Immigrants in Greece to get citizenship option

Interior minister says the path is open for permanent residency

By Maria Delithanassi - Kathimerini

The question of citizenship for ethnic Greek immigrants has been taboo for some 15 years but Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos says long-term residency will lead to citizenship, clarifying his earlier announcement of citizenship for ethnic Greeks from southern Albania.

In an interview with Kathimerini, Pavlopoulos said the way to citizenship would also be opened for second-generation immigrants and did not rule out an extension of this right to other categories of immigrants, within the limits of the unified immigration policy for the European Union set by Brussels.

Yes, it is. Naturally it does not apply to juvenile members of the family.

The status regarding long-term residency presupposes that citizens of a third country should be in a position to support themselves and their dependent family members, to have social security and a steady abode. An immigrant can fulfill these conditions if he or she has steady work.

Moreover, the acquisition of Greek citizenship, for which long-term residency is a first step, requires payment of a fee of –1,467.35, a sum that has remained unchanged since it was set in 2001.

Again, I think this is more of a myth than reality. First of all, those who have at least a Greek junior high school diploma are exempt from this requirement. Also, there are foreigners who came to Greece to study and then stayed on.

Care has been taken to ensure they don’t have any problems. Teaching hours and schedules have been arranged so as not to interfere with working hours. We are talking about very few hours, both in number and in comparison with other European countries where language learning requirements are far stricter.

For example, in the Netherlands a knowledge of the language is a condition for entry to the country, yet we are only asking for permanent residency status as a condition for citizenship. A knowledge of Greek for permanent residents is not a restriction, it is a condition.

The decrees on permanent residents are the institutional vehicle for giving civil rights according to the Constitution. Participation in municipal and prefectural elections, when the status has been set, will be the first step toward acquisition of Greek citizenship.

The additional amendments we are currently processing will determine the conditions for legal status for these parents. As you are aware, children may register at state schools irrespective of their parents’ status. So we are giving these parents the opportunity to acquire legal status by producing evidence of their children’s attendance at a school. Secondly, we grant legal status to parents whose children have a Greek birth certificate, as long as one of the parents lives permanently in Greece, and thirdly when the parents can produce a marriage certificate.

Immigrants whose children were born in Greece can acquire birth certificates for them if they register them with the relevant authorities. So this is not a problem.

We have settled this issue in cooperation with the Public Order Ministry with Law 3386/2005. No one can be sure that a foreigner who applied for asylum before December 31, 1994 is still in Greece. If we set the application for residency as a criterion, we could be faced with a mass influx of people who had submitted applications but subsequently left Greece, and then returned just to acquire legal status.

Secondly, don’t forget that we are part of the European Union and we are obliged to cooperate with its services regarding conditions for the registration of immigrants. Our goal is to have not one single illegal immigrant in the country.

However, our cooperation with the EU must be smooth because of EU funds are being used to facilitate the inclusion of immigrants. You realize that these funds would not be available if the EU had any objection to the way immigrants to Greece were being given legal status.