I have lived in Athens for eight years. long enough to know the streets, for knowing many people, many Cafenew, Rebetiko music, parks, theaters, but also long enough to watch the same headline repeat itself: “Confronting illegal immigration.”
Year after year, this phrase sets the tone. Not just in media, but in how lives are categorized, monitored, and ultimately denied their full weight. It is a language of suspicion. It does not ask who someone is or what they have survived. It only asks how they arrived. And that, from the very beginning, turns the search for protection into an accusation.
Before I came to Greece, I lived in Turkey under the term of refugee. I had fled my country because of political repression. I could running from poverty or instability, but I was running from prison. I carried the weight of interrogations, threats, the knowledge of friends who never made it out.
In Turkey, protection was never a guarantee. Refugee status was a technical category—recognized, but hollow. You were allowed to wait, but not to move. Allowed to breathe, but not to live. We waited for years in the shadow of bureaucracy for third country resettlement, confined to cities not of our choosing, denied the right to work or travel. Every part of daily life was wrapped in conditional permissions.
Many stayed. Some of us hoped. But after years of stagnation, delay, and uncertainty, some people began to move. Not for adventure, not for opportunity—but to escape the slow erosion of dignity. When every step of your life depends on a signature that may never come, movement becomes the only form of agency you have left.
And so, many took the road to Europe in 2015.
I did it two years later, in the winter of 2017. After a long wait and constant replies saying, “Wait!” But the moment we crossed that line—from Turkey into Greece—everything changed. Not in our history, not in our reasons for coming, but in how we were described.
The moment we crossed the border, we were reclassified—not as refugees, but as “migrants.” It’s a small word, but it carries the weight of a whole social order. In that single act of renaming, everything we had lived through—repression, flight, loss—was overwritten by suspicion.
This isn’t just semantics. It’s what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic violence: the power to name, to categorize, and to make those categories appear neutral—even natural. Bureaucracies do not just process people; they produce them as types. And once labeled “migrant,” you’re no longer someone to be protected, but someone to be managed.
The category does the work of erasure. It flattens history and hides power. It allows the state to treat persecution as irregularity, trauma as risk. And the more these labels circulate—through laws, forms, media—the more legitimate they seem. You become a number, a case, a problem.
This is how the state performs what Bourdieu called misrecognition: a form of institutional forgetting disguised as objective procedure. The past no longer matters. The only thing that matters is your category. And once that label is stamped on your file, dignity becomes conditional.
In this logic, dignity becomes secondary.
And indifference—slow, silent, procedural—becomes the real violence.
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In today’s asylum system, the question has shifted. No one asks why you came. The only question is: Did you come legally? And the system itself ensures the answer is always no.
This is not a gap in the law—it is the law functioning precisely as intended. Étienne Balibar has written about how European borders operate not just as physical barriers, but as legal filters—mechanisms that sort lives into categories of worth. The border doesn’t only block people; it reshapes their political existence.
For those of us fleeing repression, the notion of “legality” is absurd. What visa exists for someone hunted by their own government? What embassy grants safety to a name on a blacklist? The system criminalizes the very act of survival—and in doing so, denies what Balibar calls the right to have rights.
And when the only path to safety is outside the law, the very system designed to protect human rights becomes the one that invalidates them. Illegality isn’t a crime—it’s a condition imposed by the state itself.
Another truth is, immigration regulations are not only strict—they are often built to be impenetrable. Layers of conditions, endless documentation, waiting periods that stretch for years. For most people outside the West, legal entry into Europe, Unites State, Canada and … is less a process and more a closed door. And yet, despite this, some still take the risk. They cross deserts, walk through forests, sleep in stations and camps, and climb into boats they know might not survive the sea.
Yes, it may seem illogical. But what choice does a person have when every part of the world agrees that travel to safety is a privilege—not a right? What choice is left when you’re told your life must first be approved by a consulate or a quota or an algorithm? In that kind of world, people do what they must. They move with nothing but determination and memory. They risk it all, not because they want to break the rules, but because the rules were never made for them in the first place.
But, if you made it, the absurdity at the heart of the system shows itself: it punishes you for surviving.
For years now, Greece—like other European border states—has been described as “under pressure.” But this language conceals more than it reveals. It obscures how crisis has been strategically framed to justify a permanent state of exception, where the presence of displaced people is not met with rights, but with regulation, surveillance, and containment.
Nicos Poulantzas warned that under modern capitalism, the state no longer simply represses—it governs by differentiating. It selectively distributes rights, recognition, and vulnerability. Migrants are not denied inclusion outright; they are included in ways that neutralize their presence, making them visible only as problems to manage.
This is why, even as state policy treats asylum as a threat to order, thousands of ordinary people across Greece have responded with quiet, radical care. Volunteers, teachers, neighbors, and grassroots groups have built a parallel infrastructure of solidarity—not charity, but a form of popular counter-power. A politics from below that insists people are more than their legal status.
But to protect that dignity, civil rights movements must become clearer about what they defend. The right to asylum and the right to migrate are not the same—and confusing them, even with good intentions, risks weakening both.
Asylum is a right grounded in international law. It protects individuals fleeing persecution, war, or torture. It is not a privilege, nor an act of charity by the host state. It is a legal obligation under instruments like the 1951 Refugee Convention. Defending asylum means defending the principle that people have the right to escape violence and seek safety, regardless of how they arrive.
