about the name of the newly found neighbouring state been termed,38 led to the rebirth and institutionalision of a wide and aggressive nationalist rhetoric, which presented migrants as an imminent threat to the national cohesion and political stability (including the stability of the borders) of the country (Triandafyllidou, 2009; Christopoulos, 2014). Moreover, as King et al. (1998) observe in their analysis of the circumstances surrounding the mass departures from Albania of the early 1990s, the collapse of local economic structures and social welfare in Albania fed a demand for cheap labour in the agricultural and construction sectors of the Greek economy. The first large scale immigration from Albania at the beginning of the 90s was represented in the media and anchored in the collective memory, as (yet another) invasion from the barbaric other. Martin Baldwin-Edwards (2004, p. 51) frames the insecurity that the mass exodus from the neighbouring country has produced as ‘a fear of Albanians’. The numbers of people who crossed the 280 kilometers long mountainous borderline between Albania and Greece were so high that this has been described as one of Europe’s largest contemporary migrations, both in its size and its concentration over a very short period of time. For example, between 1991 and 1993, around 300,000 Albanians migrated to Greece. By 2001, 55.6 per cent of the documented immigrant population in Greece came from Albania, making Greece the only country in the EU with such a large percentage of a single ethnic group (Nikas and Aspasios, 2011). At the same time as communism in Albania was taking its last breaths, the naïve myth of the absolute national and religious uniformity of the Greek society was collapsing too. While, as research overwhelmingly shows, the public was bombarded by near-hysterical reports in the mass media, which constructed the stereotype of the ‘dangerous Albanian’ and amplified public feelings of xenophobia, the Greek government was equipped only with an antiquated immigration law, which went back to 1929, to respond to immigration (Antonopoulos, 2006; Baldwin-Edwards, 2004; Lazaridis and Wickens, 1999). The new legal document 1975/1991 ‘Entrance-exit, sojourn, employment, expulsion of aliens, determination of refugee status and other provisions’ signaled the first phase of It was the Republic of Macedonia then and following an agreement in 2018, the country’s name changed to Republic of North Macedonia. For an analysis of the issue of the ‘Macedonian question’ as well as the response of the Greek government to the neighbouring country’s claims to what the Greeks deemed ‘their’ national heritage, see Roudometof (1996). 38 69