming ‘mental health emergency,’ as well as forcing families to camp out-of-doors, with potentially lethal consequences for the coming winter season.[6] Longer-term housing solutions and assistance measures are urgently needed, especially as such desperate situations are more likely to propel vulnerable asylum seekers looking for any way out towards smugglers, traffickers, and other exploitative coping mechanisms.[7]

For those refugees who have had their claims approved, beginning to integrate locally brings its own challenges. Many have been relocated to remote areas in Greece, with few social services and job opportunities available to even the local population. For refugees facing formidable linguistic and cultural barriers, as well as lingering trauma and injury, dedicated assistance is needed.

Key Questions

There is growing recognition that the situation in Greece needs to shift from one of emergency reception and assistance to longer-term settlement and integration. For the second phase, IHS' Greece project team is interested in examining two populations: island-based and mainland-based asylum seekers. They are interested in exploring where these populations seek information on how to obtain services and assistance, what forms of services and assistance they are seeking, and from which actors these populations ultimately seek services and assistance.

Design

This project is intended to produce a research design, which is ultimately hoped to be completed beyond the scope of this course. The project will be informed by a literature review of the limited body of SNA studies in the migration field that exist, a summary of which can be found here. It is anticipated that this project will include producing a survey instrument that can be employed to collect data relevant to the questions of interest. Analysis

While the SNA will not be completed as a part of this project, it is anticipated that should this research design be executed, degree centrality measures would be employed to identify key sources of information for services and assistance, as well as key providers of the services and assistance themselves. It is hypothesized that these may not be in alignment. A two-mode network would be particularly useful in examining the forms of services and assistance sought relative to the asylum seekers who identified them, layered with attribute data including country of origin, gender, family composition, and other indicators of vulnerability.

I am taking the second module of this course.

References

[1] http://fletcher.tufts.edu/Institute-for-Human-Security/Research/Migration-Crisis-and-State-Fragility

[2] http://issues.newsdeeply.com/greece-between-deterrence-and-integration

[3] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35854413

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/how-greece-fumbled-refugee-crisis

[5] Ibid.

[6] https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/10/10/greece-faces-a-rerun-of-its-refugee-winter-of-discontent

[7] http://atha.se/blog/transit-reception-new-reality-refugees-greece