On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot
an elderly Vietnamese gentleman was usually asleep in a chair; he was homeless, and Luc let him nap there.
Climbing the tight staircase, near the second floor I would encounter the crowd of regularly scheduled clients waiting to see a social worker or a lawyer. Then I would make my way to the fourth floor, the Legal Service, which generally employed ten on-staff lawyers and a few rotating volunteers, though the staff changed multiple times even during my time there. Five staircase twists above the street, and two above the busy waiting area, this was usually one of the quietest parts of the building, but nonetheless, the shared offices were usually packed, with clients and an interpreter clustered around each lawyer’s desk. The density of languages heightened the tightness of space: interpreters translating into Greek and English for clients speaking Farsi/Dari, Kurdish, Arabic, Urdu, Bangla, Amharic, and Somali—and maybe also a crying baby.
During much of my fieldwork I was based in this Athens office, where I conducted participant observation as a volunteer in the legal department. In addition to helping to produce and proofread documents in English, I assisted with clerical tasks like typing, photocopying, file making (and file finding), and registration, in exchange for the opportunity to speak with staff, watch them work, and observe meetings between aid candidates and workers. However, given the sheer amount of work to do, the ARS is not a place where one can simply observe, and as time went on, I was increasingly asked to become a more active and involved presence there: assisting lawyers with research on their cases, meeting with and advising clients, and conducting client interviews. Unlike many other EU countries, the Greek state allocates minimal direct funding and resources for legal aid (nomiki aroyi; νομική αρωγή) or assistance (sindhromi; συνδρομή) to asylum seekers. The ARS is one among just a handful of organizations throughout Greece that provide pro bono legal aid to applicants. Furthermore, it is the largest of just a few organizations in Athens devoted to this purpose, with full-time staff lawyers. With Greece’s lack of state-funded legal support, and a significant gap in the NGO infrastructure as well, the ARS plays a crucial role in assisting applicants in navigating the asylum procedure. Through my presence there, I was able to access a central site in the asylum process in Greece.
For years, the ARS has been on what might be described as the front lines of the Greek asylum “crisis”—a central stopping point for many who enter Greece, whether or not they stay there. Newly arrived asylum seekers come to Athens to find work, to sell goods, to find each other, and also to find smugglers to help them travel elsewhere in Europe. As I discuss in Chapter 2, Athens is also the bureaucratic center of the asylum process, so applicants also come to file paperwork and for asylum hearings. Border communities play an enormous role in the reception of migrants and asylum seekers,9 without adequate assistance from the state, and border police figure significantly in their apprehension and detention; once released, however, new arrivals are often funneled to Athens. On Lesbos, one of the island borders in the Aegean, newly released individuals (both those who do and those who do not express a desire to apply for asylum) are bused directly from the detention center to the ferry, where they are given tickets to the capital, sometimes paid for by a local group of supporters; as a woman who works at the port described the scene, “they round them up and send them away to Athens.” Near Kavala, just a couple of hours by car from the northern land border, a local police captain described to me how officers had started to take up a collection to buy bus tickets to Athens for those recently released. When I asked this police captain, “Why Athens?” he shrugged and answered as if it were obvious: “What will they do here?” While this story may have functioned as a way to demonstrate how well police treat detainees (in case I was reporting this information back to someone), this account also highlights the centrality of Athens as an assumed destination or stopping point for all new arrivals.
Athens is an epicenter in the movements of asylum seekers and refugees in Greece, and many of those who come to Athens are among the crowds that I used to find each morning at the doorstep of the ARS. Asylum seekers are directed to the ARS by acquaintances, other organizations, and even police; one can find the address scribbled by police officers on the backs of documents issued not just at the central police station in Athens, but also at the airport, at detention centers, and in border areas. The ARS has thousands of official clients, and a great many more whom they advise informally. There are even more who do not return to the office once registered in the database. For some, the ARS is a central, even daily or weekly, stopping point; for others, it is just another office they visit once or twice; for others still, it is a way-post on the road to elsewhere in Europe.
As I describe in greater detail in Chapter 1, this NGO is an important locale in multiple migratory geographies that transect but also interact intimately with geographies of law, governance, policy, and advocacy. Through its many visitors, the ARS is tied to routes of movement stretching through and across the Mediterranean world and even toward southern and eastern Asia. But it is also an important site in wide-ranging routes of intra-European travel, and the entries and expulsions of asylum seekers across internal and external borders. This became powerfully evident to me while I was in Rome in July 2007, conducting a week of comparative research with an NGO that, at times, collaborated with the ARS. There I met with a large group of Afghans who had established an informal camp behind one of the central train stations. Many of them greeted me with recognition, in Greek, having seen me at the ARS. One of them I had met on three different occasions: first, months before, at a detention center in Mytilene, then at the ARS office, and finally at this unofficial camp in Rome. Another, who had just arrived, I had seen just the week before at the ARS office, but while I had come to Italy in a plane, he had taken the ferry from Patras to Ancona by smuggling himself into the bottom of a truck. This startling moment of recognition highlighted powerfully for me the smallness of the networks in which people move, despite the great distances they cross. The ARS and the people who work there are part of these networks, an important node in the movements of asylum seekers from many different countries of origin, whether these movements are more local or regional (primarily in Athens and Greece) or more broad, traversing multiple sites in Europe.
Figure 1. Threshold of the ARS.
The ARS is a nexus for the various ethnographic threads that constitute this book: frameworks of governance, policy, law, and advocacy (at international, Greek, and EU scales); bureaucratic practices; dilemmas of knowledge, ethics, and judgment; and finally, the lives of asylum seekers in Greece, and their struggles for survival and recognition. In my field practice, I followed these threads outward from this small office, which took me from refugee apartments at the outskirts of the city center, to the borders with Turkey, the European Parliament, and briefly to other NGOs in Brussels, Spain, and Italy. Still, at the center of this book is this Athens office, an ethnographic threshold into the asylum process in Greece and the lives that it makes possible: old PCs, fluorescent lighting and dusty floors, files piled on desks, crowds of people inside and outside, densities of different languages, the smell of sweat and cigarettes, and moments of humor, kindness, anger, and frustration.
I approach the ARS not simply as a site relevant to questions of asylum in Europe, nor even as an entry into broader patterns of movement, but also as the doorstep of a kind of possible city: a new Athens emerging in and through the “crises” of immigration and asylum. Just as I was recognized in Rome by this group of Afghan asylum seekers, ARS workers often spoke of being recognized in Athens, by people and in places many of their Greek compatriots did not even notice—being addressed on the street, in buses, in parks, on the beach by peripatetic vendors or other “foreigners.” While these moments of encounter outside the office were often unnerving for workers, they were also, like my meeting in Rome, moments of surprise and often warmth. When I walked with Stavros past a Bangladeshi street vendor who spoke to him with recognition, Stavros greeted him with a wide smile and said to me, ironically but with kindness, ine dhikos mas (είναι δικός μας), “he is one of ours” or “one of us.” This phrase also has strong kinship associations—“he is one of our own.” Stavros certainly did not mean that this man is, indeed, “family”; instead, he was highlighting