Chapter 2: The hidden history of immigration detention in Greece (1990-2010) ‘We had them caged because there were no detention centres there yet. We had built a fence around them in order to keep them there. And for a toilet we had dug out some holes because there was nothing else’ (Police officer, 2012). Introduction This chapter asks readers to picture Greece not by its acclaimed physical features, mountains, rivers and scenic islands, or by its ancient glorious past, but by its contemporary experiences in receiving immigrant populations. If we understood the pain, desperation and anxiety suffered by several groups of people as part of a historical cycle of racialised immigration controls, would we still focus our attention on the summer of 2015, when nearly 1 million people entered Europe through Greece, and its consequences? (Clayton and Holland, 2015).32 While not denying the seismic securitisation that followed the political and humanitarian crisis in Europe in 2015,33 this chapter seeks to situate current practice in a longer historical context of border control policies in Greece and Europe that had already been well-rehearsed in border enforcement and immigration law, as well as detention and deterrence policies and practices dating back to the beginning of the 1990s (Voutira, 2013; Karamanidou, 2015). As Anna Carastathis et. al (2018, p. 35) pointedly argue ‘constructing the “refugee crisis” as a sudden event with a determinate historical beginning—like a natural disaster—enables the histories and trajectories of forced migration over the past three decades to be forgotten, and the precarity to which “illegal immigrants” (as they were castigated in dominant discourses) were subjected in Greece’. The map of Greece that emerges from this chapter, then, is one of rivers full of dead bodies, mountains where people lose their way to freedom and prison islands where the loss of dignity overpowers hope. This picture may not be in line with the sense of pride Michaela Benson and Chantelle Lewis (2019) make a similar point about Brexit and everyday racism in Britain and Europe. They claim that Brexit should not be considered as a rupture but rather just as another case of everyday racism, personal experiences of racialization and racial violence, and longer European histories of racialization and racism 33 While what occurred in Europe after 2015, when more than 1.25 million refugees arrived at the borders of the European Union, has been broadly termed as a refugee crisis, I agree with authors, like Bojadžijev and Mezzadra (2015) and Afouxenidis et al. (2017), that the frame of a ‘refugee crisis’ puts the emphasis on people on the move and opens up the space for the production of specific types of subjects, at the same time as it diverts attention from the fact that the events that followed the summer of 2015, were in fact a crisis of European migration policies. See also De Genova and Tazzioli (2016) on the abuse of the term crisis. 32 65