The described process of hiring foreign workers for legal work in Greece, in my opinion, gives enough explanation of why most employers prefer to deal with illegal foreign workers rather than engage themselves in the process of following the specific state law. It was so tiring to read about this, imagine how tiring the real process is... Taking into account the scale of Greek bureaucracy and of how “fast” things normally work out in this country, such applications are usually either “lost” on their way from one institution to another or take over a year to get to the final point of the arrival of the foreign worker in Greece. Plus, most employers have no wish to show their real earnings and the first stop factor for them is the required provision of tax payments which gives him the right to apply for employment of a foreign worker (ΕΚΚΑΘΑΡΙΣΤΙΚΟ ΕΦΟΡΙΑΣ).
I do not have a specific opinion about this topic, because on the one hand I realize that this overloaded and somewhat ridiculous chain of actions by various state authorities is meant to protect the local Greek citizens` labour rights which is totally fair, but on the other hand most of the jobs that migrant workers do are of no practical interest for Greek citizens (see the post "Why are work migrants profitable for the EU?") which means that there is no competition between the locals and the foreigners in this case and in most of the cases with foreign workers an employer wishes to hire a SPECIFIC person whom he knows in person and is obliged to go through all this grueling legal process just for typical reasons. If my personal work experience at the Visa Department of the Consulate General of Greece in Odessa during the final stage of the employment process counts, I can say that in the majority of cases the future employees were children of women and men whose employer wanted to hire them for the work that their parents did in the SAME work place. So it was a kind of a family reunion through employment of foreigners` children.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the arrival of the final Greek State Decision (ΚΟΙΝΗ ΥΠΟΥΓΙΚΗ ΑΠΟΦΑΣΗ) to a Consulate is not the end of the story, because the Schengen Treaty passes over the final decision of granting visa to the related Consulate and to the Customs officers of the countries of origin and destination (See below the link to the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about Schengen Treaty). This theoretically means that if the Visa Officer of a related Consulate or a Customs Officer at the border has some particular doubts, he is given the right of not allowing the future employee to cross the border of the destination country by either not issuing the required visa (in case of Consulates) or detaining him for another investigation. Although practically in case of legal work megrants it rarely happens.
In my opinion, this article is important for those of us who want to understand the migration policy of the Greek state towards potential foreign work migrants. Its challenges are first, how to effectively control migrant inflows and, second, to prevent legal immigrants from lapsing into illegality and help promote their economic and social integration. I think this article explains quite well some of the basic reasons why Greece is flooded with illegal work migrants from such post-Soviet states as Ukraine and Moldova.
Sources:
1. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Schengen Treaty.
Sources:
1. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Schengen Treaty.
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