2006. Compounding matters, in 2010 Greece was globally the country with the fourth highest number of backlogged asylum cases, 48,201 (UNHCR, 2010a). As she contends, the country’s exclusionary and sluggish qualities of the Greek asylum system, are not just a matter of the sheer volume of cases but also a symptom of Greece’s bureaucracy and unwillingness to address claims of protection seriously. In practical terms, those who were unable to secure a red card, which certified that their asylum application had been received and was being examined, could be detained again; therefore, connecting the streets outside the Petrou Ralli offices, where migrants waited to be registered, to the detention centre that was waiting those who failed to do so, two floors above. The boundaries of deterrence A development, which has influenced the location and the types of immigration detention facilities, was the ‘transfer’ of migration routes from Western Greece to the Eastern Aegean.47 The highest number of apprehensions at Greece’s borders during the period under examination in this chapter was recorded in 2008, with 146,337 people being arrested in a 12-month period, exceeding by 30% the previous year’s arrests. ‘It is the anxiety that I feel every night when they release all the slave ships at the coasts of Greece, without any control from Turkey, all these people that we have to take care of with respect to their rights and their life’, said the Minister of Interior, Prokopis Pavlopoulos addressing the Greek Parliament in June 2008 (cited in Düvell et al., 2010). However, contrary to the official narrative, most apprehensions in 2008, 54,245, were, in fact, recorded in the mainland, while only 30,149 were apprehended at the Greek-Turkish sea border and another 14,461 at the Greek-Turkish land border; raising questions about the claims of hordes of people coming from the East. Yet, the moral panic about the rising numbers crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, paved the way for Greece to step up efforts to control the country’s borders, inviting the involvement of European institutions. In 2006, Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, began operating in the Aegean using various operational means (agents, equipment, etc.), aimed at stopping the massive arrival and entry of migrants. From 2008, Arrests at the Greek-Albanian border did not cease during this period. In fact, between 2007 and 2010 they accounted for 30 per cent of total apprehensions (Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini, 2011). The difference between Albanians and Middle Eastern migrants, which were the predominant ethnic group arriving through the Greek-Turkish borders, however, was that the former were by that time easily deportable due to the Readmission Agreement signed between the two countries in 2005; thus they did not represent a ‘deportation problem’ anymore. 47 79