ABSTRACT
From the early 1900s until the late 1970s Greece had been a labor exporting country. After 1980 Greece became a labor importing country, and since 1990 immigration inflows have been very large. Illegal immigration into Greece has been a relatively recent phenomenon, which started in the 1980s and increased considerably in the 1990s, after the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Estimates vary, but they suggest that in the mid-1990s the number of illegal aliens residing in Greece was about 400,000, or near 4 percent of the Greek population (Lianos et al., 1996).
