Keywords

1 Introduction

People’s capacities in relation to the surrounding physical, social and political possibilities for movement are unevenly distributed across class, gender, ethnicity and age lines (Kaufmann et al., 2004). And when it comes to international migration, they are largely determined by the legal structures regulating who can and cannot move. In his aspiration/ability model, Carling (2002) analytically distinguishes between migration as a potential course of action and the realisation of actual mobility. Concretely, when people develop an aspiration to leave, the outcome depends on their capacity to convert this desire into reality depending on context-specific barriers and constraints, which each potential migrant is differently equipped to overcome. According to Carling, the most consequential barriers to migration are often restrictive national immigration policies.

Seen through this light, legally unconstrained migration in the European Union (EU) makes for an exceptional mobility system. The process of European integration has constructed a supranational area within the borders of which the power of nation-states to control individuals’ choices of travel and settlement has been curbed (Recchi, 2015). As a result, European citizens aspiring to migrate have increased capabilities to do so. Free movement within the EU thus makes migration an easier mobility strategy to pursue, reducing its economic and psychological costs, and accounts for a radically different context within which to assess how migration decisions are taken and practiced.

The right to free movement, employment and settlement across the European Union was established for Greek citizens in 1988. However, it did not lead to a significant increase of outmigration from the country. In its own right, freedom of movement did not seem to provide incentives for mobility and until recently, Greeks were among the least mobile Europeans (see Pratsinakis et al., 2020). This changed drastically after the eruption of Greece’s economic crisis in 2009, the impact of which remains substantial on the Greek society and economy, more than a decade later. This crisis, which was one of the worst to hit a western nation during peacetime since the 1929 economic crash, led to the decline of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by more than a quarter and the escalation of public debt that reached 186% of GDP at the end of the adjustment and austerity programmes. The austerity measures implemented resulted in soaring unemployment rates, decreased income and in the absence of an effective safety net, led to impoverishment for a significant part of the Greek population. The combined effects of recession, austerity and a generalised mistrust towards institutions and disillusionment from the political system altered mobility intentions and practices in Greece and compelled a large number of Greeks to exercise their right to free mobility. According to Eurostat data more than 500,000 Greek citizens left the country since 2010, the vast majority of whom for countries within the EU, making Greece one of the countries with the highest emigration rates in EU.

This resurgence of large-scale emigration from Greece, effectively marking Greece’s third major wave of outmigration, has received extensive media coverage and has figured prominently in political debates in Greece. In a rather politicised public discourse, emigration has been presented as an one-way option for certain population segments, notably the young and the highly skilled, and hence a drain of the most dynamic part of the country’s labour force (Pratsinakis et al., 2017a). This focus on the highly educated led to a misleading equation of outmigration during the period of the crisis with the phenomenon of brain drain. The term itself has often been applied indiscriminately to all people leaving, regardless of their qualification and occupation, while the emigration of older people and people with less educational attainments has generally been neglected. Εmigration from Greece in the years of the crisis became almost synonymous to brain drain in the public debate in Greece.

Accounting for the experiences of wider educational groups and focusing on Germany as a destination country, Damanakis (2013) termed the re-emergence of large-scale emigration as Greece’s new emigration or ‘neo-migration,’ shifting attention away from the brain drain phenomenon. He employed this term not solely in a descriptive manner, but rather to demarcate a new phase in Greece’s migration history and to highlight its difference from the country’s previous waves of outmigration, primarily that which took place in the context of the so-called guestworker’s migration to Western Europe. The term ‘new migration’ has been adopted in several subsequent publications which similarly look beyond the brain drain phenomenon (Chap. 4 in Chatzidaki, this volume; Georgalou, 2021; Groutsis et al., 2020; Panagiotopoulou et al., 2019) and has been also occasionally picked up by the media. Others, stressing on the crisis context (Pratsinakis, 2019a, 2017a) opted for the term ‘crisis-driven migration’ instead.

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 economic crisis? How can we understand its socio-demographic composition and what type of changes did the crisis bring in migrants’ aspirations and trajectories. Finally what can be said to be ‘new’ about the post-2009 economic crisis outflow when compared to migrations preceding the crisis? Drawing on secondary sources as well as qualitative and quantitative data collected in the context of the EU funded Marie Curie EUMIGRE,Footnote 1 this chapter aims to challenge a number of conventional assumptions underlying the way the new Greek outmigration is commonly presented and to critically assess the main labels used to describe it namely, brain drain, new migration and crisis-driven migration. It further highlights the significance of the prolonged economic crisis in Greece and the freedom of movement within the EU in shaping the characteristics of the outflow and the experiences and motivations of the migrants. It also discusses their role in altering everyday discourse on emigration and loosening up social constraints towards long distance mobility.

