ABSTRACT
Sizeable immigration to Greece came almost 30 years after similar waves took place in Western Europe. This occurred at a time when the Greek economy began to prosper and Greece changed from a labour-exporting to a labour-importing country. Although immigrants (mainly Egyptians and Pakistanis) began to arrive in Greece at the beginning of the 1970s, the first major wave of immigrants came in the 1990s. This movement is directly linked to the change of regimes in Eastern Europe as well as to the economic difficulties facing the growing and youth-based populations of African and Asian countries. As expected, the influx of legal and illegal Muslim immigrants into Greece led to conditions already experienced in other European recipient countries: weak individual and political rights, social exclusion and (in some cases) the emergence of racist reactions by the local Christian population.
