727 Cheliotis management of a variety of discontents amongst average Greek citizens, including by compensating for their spreading pains of downward mobility and falling living standards since the financial crisis hit Greece in 2009, in accordance with what this article terms the ‘more eligibility’ principle. Once one begins to grasp these functions, one has already gone a long way towards explaining why the Greek state stubbornly persists in making use of rhetoric that is blatantly indefensible and bound to attract further disapprobation. Irregular migration in contemporary Greece Greece first became a country of net immigration in the 1990s, following the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Despite variations in terms of size and composition over the years, the population of migrants entering Greece illegally has grown overall to constitute a large part of the total population of immigrants in the country. In 2011, for example, out of an estimated total of 887,658 immigrants in Greece (itself amounting to around 8% of the country’s total population), close to half are believed to have been unregistered, with a substantial decrease recorded in the proportion of irregular migrants from Albania and a concomitant increase in the proportion of Asians and Africans (see Triandafyllidou, 2012; also Maroukis, 2012a, 2012b). What has made Greece such a common destination for irregular migrants is, on one hand, her extensive land and coastal borders with several migrant source countries (e.g. Turkey, Albania), which also renders Greece the main gateway for irregular migration to the European Union, and, on the other hand, her large informal labour market (including e.g. agriculture, the construction industry, and domestic services), which in practical terms has readily absorbed unskilled and semi-skilled workers without papers (see further Lawrence, 2005; Papadopoulou-Kourkoula, 2008). Opportunities for long-term settlement, however, are few and far between in Greece, not least due to state reluctance to recognise the status and address the needs of asylum seekers and irregular migrants. Although, for example, the volume of asylum applications to Greece has grown to be amongst the highest in Europe, the country has maintained one of the lowest rates of asylum recognition in the continent, having long avoided putting in place an efficient and effective system for processing applications (CPT, 2011; Karamanidou and Schuster, 2011). Similarly, whilst irregular migrants are overrepresented in Greece amongst the poorest and most vulnerable, there is no clear legal basis for them to submit claims for emergency social assistance (European Committee of Social Rights, 2010; see further Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2010). Immigrants’ prospects for integration in Greek society are further undermined by the treatment they receive by the police. Immigrant communities in Greece are systematically subject to over-policing, including a greater likelihood of being stopped and searched and so-called ‘sweep’ or ‘cleaning operations’ launched in the name of fighting illegal immigration, drug-related criminality and prostitution (see further Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2011). Practices of police violence against immigrants have also been reported with notable regularity, from the unwarranted use of force and the deliberate destruction of residence permits during routine identity checks to physical maltreatment in police stations (see e.g. Amnesty International, 2012a). Police authorities have shown Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013