2 Methodology

The chapter is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data conducted in the context of the EUMIGRE project, which aimed to assess the new Greek emigration through a mixed methods approach research design. It primarily draws on 34 in-depth interviews with Greek migrants in London and Amsterdam, two major destinations of the new Greek emigration. The interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2017 with migrants of different age groups, with the majority falling in the 25–35 age group, and were approximately equally split between men and women and between higher and lower educated people. Twenty-two of the interviews were conducted with migrants in Greater London and 12 in Amsterdam. The main themes of the interview were reasons for migration, experiences of work and life in the United Kingdom and the Netherland and plans for the future. The average interview time was one hour and a half and all interviews were recorded. After the initial interview, I had the chance to meet again with several interviewees and chat further with them on their experiences, views and plans. Interviewees were accessed via personal networks and snowballing, as well as through community organisations. In Amsterdam, further data were collected through participant observation in the Greek community organisation Neoafihthendes, which provides information and support to newcomers in the Netherlands and in which I offered voluntary work from November 2015 until May 2017. Pseudonyms are used to maintain participants’ anonymity.

Secondarily, the paper draws from a survey (EUMIGRE survey) which was conducted in Greater London and the Netherlands from January to June 2017, generating a dataset comprising 996 respondents in total. The survey was conducted through a combination of sampling methodologies, namely a web-based Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) and opt-in online survey sampling. Seven of the interviewees, as well as 197 survey respondents, had emigrated before 2010 allowing for comparisons of migration before and after the crisis. Both the survey and the interviews were carried out in the context of the EUMIGRE project.

3 What is New About the ‘New Greek Emigration’?

Greece had experienced two major waves of outmigration before the recent one that followed the 2009 economic crisis. The first one started in late nineteenth century until the mid-1920 and was driven by war and concurrent economic crises in Greece and shaped by economic opportunity in the United States. The second one took place in the postwar era up until the mid-1970s. In this period, more than one million Greeks left their country to fill the gaps in the booming industrial sectors in Western Europe in the context of the so-called guest-workers programmes, or moved to more far away destinations such as Australia, USA and Canada.

By the mid-1970s, net migration rates had turned positive largely due to return migration especially from European destinations. It is around the same period when the recruitment of foreign labour was first registered, and by the early 1990s, Greece became a de facto destination for international migrants. Greece’s emergence as an immigration destination was originally linked to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe. The bulk of immigration flows in the 1990s concerned two major waves: on the one hand, migration from neighbouring Balkan countries, chiefly from Albania and on the other, migration of ethnic Greek origin, primarily from former Soviet republics.

In the same period, even though limited, emigration had not ceased completely. It was more frequent among specific groups: emigrants of the post-war waves and their offspring moving between Greece and European destinations, and Muslims from the minority of Thrace or the (then recently settled) diaspora Greeks from the former Soviet Union spending spells of employment in Germany or Turkey (Pratsinakis et al., 2017b). In parallel, there has been a continuous outflow of professionals that started becoming prominent in the 1990s (see Chap. 3 in Labrianidis & Karampekios, this volume). Structural weaknesses of the Greek economy and long-standing pathologies such as nepotism and clientelism entailed that the substantial opening of higher education was not matched by a proportional rise in corresponding employment opportunities, resulting in relatively high unemployment rates among graduates from the 1990s onward (Labrianidis, 2014). At the same time, greater opportunities for employment in highly skilled positions as well as higher average salaries of graduates in specific destination countries, combined with ease of migration in the EU, attracted Greek professionals abroad. As a result, even before the outbreak of the crisis, a considerable number of highly skilled young Greeks had been emigrating for better career prospects, better chances of finding a job related to their specialisation, a satisfactory income and increased opportunities for further training (see Chap. 3 in Labrianidis & Karampekios, this volume).

The crisis critically intensified this trend; the outmigration of graduates skyrocketed as job opportunities in the private sector shrank in the shadow of the crisis and public-sector employment was no longer an option due to cuts and restrictions in new recruitments (Labrianidis & Pratsinakis, 2016).Footnote 2 A study by Labrianidis and Pratsinakis (2016) conducted a nationwide representative survey to 1237 households in Greece, gathering information for 248 emigrants. According to this survey, two out of three of the emigrants who left Greece during the years of the crisis were university graduates. Expectantly, the data highlight that the educational composition of the migrants in the period of the crisis sharply contrasted with that of the emigration up to the mid-1970s, which almost uniformly comprised people of lower education.

