Greeks abroad throw a lifeline to those hard up back home

By Sid Astbury Feb 15, 2012, 6:06 GMT

Sydney - Greek Australians are supporting poor relatives back home, lobbying Canberra to issue them more visas and readying for a fresh wave of settlers from the old country.

'The numbers aren't huge at the moment but we're seeing people with dual citizenship coming back,' said Bill Papastergiadis, a leader of Melbourne's 300,000-strong Greek community.

Massive migration in the 1950s made Greeks the seventh-largest ethnic group in Australia.

The recent economic hardship linked to the sovereign debt crisis is set to unleash a new surge of migrants searching for a better life on the other side of the world.

Melbourne, host to the world's second-biggest Greek diaspora after Chicago, is gearing up for the new flood.

Papastergiadis is pestering the government to add Greece to the list of countries allowed to send youngsters out on 12-month visas that allow them to work while they travel.

'No one is interested in creating any special treatment but just to put us on parity with every other country in Europe,' he said.

Australia grants working holiday visas to adults aged 30 or under from 13 of the European Union's 27 member states, including Cyprus, as well as other countries including the United States and Canada, but not from Greece.

This month Papastergiadis, president of the Greek Orthodox Community in Melbourne, is convening a meeting of the city's Greek social organizations to co-ordinate what has all the makings of a disaster relief effort.

'We're providing a lot of social support when they come here but there's more we can do and we're trying to do it, to coordinate it,' he said.

Alphington Grammar School, where around 60 per cent of pupils are of Greek descent, is offering financial support and reduced fees for immigrant families.

Judy Fetter, school development manager, said the children of five families had arrived and taken up the bursaries since October.

'They are a new type of educated migrant,' she said. 'Their liquidity is very low. They often have many assets but there is no market for their assets. They have to just walk away from it.'

Unlike their counterparts in previous decades, the fresh settlers are not the downtrodden but those with university degrees and professional qualifications.

'That whole opportunity is just disintegrating in Greece,' Fetter said. 'They just can't see a future for them or their children.'

But Australia's non-discriminatory immigration programme presents challenges as well as opportunities. With no special visas for jobless Greeks, they have to join the queue for permission to come like anyone else.

Sotiris Hatzimanolis, editor of the Greek-Australian newspaper Neos Kosmos, warns desperate compatriots back home that a visa is hard to get even for the well-qualified.

'As a community there's very little that we can do,' Kosmos told national broadcaster ABC. 'As individuals, of course, if we have our relatives and the rest, some of us do assist them.'

Papastergiadis and Fetter also said that many of the 375,000 Greeks in Australia now set aside a sum each month to remit to struggling relatives back home.

Some are not so sympathetic. Theo Menidis, whose father came out from the Greek islands in the 1970s, runs a vehicle repair shop in Sydney and has visited relatives in Greece a couple of times.

He said he would not be putting his hand in his pocket for the distressed back home - and neither will his father, who regularly sent money in the past that he says was spent by relatives on drink and gambling rather than the promised school education and home improvements.

'There's just not a culture of work,' Menidis said. 'They just wait for a hand-out. There's so much corruption. Even to see a doctor you pay a bribe. I think all the ones who wanted to work and get on, like my father, left Greece and came here.'

Ingelo Giannos, who arrived in 1956 and returns to Greece on holiday every few years, also thought his countrymen were getting what they deserve.

'This'll teach them to pay their taxes,' he said. 'And the corruption! You go to the doctor for an operation and (if) you don't pay the bribe, you don't get your operation - or you end up dead because you did not pay him.'

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