Narratives of Citizenship, Studying social mobility amongst second generation young adults in Athens, Greece.

Abstract

Migration and the new realities that it shapes is an ever-present concept that never seizes to be relevant. As it is with one of its products, the second generation, the generation that follows after the migrants settle somewhere. In a highly globalizing, mobile world, the issues of citizenship and rights within societies are becoming highly debated. In Greece, second generation is comprised by approximately 200.000 people who have yet no access to citizenship and in addition have restricted rights in relation to their Greek ‘native’ peers. This study investigates how lack of the Greek citizenship impacts the mobilities of the second generation young adults in Greece, particularly their educational and working opportunities. It does so by examining how second generation experiences the different types of mobilities, namely the physical, the socio-political and the economic mobility in relation to their parents’ generation and their Greek ‘native’ peers. To investigate the issue at hand, the study gathers data through second generation narratives in Athens, Greece. There is a distinct gap in the existing research on migration in Greece which so far is mainly focused in the previous generations of migrants, the parents of the second generation. Recent changes in the Greek migration policy granted access to the Greek citizenship to second generation that is born or raised in the country and partakes in the educational system. The new law has yet to be implemented resulting in second generation lying in a perpetual limbo in a two speed society. All this under the immediate influence of an economy in an ongoing crisis with no visible signs of recovery. Second generation aspires to access equal rights looking beyond the national citizenship to an EU citizenship. The findings of the research are highly relevant in the regional context of Southern Europe and the broader EU context, where the existence of second generation with access to citizenship is being highly contested and hyper politicized over the last years.