However, the educational composition of the migrants leaving Greece in the years of the crisis was found to be identical to that of the preceding decade. Even if a much less significant phenomenon in absolute numbers, highly skilled migration comprised the vast majority of the outflow already during the 2000s and it was on the increase already since the 1990s. Thus, the brain drain phenomenon in Greece should not be understood as a new phenomenon resulting from the crisis but rather (1) as a continuation of an earlier ongoing trend whose volume critically increased during the crisis but whose underlying structural causes predated the crisis (2) a part, albeit a very significant one, of the increased emigration that followed the crisis (Labrianidis & Pratsinakis, 2017).

At the same time, even if a minority in the total outflow, the crisis did push a significant number of people of lower educational and income backgrounds out of the country and also made several people to take the route of emigration at a late phase in their life-course. Data from the survey in Labrianidis and Pratsinakis study, show that the share of emigrants from low to very low-income households as well as the mean age of emigration increased after the crisis. Similarly, data on unemployment from that study and the EUMIGRE study show a clear distinction between the pre-crisis emigrants and those who left after 2010, who were far more pushed by the unfavourable conditions in the Greek labour market compared to the pre-crisis migrants (see also Pratsinakis & Kafe, forthcoming). The deterioration in the quality of life, loss of employment and impoverishment brought about by recession and austerity not only intensified emigration flows among the highly skilled but altered mobility aspirations and decisions more widely including those with ‘lower skills.’

The degree to which emigration has been an unwanted and enforced decision differs temporally and by country of destination. As far as the latter is concerned, it should be noted that the vast majority of post 2019 migrants headed to European destinations facilitated by the freedom of movement within the EU, which decisively contributed to the large scale of emigration. Germany and the UK attracted the largest share of emigrants, concentrating together more than half of the total emigration outflow. More than 250,000 Greek citizens migrated to Germany between 2010 and 2019, with net migration being approximately 120,000 people, while by June 2021, almost 120,000 Greek citizens’ applications for UK’s EU settlement scheme, the vast majority of which by post-2009 migrants, were approved (Pratsinakis & Kafe, forthcoming). The Netherlands appears to be the third most popular European destination of the crisis-driven Greek emigration with approximately 31,500 arrivals from 2010 to 2019 and a net migration in the same period of approximately 13,500 people.Footnote 3 At the same time, emigration to traditional non-European destinations such as Australia and the USA appears to be considerably lower. Approximately 13,000 people have obtained permanent resident status in the USA in the period 2010–2019 and 11,000 Greeks settled in Australia until 2016, according to estimations by Field-Theotokatos (2019).

People with lower formal education migrated primarily to the traditional destinations of postwar emigration because they could make use of social networks available to them to secure employment in ethnic niches in those countries. Consequently, Germany and Australia attracted a majority of people with low to medium levels of education. On the other hand, those who migrated to Britain or new emigration destinations such as Switzerland were more often people with high educational qualifications. The share of tertiary educated among the Greek UK based population, which comprises a majority of post-2009 migrants, was estimated at approximately 70% (Pratsinakis & Kafe, forthcoming). Similarly, the share of tertiary educated Greeks who settled in Switzerland was 73% in the period 2011–2014 and 80% in the period 2015–2018 (Nccr on the move, n.d.). To the contrary the share of tertiary educated migrants who settled in Germany in 2007–2012 was 29% (von Koppenfels & Hohne, 2017) and 24% for those who settled in Australia in 2006–2016 (Field-Theotokatos, 2019).

In terms of the temporal dimension of the emigration, data indicate that through time emigration became less so an involuntary decision enforced by economic hardship. As seen in Fig. 2.1, emigration increased steeply in 2010 and peaked in 2012. It modestly decreased the year after and since then it has rather stabilised with approximately 50,000 Greek citizens and 50,000 non-Greek citizens leaving the country annually. In the early years of the crisis many people emigrated in a pressing need to make ends meet making use of support networks they had abroad. Several such migrations were indented to be temporary, as a means of a short-term adjustment to the financial difficulties faced. They also included people who emigrated with longer term aspirations but ending up returning prematurely due to difficulties faced in destination countries. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Germany, the country that received the majority of those early migrations, only one in two Greeks remained in Germany for longer than one year in this early phase of migration (Sommer, 2013).

