Crisis Encounters: Constructing the figure of the migrant-Other in post-2015 Greece

The objective of this study is to provide a tentative trajectory of how the figure of the ‘refugee in need’ of 2015 largely reverted to the figure of the ‘illegal immigrant’ within a few years. In this encounter with the migrant-as-stranger, I wish to explore the factors that influence the construction of the migrant-Other in the Greek context. Concretely, the main question of this study centers on: how did the refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015 affect and reshape the narratives that contributed to the production of the figure of the migrant-Other in contemporary Greece? In delineating an answer to that question, the following sub-questions are addressed: - How did the legal and policy nexus utilized by the European Union and the Greek state to handle the migration ‘crisis’ contribute to the legitimation of othering and dehumanization? - How and why were the initial responses of solidarity and humanitarianism retracted and what did these responses transform to? - Which are the main nativist narratives employed to outline the figure of the internal and the external Others? - How is the migrant-Other produced in the refugee ‘crisis’ different than the migrant-Others that came before? Despite being a heavily researched issue migration remains highly relevant. This relevance is not only due to how timely and ever-present the matter of human mobility continues to be. More importantly, and particularly for the Greek and the European context, the relevance should be linked to how persistently similar the response to human flows has remained. The policy framework, the political discourse and public opinion on migration has remained surprisingly fixed on the same principles: deterrence, securitization, defensiveness, hostility, categorization of deservingness. It is argued that the legitimization of dehumanization that occurred throughout the first years of the refugee ‘crisis’ conditions the imagined relationship with the migrant-Other. Namely, the interactions between the host society and the incoming populations are envisioned as a tidal movement: towards and away from the migrant-Other. The possibility of this encounter is heavily influenced by a culture of dehumanization, implicitly and explicitly articulated by the migration policy regime. This tidal movement therefore operates on the basis of a dehumanized figure of the migrant-Other; encounters are governed by the essentializing effects of dehumanization whereby the figure of the migrant is streamlined, as either the idealized subject of solidarity or the demonized manifestation of threat and criminality. In both cases, the migrant-Other is constructed as a one-dimensional figure to symbolize need or illegality. Ultimately, if there is a ‘novelty’ to be found in the framing of the migrant-Other of 2015, it is to be found in the host society’s undesirable realization of an imagined but ultimately fragile and destabilized superiority. The encounter with the migrant-Other was filtered through the degradation of the position of the Self as a citizen and subject in the neoliberal capitalist framework, a subject ceaselessly forced to deal with his own precarity and withering statu