Immigration, on the other hand, is governed by national policies that regulate who may enter, reside, or work in a country. These policies are often arbitrary, shaped by labor markets, racial hierarchies, or geopolitical interest—not human need. Strengthening immigration rights means challenging these exclusions and affirming freedom of movement as a principle of global justice.
Both struggles matter—but they are not interchangeable. When asylum is reduced to just another “migration issue,” it loses its legal power. And when immigration is only defended in terms of victimhood, it cedes the ground of political agency.
But this contradiction cannot last forever. The authoritarian state does not merely repress such acts—it erodes them. It isolates them, criminalizes them, marginalizes them. And so the politics of solidarity becomes a contested terrain, caught between the slow violence of the law and the urgency of human need.
But even within these movements, something begins to echo the very logic they aim to resist. When solidarity becomes defined solely as opposition to the state, it risks reproducing its exclusions in different form. The refugee becomes a figure of need—someone to be helped, but not heard. Personal history becomes irrelevant unless it fits the narrative of vulnerability. Dissent, memory, or political critique are quietly sidelined, treated as disruptive or ungrateful. In this way, solidarity hardens into a new kind of sorting—less brutal, but still selective. It forgets that many of us did not flee only poverty or war, but repression, struggle, betrayal. And in forgetting, it demands silence as the price of inclusion. The same background that made us fugitives—the politics, the trauma, the resistance—is now what makes us difficult. And so, once again, we are asked to disappear.
And when trauma is ignored—when the histories of violence, betrayal, and resistance are forced underground—it does not make people safer. It makes them invisible, volatile, fragmented. The human being, denied meaning and memory, becomes either a potential criminal in the eyes of the state, or a dangerous excess in the eyes of solidarity. We are allowed to exist only as silent recipients of help—not as subjects with difficult truths, political convictions, or unresolved grief. But trauma, left unacknowledged, begins to leak. It shows up in anger, distrust, isolation. It is not pathology—it is the consequence of being constantly managed but never seen. And so the structures that claim to offer protection end up producing the very instability they fear. In the name of order, they discard the person. In the name of care, they exclude the one who remembers too much.
Solidarity movements try to affirm life.
Policy frameworks try to sort it.
And between them, we live in the gap. Not fully included, not fully excluded. Not prisoners, but never fully free.
This is why dialogue matters—not just as conversation, but as structure. As practice. As refusal. In a landscape shaped by silence, misrecognition, and symbolic violence, dialogue becomes the only way to reintroduce what the system erases: memory, contradiction, agency. Without it, solidarity turns into choreography. Institutions become ritual. People are sorted into roles they did not choose: the grateful refugee, the helping volunteer, the invisible intermediary.
Dialogue breaks this script. It makes space for conflict, discomfort, misunderstanding—all the things that come with truth. But more than anything, it makes people audible again. In solidarity movements, in social initiatives, and even within institutional spaces, the absence of dialogue allows the same logics of containment to reproduce themselves.
Because when speech is managed, when disagreement is seen as threat, when trauma is too political to be heard—then nothing truly changes. Real dialogue does not erase difference; it holds it. It doesn’t demand agreement; it demands presence. And without that, even the most well-intentioned projects risk becoming new forms of silencing.
I do not write this to accuse. I write it because I believe that how we treat the displaced is not only a reflection of policy, but a test of what kind of future we are building. A future where protection means something—or a future where everything is managed, processed, doubted.
What we are witnessing is not a technical failure. It is a political one. A moral one. It is not about paperwork lost in a system—it is about a system designed to lose people.
The normalization of administrative detention for so-called “illegal immigrants.” Eighteen months of imprisonment—without trial, without crime—simply for crossing a border or staying after a permit expires. This is what the new Greek Minister of Migration and Asylum said. This is not just a threat to migrants. It is a threat to justice itself.
It is about what kind of society they are building. This is a signal. A warning. It tells us how easily democratic rights can be dismantled under the cover of “crisis.” And how easily human worth can be erased by a legal status.
The refusal to ask what happened to us is not an error. It is policy—an act of institutional disinterest, embedded deep within the bureaucratic field. The asylum process does not lack information; it lacks recognition. It turns political histories into paperwork, trauma into technicality.
Pierre Bourdieu taught that state power relies on the production of classifications—categories that appear neutral but serve to reproduce domination. Labels like “refugee,” “migrant,” “illegal” do not describe us. They domesticate us. They make suffering legible only in ways the state can manage: through queues, quotas, detentions, denials.
Bureaucracies do not simply forget. They erase by design. The file replaces the testimony. The system replaces the story. And once your name enters the system, it no longer matters who you are—only what box you were sorted into.
We did not just cross borders. We escaped them. We crossed regimes of classification, archives of forgetting, maps drawn to contain rather than protect.
But the system never asks why—because to ask would be to confront the global structures that made us fugitives in the first place. It would require states to account not only for movement, but for the violence that precedes it.
Without that question, there is no justice—only containment.
No protection—only paperwork.
No asylum—only administration.
What remains is a regime of managed indifference, where the violence is slow, quiet, procedural. And where human worth is decided not by what you survived, but by whether you fit the form.
This is a preliminary discussion, and I hope it leads to further conversations.
What you think?