1 in 10 ‘Greeks’ is an immigrant
The four-fold increase in Greece’s immigrant population over the last two decades is one of the key elements in the changing landscape of migration into Greece, it was revealed yesterday. Statistics released by the head of the Immigration Policy Institute (IPI), Alexandros Zavos, at a conference yesterday said that immigrants, who constituted just 2.5 percent of the total population in Greece in the 1980s, had risen to 7.5 percent according to the census of 2001. Current estimates put the figure at some 10 percent or 1 million people in total. Over half are thought to be from Albania. Around one-sixth of all immigrants live in Athens, some 132,000 in number, while 7 percent are based in Thessaloniki. One in four inhabitants on Greek islands is an economic migrant. Almost 7 percent of students in Greek schools are children of migrants.
