The main pillars of the new bill are legal immigration, improvements to Law 4939/22 on Reception and Asylum, as well as the further tightening of penalties for traffickers
In the final stage of processing is a bill of the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum on legal immigration, which is expected to be presented to the cabinet in March, as ministry sources tell APE-MPE. The Minister of Immigration and Asylum Dimitris Kairideshas repeatedly stated that the New Democracy government wishes to encourage legal immigration within a framework of specific conditions and rules, while at the same time it is determined to tackle the criminal networks of traffickers that promote human trafficking and irregular immigration.
On this wavelength, the main axes of the new bill are legal immigration, some legal technical improvements of Law 4939/22 on Reception and Asylum as well as the further tightening of penalties for migrant smugglers.
Specifically for legal immigration, the bill whose presentation date has not been finalized, provides for:
1. Increasing the time limits of seasonal work from 9/12 to 18/24, within the limits of the Community Directive. In other words, today the seasonal migrant worker from a third country can work for nine months in Greece and return to his home country for three months before returning. The new bilateral labor mobility agreements being negotiated by the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum provide for the 18/24 model, which means 18 months of work and six months of absence. In this way, more flexibility is provided to the employee and the employer, while facilitating employees from distant countries who find it difficult to travel to their homeland in the nine months.
This model can only be applied to legal immigrants coming from countries with which Greece has transnational labor mobility agreements. The next step therefore for the implementation of this model concerns the signing of six bilateral transnational labor mobility agreements with Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova, as well as Vietnam, India, and the Philippines. These agreements are expected to be signed in the next period by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2. Visiting Professor Visa.
3. Technology Visa to be given to highly skilled people who want to work in Greece.
4. Talent Visa, which will be granted to young men and women with a high level of education who want to look for work in Greece.
5. Residence Visa for foreign students who wish to study in Greece.
One of the main objectives of the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum in the coming period is to strengthen, modernize and upgrade the administrative mechanism of legal immigration to be able to process with speed and reliability the increased requests for transfers, new residence permits and renewals of old permits .
Informing the members of the competent Committee of the Parliament, about the latest developments in immigration-refugees in the past days, the Minister of Immigration and Asylum noted that in the face of the polarization that currently exists regarding immigration in Europe, “we are obliged to chart a course which says: yes to the strict guarding of the external borders, it is the sovereign right of the Union to choose who will come and who will not, and beyond the protection it gives to refugees, this will decide and not the traffickers. It is the duty of European governments to follow what the vast majority of European peoples want. That is, effective immigration management and at the same time legal alternatives to immigration with conditions and rules”.
Source: Skai
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