I Dream in Greek: Bureaucracy and Internal Borders
This article draws on research into the experiences of second-generation Albanian migrants navigating Greek citizenship acquisition, conducted as part of a Master’s program in Southeast European Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. It explores how bureaucracies shape lives, opportunities, a person's sense of self and belonging - and how the ability to envision and realise a future within a society can rest on the shallow details of a person's documentation. In this piece, I explore the parallels between my research and the contemporary Greek asylum system, linking it to themes central to the work of Collective Aid. Interviews were carried out with consent, and participants have agreed to their stories being shared in this article.
Brisilda’s story
“The government wants to see that I have been here since I was seven years old, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove it. I can’t.”
Brisilda sits across from me at a table outside her coffee shop on an Athenian side street. Her phone lies face down on the table, the dual-headed eagle of Albania on the back of it glancing up at us. Her usually upbeat self is a little deflated today.
In 1994, Brisilda’s family left Vlorë, Albania, for Athens. With the help of a Greek taxi driver they crossed the border to join her father, who moved to Athens a few years earlier in search of work. Upon arrival, she and her brother enrolled in a school a short walk away from our conversation.
While Brisilda sees herself as Albanian, and is considered so legally, she dreams in Greek. “I was born in Albania” she tells me, looking at me in the eyes,
“But when I go back there, I feel like a stranger.”
Brisilda could claim Greek citizenship under the nationality code, amended in 2015 to open up avenues to citizenship for the children of migrants. “I could have Greek citizenship if I wanted,” she says, averting her gaze a little, “but I don’t want it. I am Albanian. I have permission to stay in Greece and have all of the same benefits.”
Our following conversations revealed a more complicated story. As a non-citizen, Brisilda is constantly mired in the cycle of ever-expiring residency permits. Her current one has lapsed, and she recently cancelled a planned Easter visit to Albania, fearing she wouldn't be allowed back into Greece. In fact, Brisilda had applied for Greek citizenship on a number of occasions, but the maze of bureaucracy lured her down dead ends, and she had given up on the idea altogether.
Her main issue is that she cannot prove the childhood she had in Greece. When she applied for citizenship, she hired a lawyer and gathered all of the required documents. But, when she collected her school certificate there was a glaring mistake. Her school had recorded her parent’s Albanian names as Greek translations.
“When we arrived in Greece, my parents didn’t know how to speak Greek. They went to register me at the school and spoke to an old lady there. She got my mother’s and father’s name wrong. My father’s name is Mane, but everyone in Greece calls him Yiannis, and that old lady wrote my fathers name as Yiannis. My mother’s name is Trita, which means ‘light’ (fos), so she wrote it as Fotini. I was a kid then, so I didn’t know. In their passports they are Trita and Mane.”
Greek schooling is central to the citizenship applications of many second-generation migrants, and so the error on her certificate is a significant one. She asked the school to change the names on the certificate a number of times, the last being 10 years ago.
“They said, “oh, we can’t change that”. They said I have to go to the government with a lawyer to get it changed. But that can take many years and a lot of money. It could take three years, four years. So I didn’t do it. When we went to school, we often had incorrect names. For 99% of Albanian people it’s very difficult.”
The Long History of Albanian Greece
Albanian speakers have been present in what is now Greece long before the existence of either state. Today, Albanian nationals make up over 5% of the population. The community is fragmented, and the slow pace of bureaucracy often leaves them waiting years for residency permits or citizenship. Centuries of Albanian migration paused briefly only during Albania’s increasing isolation after the Second World War.
In the 1980s, instability led to many crossing the border to escape poverty, unemployment, and violence. In the following decades, undocumented Albanian workers became vital to Greek industries such as agriculture and construction, often living de facto without civil rights, and beholden to exploitative employers.
As a descendant of the migrations of the 90s and 00s, Brisilda’s experience is far from unique, and she isn’t the only Greek-Albanian to express such a story.
Kostas’s Story
I first spoke to Kostas on the phone as they were en route to the Peloponnese for their holidays. I told them I was researching citizenship for second-generation Albanians in Greece, and they responded like they had been waiting for someone to ask about it. They eagerly agreed to meet when they returned, and we did so the following week.
Kostas is 26 years old and was born in Athens. Their parents are from neighbouring villages in Himarë in Southern Albania, and are considered by the Greek state to be part of the ethnic Greek minority. Kostas has applied for Greek citizenship twice without success.
They sit opposite me in striking black-and-white trousers, with dangling earrings and curly hair that spirals beyond their shoulders. They speak calmly, clearly having reflected a lot on the issue. As they are considered ethnically Greek, they have a permanent right to stay in Greece with a special ID card. However, lack of citizenship presents them with problems other Greeks do not face.
“I moved to Berlin and tried to open a business, but I was told that I couldn’t because I didn’t have a German residency permit. I went to the government offices and they told me that I couldn’t even work in Germany! I don’t have that right. I can only stay in Germany. So, I had to come back.” This set Kostas apart from their Greek peers who have a right as EU citizens to live and work in any of the 27 EU member states.