Fig. 2.1
A line depicts the annual emigration of Greek citizens and non Greek citizens from 2008 to 2019. Data are approximate. The lines start from (2008, 20000), (2008, 25000) and both end (2019, 45000) respectively. The lines follow an increase to decrease in trend.

Estimated annual emigration from Greece, 2008–19. (Source: Eurostat (n.d.))

Full size image

It should be noted that experiences of discrimination were reported by many migrants working in low-skilled jobs (Damanakis, 2013; Pratsinakis et al., 2017a; see also Chap. 4 in Chatzidaki, this volume), with people working in more skilled occupations not being totally unaffected (Pratsinakis & Kafe, forthcoming). According to the EUMIGRE survey 62% of the participants in the Netherlands experienced discrimination and 37% felt they were treated unfairly at work due to being foreigners. Not all such experiences concerned interactions with the native populations. Particularly notorious have been cases of exploitation by Greek employers affecting mostly those migrants who were provided accommodation as part of the remuneration agreement and were thus more vulnerable due to dependency relations to their employers.

Those negative experiences of a segment of post-2010 migrants attracted some attention by the media in Greece (Pratsinakis et al., 2017a) but research has been limited and generally the experiences of people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds has been less well documented. Similarly limited has been research on the onwards migration of the immigrants in Greece and the experiences thereof. That is despite the fact that they comprise almost half of the total migration outflow from Greece as can be seen in Fig. 2.1. Recent studies (Dimitriadis, 2021; King & Karamoschou, 2019) explore the migration decision making of Albanian onwards migrants in the UK, their sustained transnational practices as well as their ambivalent identification.Footnote 4

Overall, research has focused primarily on the highly skilled but without much attention on their migration motivations, which are thought of as a direct function of the deterioration of socioeconomic conditions in Greece. As it will be described, even though the crisis has had a major role in shaping the migration decisions, both among the highly educated and the less educated ones, its impact was far from being straightforward. I explore this issue in the next section (Sect. 2.4), while looking at the multiplicity of migration aspirations and trajectories.

4 Necessity Driven Migrants, Career Migrants and Middling Transnationals

Analysing the migration motivations and trajectories of the EUMIGRE research interview participants in the Netherlands and Greater London, three migrant profiles can be singled out. The career migrants, the necessity driven migrants and the middling transnationals.

The Career-Oriented Migrants

The career-oriented migrants were found to be a small minority among the respondents. Their experiences and motivations highlight a continuation of pre-crisis migration patterns when emigration from Greece was largely a career move concerning primarily the upper classes. They are akin to the ‘global nomads,’ a category coined by Jordan and Duvell (2003) to describe the highly mobile professionals who move from one country to another depending on work opportunities that arise as a result of the integration and globalisation of the world economy, and who often exhibit a cosmopolitan orientation. The career-oriented interviewees were highly educated, mostly in Information Technologies (IT), business and economics, and treated their move as a means to embark on or further advance their professional career. They contrasted with the necessity-driven migrants in that their migration was very marginally, if at all, influenced by the economic crisis.

Migration was described by them as a strategically identified step in a planned career path. They commonly had found employment through applications for advertised vacancies before emigrating, or were headhunted or transferred by an employer. They were open-minded about their future, mostly younger in age, which helped them sustain a lifestyle of mobility. However, they planned to settle at a later phase in their life-course, primarily for reasons of family formation. They were disillusioned about the potential of having a stable and satisfying professional life in Greece and were hence less oriented towards a return.

The Necessity-Driven Migrants

At the other end of the spectrum several research participants noted that lack of a job and/or marginal socioeconomic conditions shaped the migration to London or the Netherlands. Many of those migrants highlighted the centrality of the crisis in shaping their rather abrupt migration decisions. Giorgia (31, London) revealed that a year before she left Greece, emigration had not crossed her mind. She had invested the savings of several years’ work in the hospitality sector to open, together with a friend, a tapas bar in the centre of Athens. Their business had gone through difficult times, but they had managed to keep it going and gradually things started looking up. But the imposition of capital controls, which were put into effect in 2015 in Greece, was a huge blow:

People stopped going out. I mean, things became very bad after the capital controls were imposed. . . everything ended. Four months of slack can be coped with; but not more [. . .]. And so, I was thinking what I should do, it’s only once in my life I’m 30 years old. I thought I shouldn’t fight for my business anymore. . . It was worthless. I couldn’t describe a more depressing situation. . . [. . .] I wanted to fight for my future; you can’t do that in Greece though. . . You fight a battle you can’t win there. . . I mean, it’s depressing. . . (2/2016)

