Moving across statuses:

question the ways that people who crossed the Greek borders were addressed within the analysed sources. In the vast majority of documents, the most common terms were ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’, which were almost always used in combination and often interchangeably. However, and although the organizations declared that they offered their services regardless of individuals’ legal status, the documents revealed that across the examined period, there were salient differentiations regarding the status of the newcomers across time.

Throughout the documents published during the peak of the phenomenon, from June until November 2015, it was highlighted that people who crossed the Greek borders through 44 sea landing points and one land entry point, all had to deal with the same response from the Greek state which was summarised in delayed registration procedures and inhumane living

conditions until the time they were allowed to leave the entry point and move towards the mainland. However, it is indicative that during that period, the phenomenon was framed as a ‘refugee crisis’ and throughout documents published primarily by the UNHCR, it was highlighted that the “vast majority of those coming to Greece [were] from countries experiencing conflict or human rights violations” (UNHCR, 2015f). Elsewhere, it was further elaborated that

“This [was] a primarily refugee crisis, not only a migration phenomenon. The vast majority of those arriving in Greece [came] from conflict zones like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan and [were] simply running for their lives. All people on the move in these tragic circumstances deserve to see their human rights and dignity fully respected, independently of their legal status. But we cannot forget the particular responsibility all states have vis a vis refugees, in accordance with international law” (UNHCR, 2015b).

As put by Malkki (1992), the refugee category is constructed in contrast to that of citizenship and hence, it is unavoidably associated with notions of otherness that render refugees an exceptional population. Further, the construction of a ‘crisis’ narrative and the reminder of a particular responsibility towards refugees that derives from the international law for all the European states adds further to the depiction of refugees as an exceptional group (Ramsay, 2019). In its turn, this exceptional character of the refugee category links to discourses of deservingness (Feldman, 2015). The statement, that all people deserve to enjoy their human rights but for the case of refugees this suggests a legal obligation for states, describes implicitly but still graphically the existence of a hierarchy of deservingness, the top of which is saved for refugees. It seems then that the ‘refugee’ emerged as a reference category implying deservingness of protection rights. Further, UNHCR’s statements also suggest the existence of a sorting mechanism -a quick filter that differentiated refugees from migrants- and this was no other than nationality. Given that what distinguishes a refugee from the rest of migrants is the experience of persecution, coming from countries affected by conflict or war emerged as an equivalent for being persecuted and hence, proven nationality as sorting tool. This is the first point where refugee status intersected with the category of nationality in the creation of a hierarchy of deservingness and access to human rights at the Greek borders. As it will be elaborated in the following section, the intersection between refugee status and

nationality was crucial for the emergence of health disadvantage across multiple sectors of the first reception.

Another salient point of differentiation that emerged as relevant to inequality through the analysed texts was that between refugees and asylum seekers. Through the first period of the phenomenon until the implementation of the EU – Turkey Agreement, the humanitarian actors’ emphasis on the origins of the newcomers from countries in conflict, and particularly Syria, was employed in order to highlight their deservingness for aid and thus, to strengthen the call for a humanitarian response from Greece and Europe towards refugees. However, an interesting element that came out of the documents is that the response that followed, regardless of its effectiveness, was designated for asylum seekers. What is clearly mentioned within the documents is that “refugees who having been officially recognized in Greece [were] not eligible for the majority of services provided in Greece which those [targeted] asylum seekers” (UNHCR, 2017b) due to “the legal basis for funding regulated by instruments linked to the asylum procedures that govern the humanitarian assistance asylum seekers [received]. Recognised refugees on the other hand are subject to EU minimum standards for refugees, which are implemented differently in all EU member states” (CwC National Working Group Meeting Minutes, 21 June 2017).

This meant that the services offered at the Greek borders, involving health care, accommodation or cash assistance, were targeting people who in their majority had escaped conflict zones and were seeking asylum in Europe but only for as long as their asylum claims were pending. Hence, in reality, shifting from the status of an asylum seeker to that of a refugee involved the loss of access to minimum but still crucial support and the exposure to a new form of precarity. Given that the processes of registration and asylum claims were slow (and even more so after the migration Agreement with Turkey) (NGO joint, 2017b), the shift to the refugee status would happen- if ever- after a prolonged period of social isolation or detention, inactivity, exposure to physical and mental health risks and with no actual provision for the transitional period, in a country devastated from almost a decade of recession where refugees would have to compete for resources.

Further, the implementation of the migration Agreement with Turkey increased the salience of differentiations among the newcomers both institutionally and in the public sphere. Once the Agreement took effect, all the people who arrived at the Greek islands from Turkey had to go through an admissibility evaluation that decided whether they were eligible to apply for asylum or not. Eligibility, or else admissibility, overlaps with either assessed vulnerability

or eligibility for family reunification, according to the Dublin III regulations (Joint NGO, 2017b). Failing to meet the admissibility criteria implied forced return to Turkey, that in the frame of the bilateral Agreement is considered as a safe third country. At a symbolic representational level, those developments coincided with a shift in the framing of refugees’ arrival from a ‘refugee crisis’ to an irregular migration phenomenon (Sigona, 2018). What the Agreement with Turkey actually implied was that those who were seeking refuge could actually find it in Turkey and thus, they should have stayed there. If they would decide to move to Europe, they simply aimed to migrate in order to find better circumstances. Hence, those who in their majority had been portrayed as refugees were now, in the frame of the Agreement, depicted as migrants and importantly, irregular migrants. This shift in symbolic terms overlapped with a dramatic increase in violence exerted by state authorities in Greece as well as in Turkey across the borders (DWB, 2017a) and a simultaneous decrease in international attention, so that the observed devastating impact of the Agreement on refugees’ and migrants’ health was addressed as an emergency by humanitarian actors present in the field (DWB, 2017b) and less so by Greek or European political leaders or in the international media.

On the other hand, at an institutional level, the introduction of the intermediate step of admissibility assessment in the asylum process associated with the emergence of vulnerability as an integral element of the refugee category (Freedman, 2019). According to the Greek asylum law 4375/2016, vulnerability categories include unaccompanied minors, single parent families, pregnant women, people with serious health conditions or disabilities, victims of torture, victims of violence including sexual and gender-based violence, victims of trafficking and survivors of shipwrecks. In one way or another, all the subcategories of vulnerability involve either increased experience or risk of suffering. Thus, the identification and assessment of vulnerable cases was a prominent concern for the humanitarian actors in the field throughout the whole examined period. Simultaneously, assessed vulnerability was linked to a series of services, including accommodation outside the camps, access to care appropriate for each case as well as accelerated asylum procedures. However, within the frame of the EU-Turkey Agreement, vulnerability literally became a presupposition for access to asylum (MHPSS Sub- working group meeting minutes, 26 May 2017) and hence, a distributed category used for the unequal distribution of asylum (Sözer, 2019). In light of those developments, two processes took place. First, poor health or increased susceptibility to harm -contained in the meaning of vulnerability- was operationalized as an institutional component of the refugee status. Second, the boundaries of the refugee category shifted, so that the hierarchy of asylum deservingness

included only vulnerable refugees. However, the answer to the question, who is the vulnerable refugee, is not easy to give, especially within a context that by definition produces vulnerability (Sözer, 2019). As the following sections will show, pathways of exposure to health risk and vulnerabilities produced during the first reception procedure were subject to specific dimensions of difference among refugees associated with underlying intersecting power hierarchies.