Inside GAPs Blogs

On February 4th, the new bill of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, titled “Promotion of Legal Migration Policies,” reached the plenary session of the Greek Parliament. Among its provisions are measures introducing increased prison sentences and higher financial penalties for the offenses of “facilitating” the irregular entry or unlawful stay of migrants in the country, when those convicted are members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or act jointly with others. In addition, the bill provides for the possibility of removing an NGO from the ministry’s registry (which grants access to public funding and to facilities under its responsibility) solely on the basis that one of its members is charged with any of the above offenses—meaning that no conviction is required for the organization’s deletion.

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Timokleia Psallidaki is a member of the GAPs research team in Greece at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE). She is a PhD candidate in Migration Studies and Human Geography at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Her research interests include migration, border transformations, practices of migrants’ settlement in the city, socio-spatial inequalities, European migration policies, mobility, and precarity. During my postgraduate studies in Urban and Regional Planning at NTUA, I engaged with critical geography perspectives that conceptualize space as a relational entity—one shaped by interconnections, multiplicity, and ongoing interactions between global and local dynamics. Perceiving space…

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In the context of return migration from Greece, whether considered through the legal and institutional framework or the research on the ‘Return Migration Infrastructures’, the issue of regularity versus irregularity is inescapable. Irregularity has become a central concept in dominant public discourses about migration, often defined in opposition to regularity—or, more specifically, legality. By equating irregularity with illegality, this binary logic is used to stigmatize migrants as ‘threats’ to national and EU social and political structures. This oversimplification, however, neglects the complex ways in which irregularity is not simply a status but a process shaped by…

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