They first applied at the age of 18, and it was a long and expensive process involving fixing mistakes on their Greek documentation. By now, a familiar story. Their full name is ‘Konstantino’, but it had been hellenised by an administrator to ‘Konstantinos’. This singular letter ‘s’ stood between Kostas and their citizenship, so they sat before a judge and requested that the spelling be changed.
“I had a lawyer, but they can easily just scam you, take your money and run away with it. That’s what the first one did. And then I got another one, but I couldn’t finish the work.”
Within a few months they received a new ID, but they were then asked to retrieve documents from Albania. They would need to travel to obtain the documents and acquire expensive apostilles and certified translations for them, and so they gave up.
To make matters worse, when it was discovered that their father used a falsified document to enter Greece back in the 1990s, Kostas and their sister were instructed to leave Greece within 30 days and re-enter as tourists into the country they had grown up in.
Kostas has had enough. “I was like, ‘I don’t want it. I will stay with my Albanian passport. I’m Albanian.”
We wrap up our conversation speaking about their increasing involvement in the rights for queer people in Albania and Kosovo. In a few weeks they would be heading to a queer festival in Pristina that they played a role in organising. I ask if they plan to remain in Athens for now.
“For now, yes. I’d love to spend some time in Albania. Between Tirana and Pristina. But here in Greece are my friends, my family, my childhood. Everything is here. Here, I feel like I’m at home actually.”
The Long Roots of Exploitation
Though separated in time, the Albanian experience in Greece is reflected in those of displaced people today. Many continue to face precarity as they maneuver through bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions on their legal status. A historical perspective shows us the deeper structural roots of the issues, stretching far beyond the summer of 2015.
Displaced and undocumented people still play a central role in agriculture and construction, often working undeclared and vulnerable to the kinds of exploitation faced by Albanian workers before them. In 2013, around 150 farmworkers from Bangladesh were shot at by their employer in Nea Mandolada after demanding six months of unpaid wages. Earlier this year, a fire destroyed the makeshift settlement where many strawberry pickers were living, leaving around a thousand homeless.
Incidents like these do not happen in a vacuum. Language barriers, insecure legal status, and limited access to legal work create conditions that push people into precarity. Meanwhile, many of the strawberries picked in places like Nea Mandolada end up on dining tables across Europe.
Navigating the Maze of Asylum
The parallels extend into Greece’s asylum system. Like Kostas, people seeking asylum in Greece are issued special identity cards, placing them within a separate administrative category, with a
distinct set of rights. These cards are issued once asylum claims are fully registered, and applicants are legally permitted to work 60 days after receiving them.
Successfully registering a claim is a struggle in itself. Some wait up to ten months without receiving an appointment for their first asylum interview. System updates or error messages saying ‘no dates available’ can stall a claim indefinitely. In the meantime, people remain in detention camps with limited hygiene and healthcare. As Brisilda tells us, waiting in uncertainty is a painful process.
Receiving protected status comes with its own challenges. Residency permits must be renewed, so people send renewal forms to an email address that provides no confirmation, and then wait - often for long periods without social benefits, the right to work, or access to healthcare. By the end of last year, almost 40% of residency cards under renewal for those with international protection were pending for six months or longer.
As in the case of Brisilda, language barriers can have long-term impacts. Asylum seekers in Greece face a shortage of interpreters, and often asylum interviewers rely on uncertified third parties rather than certified translators, increasing the chance of miscommunication. The asylum interview is the main determinant of whether or not a person is granted asylum, and there is no room for even the smallest misunderstandings.
Some are shut out of the asylum system completely. In 2023, access to asylum was unlawfully suspended for three months for people arriving from North Africa. During this time, people remained detained without the ability to lodge a claim, and a single administrative decision pushed many further into precarity.
Bureaucracies and Internal Borders
The bureaucracy is usually described as dysfunctional. An alternative interpretation is it is not broken, but working as bureaucracies do. Administrations do not deal with people, but with categories: citizen, tourist, resident. In doing so, they strip individuals of their story and humanity, flattening them into an administrative label. This principle helps underpin the dehumanisation and criminalisation of people on the move - an EU wide project, in which Greece is the tip of the spear.
The existence of the citizen requires the existence of the non-citizen, defined by increasingly wordy labels that grant ever-few rights: the resident, the asylum seeker, the recipient of subsidiary protection. The more categories there are, the fewer rights individuals hold, and the greater the power of the state over them. As borders harden, this logic will affect most of us. Undoubtedly, the heaviest weight falls on displaced people.
Bureaucracies erect metaphorical walls, wearing people down by turning them into case files. Stacks of paper gather dust while the person behind them waits in uncertainty, often forced to continue dangerous journeys or try their luck elsewhere.
For Brisilda, Kostas, and countless others, battles with bureaucracy define possibility, shape choices, and draw the boundaries of their lives.
Words by Louis Kushner