60 Race & Class 56(4) Generally speaking, dealing with a ‘social question’ is anything but independent of how such a question is formulated and who feels authorised to handle it. History shows how the social exclusion of particular groups leads to their being deprived of all means of subsistence, artificially creating a ‘social question’ that, again, the authorities are anxious to solve not necessarily by changing the conditions of deprivation but, all too often, by repression, isolation, detention or even, as in the case of the Roma during the second world war, by extermination. They, who had previously been banned from employment, were then accused of parasitism on society at large.4 In the current neoliberal context, the situation of refugees and undocumented immigrants unveils facets of global inequality at the local level. The exhausted, uninvited foreigners, arriving clandestinely, embody what Zygmunt Bauman has sarcastically termed the ‘collateral casualty (or damage)’ of unco-ordinated and uncontrolled globalisation. ‘Thinking in terms of collateral damages tacitly assumes an already existing inequality of rights and chances, while accepting a priori the unequal distribution of the costs of undertaking (or for that matter of desisting from) action.’5 The issue is then how to cope with ‘modernity’s outcasts’6 when they become publicly visible as a wretched collective human subject, deprived of any means of survival; a miserable mass that disturbs the public image of desired social harmony. The presence of a needy group of border crossers in the town of Mytilene in the autumn of 2012 mobilised civil society rather than the authorities. That first spontaneous reaction of solidarity took a more systematic form as migrants continued to enter. All the while, local authorities failed to take responsibility for providing those arriving with ad hoc aid. The solidarity exercised by the local society did not come out of nowhere, though. Ordinary citizens were already sensitised to the social deprivation and increasing impoverishment of the local population, arising from the current economic crisis. So the first collective initiative to house the immigrants and refugees came from a recently formed social network of activists whose initial objective was to counteract that impoverishment. The network was called ‘The Village of “All-Together”’ (from the title of a Greek anti-racist tale by Sokratis Mantzouranis). Members of the ‘Village’ and independent activists asked for permission to re-open a holiday camp for children called PIKPA that had been closed for several years. The municipal authority agreed and PIKPA started accommodating the border crossers. This was the genesis of a civic project that was an alternative to, if not quite the opposite of, detention. The centre operated on the basis of the solidarity shown by local people and activists who cared for the guests, along with NGOs such as Doctors without Borders and others. Members of this solidarity network also liaised with the authorities responsible for the formalities that would allow the refugees and immigrants to leave the island for the mainland, as was their wish. The thinking behind the negotiations was that they should be legally dealt with as delinquents, i.e., as having made an unauthorised entry into the country, for which the penalty was an order to leave. This was instead of classifying such entry as a crime, which would have led to their being detained for an indeterminate period. Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016