Giorgia sold her car to support her migration project and left Greece. She was initially hosted by friends in London until she found a job and moved out. She started working as a waitress. Professionally her migration entailed a downward move. Her housing conditions were also worse than in Greece. Like the majority of the interviewees, she was living in a room in a shared apartment. Yet she was happy with her decision to move to London and was planning her future there, not considering returning to Greece any time soon. Giorgia explained that in Greece she felt trapped in a situation in which she was unable to plan her life. She was devastated by the fear she described as being gradually instilled among people in Greece – a fear that paralyses and makes them downscale their expectations. She told us she was not willing to cope with this situation. Her life in London came with many hardships and a lot of stress, but also excitement about new experiences, expectations about the future and a firm belief that she can gradually progress and build her life there. Her goal was to open her own business in the tourism sector. I was also told such stories of moving abruptly as a result of the crisis by several people I met as part of my volunteer work in the organisation Neoafihthendes in Amsterdam.

Giorgia, along with other migrants whose move was forced by circumstances induced by the crisis, can be described as necessity-driven migrants. Those migrants had a lesser ability to plan their move strategically. Motivations relating to personal development and adventure were less strong in shaping their migration decision-making, but a favourable attitude towards mobility was prevalent and migration was seen as a great learning experience. Most of the necessity-driven migrant interviewees had not secured employment prior to migration and moved to London or Amsterdam to look for work opportunities on spec. Overall, finding employment proved to be relatively easy especially in London. Finding a job matching their qualifications and working experience prior to migration, however, was more difficult. Yet, most of them expressed a belief they can make it in the long run and embraced a strong work ethos with that target in mind.

Most of the necessity-driven migrants left their country at a later phase in their life-course, often 30 or older. They described migration as means to progress and a way to restore the socioeconomic stability which they had lost over the past years in their countries of origin. Like the Polish and Spanish migrants interviewed by Bygnes and Erdal (2017) in Norway, they were seeking to create the grounded and predictable lives and futures that were no longer attainable in Greece. Even if most of the necessity-driven migrant interviewees were people without university degrees, I did encounter highly educated migrants in this category, too. However, and contrary to what one may have expected, the necessity-driven migrants were not a majority among the overall sample of interviewees.

Migrating as a Way to Getting Ahead in Life: Middling Transnationals in Times of Crisis

If we conceptualise the influence that the crisis has had on emigration decisions as lying along a continuum, with the necessity-driven migrants and the career-oriented migrants forming the two polar opposites, the majority of the research participants would fall somewhere in between. The interviewees of this majority category expressed a pro-migration attitude, and many of them noted that they had always wanted to leave Greece and live abroad. The economic crisis has not had a direct impact in shaping their decision to emigrate, unlike the necessity-driven migrants. Yet, unlike the career-oriented migrants, the crisis was often important in reshaping the wider socioeconomic dynamics that triggered their decision to leave.

A common denominator among the research participants of this diverse category is that they treated their migration project as a way to get ahead in life. Younger participants were over-represented in this category: they approached migration as a route towards leading an independent life without being dependent on family support and the life-stage stagnation that this entails. Most of them had jobs in Greece, so that migration was not shaped by an urgency to get employed as in the case of the necessity-driven migrants. The majority thus had the ability to plan their emigration more smoothly than the necessity-driven migrants and many, especially the highly educated, had secured employment in their country of settlement before emigration.

They migrated aiming to achieve a sense of personal fulfilment and progress coupled with socioeconomic stability. Several of them embarked on an attempt to pursue their dream career by seeking employment in a field they had given up trying in Greece often in art or in academia. Many interviewees, especially those who emigrated later in their life-course, compared themselves to local residents and expressed feelings of lagging behind in terms of their school-to-work transitions.

For the graduates in social sciences and humanities, finding employment that matched their qualifications and subject specialisms was not easy and many had to take up lower status jobs in the service economy, sharing similar employment trajectories with lower-educated migrants. This is also corroborated with the survey findings of the EUMIGRE survey which showcases that the income level of migrant in those fields was comparable to people without University degree (see also Pratsinakis & Kafe, forthcoming). To the contrary, the trajectories of those with education in hard science, engineering, business, medicine and IT were much more favourable, resulting in faster upward career mobility. Their pathways resembled those of Favell’s (2008) Eurostars, whilst the rest of the interviewees in this category would be more appropriately described as Conradson and Latham’s (2005) ‘middling transnationals’ with middle-range office and administrative work or employment in the education or health sector.

