The Prospects for Refugees’ Integration in Greece: A Case Study in Crete and the Mytilene Islands

The refugee crisis in Greece has created an enormous amount of challenges for policy makers, not only regarding the hosting conditions in the refugee camps but also for planning the appropriate strategy for their smooth and effective socio-economic integration. The second objective is extremely important as long as a vast number of refugees will permanently stay in Greece, creating a challenges that cannot be bypassed. This research analyses the abovementioned perspectives as well as illustrates the obstacles that refugees encounter, which are preventive in terms of social and economic integration. The methodological strategy of the research includes both qualitative (semi-structured interviews with labor market stakeholders) and quantitative (structured questionnaire to refugees) methods in order to identify the difficulties that refugees encounter, the dimensions of their social capital as well as labor market’s prospects, shortcomings and barriers, which affect their socio-economic integration. The field research was carried out in the islands of Crete and Mytilene, Greece. The selection of these two geographical areas was based on the different socio-economic conditions and potential opportunities for integration as long as the former has received huge refugee flows and faces enormous integration difficulties while the latter has not yet received refugee flows and is an appropriate field for entrepreneurship-business development and consequently, refugees’ potential socio-economic integration. Thus, the main objective of this research was to identify and categorize the prospects and obstacles to refugees’ integration into the Greek socio-economic system by examining two diverse but significant regions in terms both of integration problems as well as prospects.