I had never seen a Greek cop run. Even walking seemed too energetic for them. Mostly they smoke and drink coffee sitting or slouched in their cars. That takes it out of them; they fall asleep with the seat leaned back.
But this cop was sprinting, his stomach like a ship’s keel parting the confused tourists from his path. What could ever convince a Greek cop to run, I wondered, following the crowd’s gaze. An ambiguously dark-skinned man dwindled to a dot down the street, trailing a twirling pink parasol behind him. The cop stomped to a halt and smoothed back his hair. Coffee break.
Only an immigrant could have made him run. Even more than the States, Europe is fixated by the issue of immigration. The Mediterranean countries especially, but Greece by yet another degree because it receives huddled masses from both Northern Africa and Asia: Africans cross from Egypt and Libya while tens of thousands from everywhere east of the Aegean flow from Turkey across narrow straits to islands like Samos, Lesvos, and Hios.
With a population of no more than twelve million, Greece cannot absorb these people discreetly or easily and it seems forced against its inclination to do something—but only the government, slow, stupid, and corrupt—is large enough to do anything. Of course it doesn’t, and the cop blurred in speed is only another symbol of doing nothing.
From the north, Albanians have entered Greece in larger numbers than any immigrant group, possibly over one million strong (the official government count is 550,000). Like the Mexicans in the United States, they form a core of legal and illegal labor that does the dirty and necessary jobs the Greeks don’t want to do. No people in Greece are despised and mistrusted more than the Albanians, who the Greeks blame for a surge in the crime rate and any other number of social ills. Still, the Greeks manage to reserve ire for the hundreds of thousands (112,000 in 2007, nearly double that of five years ago) of others from at least a hundred different nations.
Maybe most of all Greece resents that the majority of these immigrants are only looking to pass through Greece on to more liberal and prosperous parts of Europe—Germany, England, and Norway with its generous support for immigrants. Most end up stuck here, unable to leave and never legally arrived, as resentful of the Greeks as the Greeks are of them. For the Greeks, it’s as if the immigrants have snubbed them and their whole fragile pride already laced with fractures of insecurity: “Greece is not good enough for the Africans, the Indians, the Pakistanis.” Dark faces become yet another reminder to the Greeks that their country is still in most aspects a second-class citizen of Europe, in constant need of scolding and rescuing. When it isn’t rescued, as in the case of its immigration burden, it lets out as mighty a wail as it can muster, like a child abandoned in familiar space suddenly wrong and filled with strangers.
For the immigrants who choose to stay in Greece, the prejudices against them have only piled up and their chances of naturalization proportionally dwindled. Greek bureaucracy is one of those things both huge and empty, terrifying but impotent to cause anything but obstruction or negation. For those who sincerely desire to become Greek citizens—or for their children to become citizens—there is little to do but languish and wait, receiving rejection after rejection for years without explanation and without much hope. A new bill being pushed through the government would allow children of immigrants to obtain long-term resident status, a step up if it passes but still a few steps short of the immigrant families’ ideal.
Most who pass through Athens see its immigrants as nothing more than the street vendors who appear in the morning burdened with sacks of cheap and stolen goods and who by night fade away into the sprawling city as if absorbed like water into a plant, this city’s streets like its naked grey roots that leech from those who live upon them. They sell sunglasses, purses, pirated CDs, junk and trifles that anyone at some whim might want; and at the same whim of those who see, they vanish.
That’s how I knew them for a while too, until I journeyed down Sofokleos street, where at its far end the immigrant community coalesces and pulses, parcels of the world torn from the ground and stuck back in out of order and stuffed into a few blocks, faces collections of maps their lines outdated, the street lettered with the languages of home, home again over and over and different all the time, in a bag of dates from Egypt or a handful of chickpeas from Iran. Home, home all over again and again, while the police cruise the street, pushing the bodies bargaining and squatting with their bumpers, never leaving their cars, never opening their windows, never to smell the wet grime and garlic or hear the common language of noise.
But Sofokleos ends too and I know there are immigrants in this city who have become at home here. The full picture of immigration is not just its desperation or tragedy—Europe sustaining its self-image as the promised land with the scores of dead Africans thrown bloated from a boat lost at sea—however magnified it may become on the front page of any paper or upon the banner of any protest inked in red. Immigration is the success too, the finding, the arriving that is more than setting foot upon the land. The journey is not the destination this time; home is left for home.
For that reason I wandered into Athens’ northern suburbs for the championship soccer game between the Nigerian and Cameroonian immigrant teams. The game was boring but the crowd made it, whooping, cheering and pounding drums when their team came within fifty yards of the opponent’s goal. A rare score caused an eruption that shot across the suburbs and the leafy field of grape vines beyond the stadium.
The Africans danced and sang in the evening smacking their feet on the plastic stadium chairs and a man in wood mask with a mane of braided rope ran laps around the field bare chested, bare footed clapping his hands and taunting the other team. The crowd was resolutely middle-class; the play calling was in English, French, and Greek; the refs were Greek; and the mayor of the municipality sat between the presidents of the Nigerian and Cameroonian communities.
Few Greeks were in the stands, about five pale faces total including mine, but to see people not just hanging on but hanging out felt good. Beside me, a man swept the dust from his seat with a napkin before he sat down and smoothed the wrinkles in his tight black jeans. Somehow, even vanity was a comfort. It could be afforded, there was room for being ridiculous because life wasn’t crushed by the enormous weight of the necessary. These people, it seemed, it felt, had made it: Their children, limp and soft and loose in their chubby skin, slept upon their parents’ laps.
It seems strange that Greeks wouldn’t get it. When the millions of Anatolian Greeks fled Turkey after Greece’s failed invasion and the destruction of Smyrna, they were treated like strangers by the mainland Greeks. They both spoke Greek, but it sounded different as it hit their ears and that was enough.
How long have Greeks lived in two lands at once, Greek to their core, whatever that means, but speaking not just English but American, Canadian, and Australian, tasting upon their lips the consonants of a new home? How many Greeks have been immigrants themselves? Greece’s biggest export has always been its own people. Many made their way as the Africans do today and faced the same scorn that they now pour back upon their own immigrants.
It seems the way of people. The other day when I was locked outside of our apartment building I met Minda, a Filipino woman who has lived in Greece the past eighteen years, learning the language from the Greek children who she cared for while their parents were away. She was a little leery of me at first, she explained, because a man stole her purse the other day, taking with him her residence permit and ID. She’ll have to pay a 100 Euros for a new one, whenever they get around to issuing it. “It’s not like it was before here in Greece,” she told me. “It was so safe here before, but now there are criminals here, Bulgarians, Albanians. All these new immigrants.”
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