Commentary 95 practices. These are especially common during operations ostensibly aimed at tackling illegal immigration, which often result in the confiscation of personal legal documents, such as passports, and the destruction (for no apparent reason) of residence and employment documents, such as the prasini karta (green card). The international ‘war on terror’ has brought another dimension to state racism in Greece. Following the July 2005 terrorist attack in London, UK security services appear to have requested an investigation by their Athens counterparts into a potential Greek connection. As a result, the Greek authorities carried out a massive sweep of migrants in Greece, with 1,000 law enforcement units, including state security, immigration and counter-terrorism officers questioning 5,432 individuals. In a separate incident, twenty-eight Pakistani men were abducted by plain-clothes Greek security agents and driven to secret houses where they were interrogated and subjected to abuse and illtreatment for between two to six days before being released. British intelligence agents are thought to have been present during the interrogations.14 Police perceptions of migrants Behind these practices lies a perception that particular migrant and minority groups are intrinsically criminal. In 2002, I carried out interviews with a number of detectives in Greece on their views of the relationship between migrants and crime. In general, the detectives did not consider migration to be a positive phenomenon for Greek society; it was rather seen as a ‘huge problem’ that is getting worse. Most of the detectives referred to migration as a ‘plague’ or a source of irritation, threatening Greece and the rest of the West. Migration to Greece was seen as the cause of a number of other problems – criminality, insecurity and unemployment – deeply affecting Greek life. As one detective commented: Migration has harmed Greece to a very large extent. Migrants have made us fearful of sleeping in our yards and balconies in the summer, as we used to do before. Everyone lives in fear now. Foreigners take jobs from the Greeks. Greece has become a ‘fenceless vineyard’, in which anyone can enter whenever they want and the results are evident. They made us install alarms in our houses and sleep with a gun under the pillow. I do not think that migrants are a good thing for Greece.15 Apart from criminality, insecurity and unemployment, detectives also claimed that migration was causing an imbalance between Greeks and migrants in some sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and construction, and also spoke of their thwarting increases in the wages Downloaded from http://rac.sagepub.com at Athens Univ. of Economics on June 25, 2007 © 2006 Institute of Race Relations. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.