Immigration to Greece

The percentage of foreign populations in Greece is as high as 8.4% in proportion to the total population of the country. Moreover, between 9 and 11% of the registered Greek labor force of 4.4 million are foreigners. Migrants additionally make up 25% of wage and salary earners. Migrants are so plentiful that in a society with negative natural population growth, immigration has become the sole source of population increase overall.

As of 2012, Albanian migrants constitute some 55–60% or more of the immigrant population. More recent immigrant groups, with more recent political asylum and/or illegal migration flows through Turkey of Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, Somali and others. Since the 1990s, increases in such flows have led to the emergence of immigration as an increasingly important political issue in Greece.

Immigrants fill roles mainly in the informal sector, and there are large numbers of undocumented immigrants in Greece today. As larger numbers of migrants entered Greece in the 1990s, the Greek government's immigration policy began to be seen as lacking the control and legal framework to manage the situation. While the Greek government has made some changes in immigration policy, immigration reform remains a low priority.

In 2015, arrivals of refugees by sea have increased dramatically in Greece mainly due to the ongoing Syrian Civil War. There were 856,723 arrivals by sea in Greece, an almost fivefold increase to the same period of 2014. An estimated 8% of the arrivals applied for asylum in Greece, with others hoping to find asylum in Northern European countries.

For the first half of the twentieth century, immigration mostly flowed outwards from Greece. At the turn of the century, the majority of Greek immigrants migrated to the United States; from the 1950s to the 1970s, migration flowed towards other European countries, mainly the Federal Republic of Germany, where there was a labor shortage in the rebuilding process after the second world war. Additionally, about 65,000 Greeks sought refuge in former Soviet Bloc countries after the defeat of the left-wing forces in the Greek Civil War (1946-9). Looking solely at the years 1955 to 1970, approximately one million people—over ten percent of the total Greek population—left Greece to emigrate primarily to Europe, Australia, and North America.

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