Athens News Agency: News in English, 10-05-28

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From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/>

CONTENTS

[01] English-language book on migrant trends in Greece published

[01] English-language book on migrant trends in Greece published

The book is entitled "Profile and Labour Market Analysis of Immigration in Greece" and is authored by Constantinos N. Kanellopoulos, Maria Gregou and Athanasios Petralias. It gives figures, analyses immigration trends and examines how migrants fit into the labour market in Greece.

During an event at CEPR, authors said their study had confirmed an unprecedented increase of migration to Greece in the 1990s, so that migrants now represented nearly 10 percent of the indigenous population. The chief source countries of migrants continue to be Albania and other neighbouring Balkan states, while a more recent phenomenon is the increasing number of migrants from certain Asian countries and Africa.

The migrants tend to be younger on average than the indigenous population, with men making up the majority of those arriving from Albania, Romania, Asia and Africa and women the greater number of those arriving from Bulgaria and the former Soviet countries.

They are chiefly employed in construction, manufacturing and as domestics, all sectors that are more directly affected by economic cycles.

A relatively recent development in migration toward Greece is that arising from the reunification of foreign nationals with members of their families. According to the study, a significant percentage of foreign nationals now enters the country for this purpose, while there is a negligible number of rejections.

It also found Albanian nationals highly represented in all residence permits for family reunification, combined with a very low but rising participation of nationals from certain African and Asian countries.

The great majority of such residence permits are issue for women and adults aged 22-65, indicating that existing migrants, chiefly men, are tending to bring their wives to live with them.

Concerning figures for illegal migration, the study shows that the great majority of currently legal migrants had earlier entered the country illegally and were then legalised through various legalisation programmes.

Though there is a close statistical correlation between illegal and legal migrants from each individual country of origin, the number of illegal migrants from Asian and African countries is on the rise.

Clear figures on the number of illegal migrants are given in the 2007 Labour Force Study, where they are listed as uninsured nationals of third countries. Married migrants tend to be legal and insured to a greater extent than single migrants. Uninsured illegal migrants are also more plentiful in the younger and older age groups.

This indicates that migrants are tending to act rationally, since younger migrants lacking documents and family obligations as well as older migrants with scant opportunity to establish the right to an old-age pension are less interested in paying social insurance contributions.

Both legal and illegal migrants show similar levels of employment, but illegal migrants are more than doubly represented among the unemployed. Illegal migrants appear to have a smaller percentage of permanent employment, tend to change jobs regularly and tend to have a higher percentage of inactivity.

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