739 Cheliotis determination to reduce the number of irregular migrants in the country than Minister Dendias’ statement suggests. In fact, whether by commission or omission, the Greek state appears to have played a key role in the maintenance of what it portrays, more often than not in apocalyptic terms, as the excessive size of the irregular migrant population in the country. The long barbed-wire fence in the region of Evros, for example, was constructed with a delay inversely proportional to the urgency ascribed to it in dominant political discourse as a means of preventing irregular immigration into Greece from her mainland borders with Turkey. Stringent policies and infamously protracted bureaucratic procedures, meanwhile, have long limited the chances of regularisation for those entering Greece, as attested by the stubbornly low rates of refugee recognition and the vast numbers of migrants facing difficulties in acquiring or renewing stay permits for work purposes (Cabot, 2012; Xenakis, 2011). The case of policing is not dissimilar: whilst no substantial changes appear to have occurred in recent years in the size of the irregular migrant population resident in Greece (Maroukis, 2012a, 2012b), the annual volume of apprehensions of irregular migrants in the country nearly halved between 2008 and 2012 (see further Cheliotis, in progress). To top it all off, the legal maximum duration of immigration detention has undergone repeated extensions since 2009, at the same time that a significant overall downward trend has been recorded in the volume of deportations actually carried out (although this is to some extent due to a lack of cooperation on the part of Turkey in terms of readmitting irregular migrants of Asian and African descent; see further Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini, 2011). Given, on one hand, that Greece has been subject to international criticism for its continuing failure to curb irregular migration and its inefficient asylum system, and, on the other hand, that irregular migrants themselves have reportedly grown increasingly willing to leave Greece, it is a paradox of no small proportion that the Greek state has largely subverted or otherwise thwarted its very own proclamations about the need to constrain the number of irregular migrants in the country. In the last analysis, the reproduction of power imbalances that is achieved in Greece through policies and practices disguised behind the veil of philoxenia needs to be understood primarily as a process of deliberate if qualified inclusion, rather than a question of designed but often failed exclusion (for similar arguments, see Bigo, 2002; Calavita, 2005; De Giorgi, 2010; Melossi, 2003). Since the late 1980s, for instance, the irregular or precarious legal status of large swathes of migrants, their poverty and the limited social rights meted out to them have combined with the looming prospect of imprisonment, and increasingly of administrative detention, to render them exploitable in the Greek labour market (see further Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2010). Indeed, the fact that standards of living inside prisons and immigration detention centres in Greece have been kept so low has functioned to threaten the most marginalised fractions of the population into accepting any available condition of work in the free community, in accordance with what has come to be known in pertinent Anglophone literature as the ‘less eligibility’ principle, arguably much more so than to deter irregular migration into the country (Cheliotis, in progress).8 More recently, and especially since the financial crisis hit Greece in 2009, the widely publicised intensification in the use of penal and particularly administrative detention against migrants has been deployed by governing parties as a convenient cathartic remedy Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013