No Safe Haven 163 agreement, the European Commission insists on (voluntary or forced) return to the countries of origin or to a country of transit to send “a clear message to illegal residents in the Member States and potential illegal migrants outside the EU, that illegal entry and residence do not lead to the stable form of residence they wish to achieve”.44 Maybe the time has come, not only in Athens, but also in Brussels, where basic concepts of immigration control are formulated in the framework of a common EU migration and asylum policy, to discuss that irregular immigration from outside of Europe is and will be a social phenomenon not only to be solved with enhanced border control and (forced or voluntary) repatriation. Other strategies and instruments for the effective management of irregular migration might be discussed, too, for example exceptions from the rule of return and preconditions for granting residence rights to undocumented migrants of third countries origin in spite of their unauthorized entry to European territory.45 Finally, I would like to argue that the adequate analytical concept to be applied in migration studies is the term “undocumented migrant” or “irregular migrant” for this specific group of undocumented foreigners whose presence in the black zone of illegality is clearly constructed as a classification by state authorities, which categorize him or her as such. On the other hand, and especially for reasons of academic clarification, I prefer to use the term “illegal migration” instead of the also often used term “irregular migration” to characterize the complex process of unauthorized entry and reception management, which in the Greek case is characterized by unacceptable conditions in the local reception facilities and a series of legal omissions and violations of EU regulations that make Greece an unsafe haven for arriving undocumented irregular migrants. Literature Alipranti-Maratou, Laura 2007: Migration to Greece: A New Type and Emerging Problems. In: Elisabeth Close, Maria Tsianikas, George Couvalis (eds.), Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University June 2005, Flinders Department of Languages – Modern Greek. Adelaide: University Press, 185–198. 44 Proposals of the European Commission on “Wide-ranging common actions to combat illegal immigration at EU level”. See: http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/immigration/ 45 For a discussion of approaches to control irregular migration to the EU see Düvell 2006. illegal/fsj_immigration_illegal_en.htm.

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