5 The Changing Emigration Environment in Greece: Migration as a Materialisation of an Existing Aspiration

When I explained the topic of my research to my research participants who belonged in this last category, many of them felt the need to dissociate themselves from what they described as the typical new Greek migrant: someone urgently fleeing the economic crisis in Greece. Assuming it was such experiences that I was looking to record and fearing that they may be not suitable respondents, they were telling me that for them it was not the need that pushed them out of Greece, and further explained that they always wanted to leave Greece, or that they had a job in Greece as well as a relatively job security before leaving. In the same light, others would tell me that they came to the UK or the Netherlands to follow their partners or close friends and that it was not a direct impact of the crisis in their personal life that shaped their decision making. Kostas (36, London) was a characteristic such a case. In his own words:

Some of my friends in Greece had already been living in Oxford and so I travelled to England three times in 2010, 2012 and 2014 to visit them. [….]The last time I visited the country, in March 2014, my friends from Oxford had moved and they were living in North London. At that time, I was in a strange situation, like I was looking for change. I thought the time was ripe for a thought I’d had in mind for years. It’s not that I was unemployed in Greece. I was working as a Customer Service Representative at IKEA in Athens. I had been working there for seven years and although it wasn’t terrific, it was quite a good job if you consider the situation in Greece. A person wouldn’t leave easily this job to emigrate, especially during the crisis. However, for several years I wanted to go and live abroad, see how life is outside Greece (7/2016).

Kostas told me that his friends had been already half-jokingly telling him that he should go live with them. When they moved to London they had a spare room he could rent for an affordable price. He was single at this period. When he returned in Greece, he told me, he had already taken the decision to leave:

The truth is, I always wanted to work with children, I mean work in the education field. However, I didn’t have the necessary qualifications to do something like that in Greece and I also couldn’t attend courses to acquire such qualifications because of my working hours. And so I thought I would go to England to do something about it there, thinking I could combine work and studies more easily. This was the plan: to go to England and do something in the field of education (7/2016).

Kostas resigned from IKEA and moved to his friends’ house in London. He started working in a cafeteria and offered voluntary work in a community organisation working with children, where he was also later offered accommodation. His aim was to save money and improve his English and then follow a course which would allow him to become a teaching assistant.

Similar was the case of Nikos (35, Amsterdam) who had a position as civil servant in Athens from which he decided to resign to join his Serbian girlfriend and his best Greek friend in Amsterdam in 2016. Nikos, who had a degree in tourism, found very swiftly a job in a hotel and within a years’ time he was promoted to work on a project in the financial department of the company owning the hotel. In a follow-up meeting several months later, Nikos told me he had applied and was accepted to study economics at a BA level at Nijmegen.

Even though respondents like Kostas and Nikos described their trajectories as rather exceptional, this seemed not to be the case given that I was often hearing stories akin to theirs. Later on I was able to test this observation by including two questions in the survey questionnaire. The first one was ‘to what degree was your decision to emigrate something you have been wishing for?’ and the second one ‘to what degree was your decision to emigrate enforced by the circumstances in Greece?’ Forty-three percent of the sub sample of the post-2010 migrants (N = 799) indicated that their decision was basically something they have been wishing for, while 27% indicated that it was more so enforced upon them due to the circumstances in Greece. Even if differences were found to be less pronounced in London (38% wish and 34% need), the survey findings clearly show that the people who rejected the economic crisis as the main motivation for their migration were certainly not a small minority, if not the majority among the post 2010-emigrants.

What does the fact that a significant segment of the so-called crisis-driven migrants present their migration not as a direct outcome of the economic crisis signify? As I have explained in more detail elsewhere (Pratsinakis, 2019b), the large number of people who present their emigration from crisis-driven Greece as a materialisation of an earlier aspiration does not only affirm the self-selectivity of migration, but also highlights a significant change that the emigration environment in Greece has undergone in the past few years. It was this change that allowed, triggered or gave an extra push to several people to leave Greece –people who wished to experience life abroad but would most probably have not done so otherwise.

Drawing on Carling’s work (2002, 2014), with the term ‘emigration environment’ here I refer to the historical, sociocultural, economic, and political settings in a given locale, which encourages migration or not. This can be understood to have two dimensions: one that concerns the structural backdrop upon which emigration decisions take place, and a second one that concerns the ways that this structural reality is evaluated at the collective level and by individuals. As Carling (2014, p. 3) argues, ‘a vital part of the emigration environment is the nature of migration as a socially constructed project. People who consider migration as an option relate to it through the meanings with which it is embedded.’

