Greece: 2024 will be the year of ‘legal migration’

Athens: Greece is set to table new, important legislation to make life easier for migrants living in the country legally. The Minister of Migration and Asylum promised that 2024 will be the “year of legal migration.”

The Migration and Asylum Ministry is working on a draft law to modernize the administrative mechanism granting resident permits to legal migrants.

At present, the process can take up to two years, and the bureaucracy involved is far from supportive.”Within the first half of 2024, four new biometric data collection centers will be opened, three in Athens and one in Thessaloniki, to free up staff,” The Greek Minister for Migration and Asylum Dimitris Kairidis told Parliament.

“A migrant who has come here legally, who works here legally, who pays taxes and contributions and applies for renewal of their residence permit has been suffering for years,” he added.

The digitization of 850,000 migration files will be completed by the first half of 2026, Kairidis stated, reducing the time needed to process applications.This news comes on the back of another law passed last December which allows migrants to obtain a three-year residency and work permit as a means to tackle labor shortages in Greece, in what was a positive development for asylum seekers in the country.

That amendment relates to around 30,000 undocumented migrants from non-EU countries, who have crossed into Greece by illegal means and are still living in Greece and have been employed, albeit irregularly, for a minimum of three years.

The next step, according to a statement released by the Migration Ministry, concerns the signing of “six bilateral transnational labor mobility agreements with Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova, as well as Vietnam, India, and the Philippines. Finally, the administrative mechanism of legal immigration is strengthened, modernized and upgraded to be able to process with speed and reliability the increased requests for transfers, new residence permits and renewals of old permits.”

Kairidis concluded his statements by referring in detail to the developments of the last six months at national and European level, both on the front of illegal and legal immigration, underlining that “immigration is not only a problem but also, with proper management, an opportunity for development.” He promised that 2024 would be known in Greece as the “year of legal migration.”