“The government’s immigration strategy is based on two pillars: No to the illegal, yes to the so-called legal. The country is not changing its immigration policy. The country has a strict anti-trafficking policy and is in favor of legal immigration pathways,” the Minister of Immigration and Asylum said. Dimitris Kairides which took place at the floor of the Plenary, earlier today, in the wake of the statement of the former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, in relation to the amendment on the residence permit for working foreigners.

“We have a problem of shrinking the human resources of our country”, said Dimitris Kairides and added that “legal immigration can become a lever literally, with conditions and rules”, according to the needs of the Greek economy and the priorities of Greek society, a lever developmental. “If we don’t take advantage of it, we risk slowing down our growth and our economy,” said the Minister of Immigration and Asylum.

|We need to do a lot on legal immigration. Upgrading, modernizing, speeding up the administrative mechanism of legal immigration. Today we have huge delays in licensing, anyone who has dealt with the decentralized ones, anyone who has tried, through the consulates, anyone who knows the difficulties we have to implement the agreement with Bangladesh and Egypt, understands this. New bilateral agreements are needed, with countries of our choice, such as Georgia, such as Moldova, which will bring in personnel with conditions and rules. The regulation we submitted is not legalization, as is written by some of the cunning, it does not give any right, beyond access to the labor market, nor family reunification, nor permanent residence, nor even more likely citizenship, as the Germans do. It’s not about new arrivals, it’s not even about people who came in 2022 or 2023. It’s about people who came before 2021, who have been here for three years, and who, above all, have a work contract and a clean criminal record,” said the Minister of Immigration and Asylum .

THE Dimitris Kairides referred to the issue of the residence permit for foreign workers, invoking the resounding warnings of the region’s deputies, who throughout the previous period, have warned the government, and especially the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum, about the risks of a slowdown in agricultural production and the local economy, because of the thousands of shortages of land workers and in general workers in a multitude of economic activities. Thus, he addressed, indicatively and in a personal tone, to the presiding officer Yiannis Plakiotakis, ND MP who is elected in Lasithi: “Mr. President, I am addressing you especially, because you are one of the MPs who recently visited me in my office at the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum, for convey to me the anguish of the local productive bodies, for the lack of land workers. You come from a prefecture that pioneers early agricultural production, Ierapetra is about half of the country’s greenhouses.”

Each greenhouse needs approximately one worker per hectare, said Mr. Kairides and he personally addressed PASOK’s parliamentary representative Michalis Katrinis who is elected in Ilia. “If we are talking about 20,000 greenhouses in Ierapetra, we are easily talking about 30,000 land workers. Other MPs told me that for the 3 billion worth of olive oil in our country, with current prices, there is a risk that the olives will not be harvested, that we will lose one, we will lose one and a half billion, due to a lack of land workers. “So the problems are real, they are here and we must, without ideologies and cries or populism, give solutions”, said Mr. Kairides. At the same time, he underlined that both the experts and the European Commission emphasize that in order to crack down on the illegal, there must be legal channels of legal immigration, with conditions and rules.

In the same mood as what the Minister of Labor and Social Security said yesterday ‘Adonis Georgiades and Dimitris Kairides said that “it is completely untrue, even funny, for a government that has been so accused, by some maliciously, of push backs and strict adherence to borders, to abandon itself as relaxing policy and opening borders”.

SYRIZA’s parliamentary representative Theofilos Xanthopoulos said that the amendment makes a difference and that is why SYRIZA will vote for it. At the same time, however, he commented that New Democracy followed a criminal policy when, as the opposition, it claimed that the borders were not guarded. “I consider it very positive that the need for legal immigration passages is finally being recognized. And not for push backs during the day or at night,” said Mr. Xanthopoulos and added that it was not SYRIZA that fueled Greek society with anti-immigration reflexes.

The parliamentary representative of the Hellenic Solution Konstantinos Chitas said that the amendment legalizes illegal entrants, because it is not an interstate agreement. “These people entered the country illegally, so you can’t talk about legal immigration. Pakistanis have been celebrating since yesterday. It becomes a normal party on social media,” said Mr. Chitas.

“You are wrong and persist in populating and lying. The amendment mainly concerns legal entrants. People who came to Greece legally. Albanians who came here with a permit and worked. They are 80% of the beneficiaries, of the permanent arrangement we have with the 7-year period. And for some reason their permit expired and was not renewed”, said the Minister of Development and Asylum and added that the vast majority of those who come to Greece illegally leave Greece. “as of 2021 we had 65,000 illegal arrivals, and 110,000 refugee passports issued, meaning 110,000 got passports and left.”

In relation to what Mr. Xanthopoulos said, the Minister of Immigration and Asylum said that “the mess of 2015 and 2016 and the whole period of SYRIZA, contributed to Brexit and the rise of the extreme right”. In this climate, he added that the ND government created chaos in security and immigration and cited the testimony of the coast guard that “they had orders to do nothing and become the traffickers’ domestic workers”, at that time.