Someone does not feel the urge to emigrate because she is poor in absolute terms or because she receives a salary that can be objectively defined as being low. Instead, it is because someone feels she is poor and importantly because she feels her poverty or her socioeconomic stagnation and/or downward mobility is place-bound. Migration decisions are thus taken with reference to both feelings of frustration and disappointment with conditions at home and related positive expectations about life abroad. It is in this context that in crisis-driven Greece emigration emerged as a sensible strategy to pursue in order to better one’s life.

Media started painting a rather positive image of emigration, highlighting successful cases of Greek emigrants broad. This emphasis on positive examples may be read as an attempt to boost the wounded national sentiment, forming hence the other pole in an ambivalent presentation of emigration, which on the one hand laments the ‘bleeding’ of the nation, while, on the other, depicts it as an (easy) way out from a wrecked economy and a corrupt and inefficient state (Pratsinakis et al., 2017a). This same discourse seems to have permeated to a certain degree the everyday too. Natasha (33, London) emigrated before the crisis erupted in Greece initially to do a postdoctoral degree in the Netherlands and then to London for work. She told me that one of the most significant changes that she experienced while being abroad was the reversal of views of people back in Greece in relation to her decision to emigrate:

During the first three years, people used to say to me ‘oh, it is such a pity, you live so far away,’ but the next three years the same people would say ‘you are far better abroad.’ There was a high contrast in their reactions. It was outrageous. At first they couldn’t understand my decision to leave the country and I had to convince them I did what I thought was right for me and after that, I had to convince them that things are not the best when you live abroad. During the first period when I had a plain job in England and earned little money, people in Greece used to disapprove my life and judge me. I had to prove to them why I did what I did. On the contrary now, they tend to accept my life and think that it is the best thing to do. Now they say to me ‘Are you crazy you want to come back?’ (4/2016).

As emigration was widely being discussed and indeed practiced equally widely, people were increasingly confronted with the dilemma if they should leave or stay. Emigration was thought as something they needed to urgently put in practice to avoid socioeconomic stagnation. For others, the fact the emigration gradually became a reality that concerned a significant number of people had in itself an impact on how they took migration decisions. Mihalis (32, London), for instance, described to me how he decided to emigrate at a period when many of his friends and fellow students in the University (he had studied civil engineering) were leaving. The emigration of a friend of his who had a good salary given the circumstances in Greece but decided to emigrate together with his girlfriend regardless, had a considerable impact on him:

Manolis: So the fact that many people were leaving made you also consider emigrating?

Mihalis: Yes. I think this applies to everyone. When you see that most of the people you know are leaving the country then you take the decision to leave more easily… Maybe ten years before, the situation was different. For example, possibly when you would try to leave things behind, people might have tried to stop you. However now people even encourage you to leave, ‘leave the country, there is nothing you can do here anyhow’ they say… (11/2016).

6 The Loosening of Social Constraints

People are embedded in webs of social relations. Taking the step to emigrate is a decision that does not only influence the migrant herself but also other people with whom she is invested in reciprocal relations. The departure of one or more individuals utterly reshapes this web of social relations and its internal arrangements and dynamics. In that sense, migration decisions are decisions that have a strong moral dimension. Often this moral dimension is perceived to concern one’s obligation towards the national community and, in this framing, decisions to leave may be seen as escapist or even treasonous (see Genova, 2020). Much more concrete are the dilemmas that migrants face towards ‘their close people’; the more one is embedded and invested in relations of solidarity and strong psychological and social dependency, the weightier it is for her to emigrate.

That concerns particularly family relations, and especially in Greece, which is characterised by a collectivistic culture (Kafetsios, 2019). In Greece, family relations have remained closely knit often characterised by mutual socioeconomic dependency and a culture of intergenerational solidarity that has historically substituted for the lack of provisions from a traditionally weak Greek welfare state. Along with its functions as provider of childcare, the family in Greece, and in Southern Europe more broadly, is the main locus of support, with both a social role and a productive role (Ferrera, 1996; Karamessini, 2007). The former role is pursued through the provision of care, emotional support and financial transfers for the needy and vulnerable members, such as the unemployed, the elderly and the chronically ill. The latter through the creation of family businesses, which have flourished in Greece.

The Greek family is also characterised by a child-centred mentality (Maratou-Alibranti, 1999, p.61) which augmented from the 1990s onward when the family emerged as a prime ‘social shock absorber’ against relatively high youth unemployment and protracted school-to-work transition (Karamessini, 2007). Parents provide support through extended co-residence with their adult children, financial support of their education and training, and a strong commitment to secure them stable employment. In this attempt they often mobilised clientelistic networks and family loyalties related to patron-client hierarchies to provide them access to public sector jobs. Others, in a similarly paternalistic mentality, expected their children to follow their profession, if self-employed, or to take over the family business if they had one.

