Attitudes Towards Refugees & Immigrants in Greece: a national-local comparative analysis

Abstract

Over the past decade, Greece has received a significant number of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who, due to specific decisions taken at both the EU and the national levels, have been “trapped” in Greece for an indefinite period. Dealing with this situation was, and still is, a hot issue, with state policies remaining focused on reception and control rather than on integration. Moreover, the spatial allocation of refugees in specific places throughout the country raised further debate, as they often provoked reactions (of substantial political costs), given that different localities tend to exhibit different attitudes and views towards refugees and immigrants. Since these perceptions seem to exert a significant effect on the direction of public debate and state policy there have been a number of nationwide surveys that have sought to shed light on them. These studies certainly advance our understanding on how Greeks in totality perceive those issues, but they also suffer from serious limitations regarding the specificities that different localities exhibit. On their grounds, the current works seek to provide a comparative analysis between the results of a nation-wide survey and a locally contacted one, contrasting perceptions between people living in Athens metropolitan area and in three small-medium size cities in central Greece (Trikala, Larisa, and Volos), in order to identify similarities and differences in views between the different spatial scales.