Greece’s Emigration During the Crisis Beyond the Brain Drain

Abstract

How can we appraise and best describe the re-emergence of large-scale emigration from Greece in hindsight, more than ten years since the eruption of the Greek crisis? Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected in the context of the EUMIGRE project in the Netherlands and Greater London, this chapter provides an in-depth assessment of Greece’s emigration during the period of the country’s prolonged economic crisis from the perspective of the key actors, the migrants themselves. Focusing on their migration motivations, it explores how the crisis in Greece has altered everyday discourse on emigration and loosened up social constraints towards long distance mobility. It further highlights the significance of the freedom of movement within the EU in shaping the characteristics of the outflow and the experiences and aspirations of the migrants. Three different migrant profiles are singled out, the necessity driven migrants, the career-oriented migrants and the middling transnationals. Moving away from statist and economistic presentations of the phenomenon, the chapter aims to challenge several conventional assumptions underlying the way this outmigration is commonly presented in the Greek public discourse and critically assess the main labels used to describe it namely, brain drain, new migration and crisis-driven migration.