Once public sector employment became no longer an option as a result of cuts and restrictions in new recruitments, and while several professional and employment sectors collapsed and small-scale family business found it extremely difficult to remain economically viable during the crisis, many Greek parents found it increasingly difficult to offer to their children access to any employment or to employment that their children would wish to take up. As a result, children became much more open to take risks to avoid socioeconomic stagnation by emigrating. On their side, the parents, partly as a result of their inability to provide access to good jobs to their children and partly due to a general deep-felt disappointment for what is widely perceived to be a grim future for younger generations in Greece, they became more favourable towards the emigration of their children even if that would, regrettably for them, entail physically separating from them.

7 Conclusion

In the past decade, in a period when Greece has suffered deeply from the economic crisis, austerity measures and their social and political consequences, emigration rates rose steeply. This resurgence of outmigration has attracted considerable attention in public debates in the country, particularly in relation to the brain drain phenomenon. Emphasis has been placed on the combined effect of the flight of a highly educated labor force on the one hand and recession or economic stagnation on the other. In this context, the emigration of a young generation of Greece professionals came to symbolise Greece’s economic and political downfall and indicate its grim prospects for the future. A discourse gradually emerged in which the return of the ‘brain drain’ generation was deemed sine qua non for Greece’s regeneration and subsequent governments made promises for repatriating the Greek professionals who left during the crisis. Such promises were not met leading to accusations and the further politicisation of the issue with the return of the young professionals who left during the crisis coming centre stage to the discussion about the emigration during the crisis.

The brain drain phenomenon, which as described was not caused by the recent outflow per se but was critically exacerbated by it, does merit the attention that it has attracted. That is not only due to its detrimental consequences on Greece’s socioeconomic and political progress, but also to uncover and problematise the ever-more complex stratification of ‘core-periphery’ relations re-emerging within the EU (King, 2015). However, reducing Greece’s emigration in the period of the crisis to the brain drain phenomenon is misleading. It reproduces a statist and economistic conceptualisation of migration far removed from the migrants’ subjectivities. As such it does not only silence the emigration of people of lower educational attainments, but also simplifies the subjective motivations, aspirations and desires of the majority of recent migrants, whose emigration cannot be explained as an outcome of strict economic, material and career considerations (see also Bartolini et al., 2017; Groutsis et al., 2020).

As outlined, the crisis not only fed Greece’s recent outflow in terms of volume, effectively shaping Greece’s third major outwave of migration, but also brought qualitative changes in migration motivations and aspirations. Unlike pre-crisis emigrants most of whom saw their emigration as a career move followed by an eventual return to Greece, most post-2010 emigrants, left Greece due to a perception of a depressing lack of prospects in their home country and a deep felt disappointment in the socioeconomic environment in Greece. Irrespective of skills, educations and age, the majority planned a longer stay abroad driven by a search for more predictable and stable lives and with the aim to ‘get ahead in their lives’ and materialise their aspirations. Many also described their decision to leave Greece as something they have always wanted to pursue, and that the crisis just gave them the extra push to do so. Their emigration thus hints of the drastically changed emigration environment in Greece. By altering everyday discourse on emigration and loosening up social constraints towards long distance mobility, the crisis has made emigration an option to be widely considered and practiced. At same time, the presence of new migrants abroad induced further migration through the workings of transnational networks in a self-feeding process which was critically facilitated by the freedom of movement within the European space.

Their ongoing emigration takes place in a period when Greece continues to be home for significant numbers of immigrants and one of the main entry points to Europe in the extremely perilous journey taken by various categories of disadvantaged moving populations. Similarly to the recent Greek emigrants, the arriving immigrants move striving to avoid major crises and ameliorate their live conditions. Yet their reduced options for legally permitted mobility entails a much more dangerous migration project which for large segment of them results in their forced immobilisation in Greece’s hot spots. Their exit strategy is not only a political act in relation to their home countries but also as a means to contest the condition that deprives them from the right to seek and upgrade their life conditions through geographical mobility (Mezzadra, 2010). The parallels between emigration of Greek citizens and immigration to Greece from the Global South become apparent and the contrast evident. In Greece’s dominant public discourse on brain drain, however, they conveniently remain hidden, serving the reproduction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinctions even in this transnational setting.