Athens : Immigrants Welcome
Refugees, language and deserving or undeserving movers
As the final stop on a recent European rail trip, and on the way to Beirut (more of that another day soon, no doubt), I made a brief visit to Athens.
There’s never a good reason not to stop-in on Athens. The city has been a welcoming one to me since I first visited and stayed a while in 2017, and for all the changes there, it still holds a sense of home. As I write this, I remember (a little amazed not to have written Istanbul) that I chose it when the other year National Geographic asked me to write about a place close to my heart.
As that short portrait details, my time in Athens and all Greece since has been inseparable from events in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and East Africa, as well as the situation at the border with Türkiye. Refugees were integral to the community centres and social fabric in neighbourhoods and places I spent my time.
A universal spirit of a borderless world always seemed so implicit to the Greeks I knew - many of them self-identifying as anarchists or leftists, but others just Greeks going about lives as parents, professionals, or owners of small businesses - that it became a major part of what I loved about the city. It equally made it - even as an outsider - sad and confusing that Greece elected the far-right and so-called “New Democracy” government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis in 2019, and it was with dismay that people since watched as he went about vilifying refugees inside and out of Greece, further militarising borders, ceasing refugee coordination with Türkiye, and in general worsening regional relations in every direction.
All this is just a backdrop to the above image of stencilled graffiti, seen briefly on a final day in Athens. The graffiti of Athens has, in those neighbourhoods I spent my time, always been loudly supportive of refugee rights. “Refugees Welcome, Tourists Go Home!” is a message I’ve seen with many subtle variations, and I often wondered whether it was my Turkishness and belief in an eternal Greek-Turkish bond, my being a writer, repeat visits, or just Greek hospitality that explained why I always seemed to be given more warmth than the tourist status I felt was all I really deserved. I suppose sometimes asking Why? isn’t really important.
The reason the graffiti and its message caught my eye is perhaps quickly apparent. Putting aside the fact it’s in English rather than either Greek or Cyrillic, and so intended for international consumption, the message has been uprated from the more familiar Refugees Welcome, to the more general Immigrants Welcome. Seeing it felt instinctively like an important change in language and message that needs to happen more broadly than only in Athens.
While of course basically supportive of it, I’ve always had issues with the simplicity of the RefugeesWelcome message. Perhaps I’ll write about it another time, but to keep this short let’s just say I feel it risks self-congratulation from the (usually Western) countries welcoming, or sometimes saving, people from whatever they’re escaping. At the same time it risks understating the chronic difficulty and pain of leaving your home to begin with, even assuming you complete the journey safely.
The emphasis is perhaps forgivable for its necessary simplicity, though less so where it is used to obscure emphasis on Western trade and foreign policies, Western bombs and sanctions, and Western-backed regimes from which people also have to escape. Far better to not destroy countries to begin with than to welcome the vanishingly small number who can successfully pay for, and complete, the journey out of them and into a new life of precarity and frequent alienation in the West. As both US and UK politics recently witnessed: is is less reputational risk to call for (and likely still be ignored) respect of refugee rights, than to demand democratic changes to Western state, energy and climate policy that makes the creation of refugees implicit.
The other problem I have with RefugeesWelcome, and why I think ImmigrantsWelcome is doing a useful job, is that Refugees appeals to a sense, and so separates, between an idea of those migrants who are deserving and undeserving, legitimate or illegitimate. I know US people living in Europe who joke at being refugees from a country they no longer want to live in. Others now pointedly refer to themselves as “immigrants” rather than “expats”, to help normalise and make apparent the double-standards of how these words are deployed. All this represents a small but useful step in changing language in a discourse that across a generation became successfully led and owned by right-wing media.
This broader sense of worthiness is no stranger in the capitalist logic of Western politics. The deserving and undeserving poor are readily partitioned between those who work hard to stay poor, and those who - perhaps for reason of disability, mental health ailment, or sheer rotten luck - are through no fault of their own unable to. A refugee often conjures - where it is covered sympathetically at all - the idea of a poor, pitiful individual who we cannot deny help, while the immigrant has mostly now been stigmatised in mainstream Western discourse. Where immigrants are defended at all it is generally as an economic actor. Immigrants are in fact good for the economy: they staff our health service, they serve our coffees. I am not sure either label works fully, but the Refugee is presented as an object for compassion and the immigrant, at best, as a useful economic input. Welcoming immigrants feels like a useful step in humanising all those who have to move, while perhaps warding against some of the culture of saviourism that can attach itself to refugee politics.
There are further anomalies, too, where refugee status is anyway at the mercy of right-wing European and North American political forces. Having been destroyed and plunged into war by the US-UK, but with a favourable government installed by the invasion, Iraq has spent many years adjudged to be a “safe country” to which people could be returned.
Afghans have often faced a similar bureaucratic hurdle, all of which on one-hand creates implicitly dehumanising requirements of suffering before people are offered a chance at a fair life in a safer and more economically stable country. On the other hand and by the same token, this hierarchy of needs denigrates those who have the misfortune of simply needing to move because their home economy has been ruined and there is no chance of a livelihood, because a changing climate no longer irrigates their fields, because they have the misfortune of being repressed by regimes the West is allied with.
Language and labels are always imperfect: what we gain in the need to speak plainly we generally lose in the ability to capture nuance or recognise complexity. Both Refugee and Immigrant fail in the fundamental task of humanising people beyond the fact of their movement and the reasons for it. The arising injustices and hardships can only be fixed through politics, not language, which is perhaps useful to bear in mind while we are increasingly encouraged to feud over words.
That being said, in the spirit of encouraging conversation, and a quick glimpse of graffiti in Athens: Immigrants Welcome.
***I hope to increase the regularity of posts here in the coming months. I continue to struggle between wanting to reward paid-subscribers with more paid-only content, and fund the time it takes to write these blogs, with of course the fundamental reason for writing: wanting to be read, and have as many people as possible exposed to my perspective, which I’ve always been very glad to hear valued in its alternative to mainstream media. It remains my hope not to have to use a paywall for these posts, and thanks greatly to all paid subscribers who have allowed me to so far hold-off introducing one.***