Just as many Greeks are now voting with their feet and leaving Greece – as so often in the past – so too are many of the hundreds of thousands of Greece’s immigrant population. While the flood of asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa, and beyond have skewed the numbers, the vast majority of foreigners in Greece are from neighbouring countries, most notably Albania, but Bulgaria and other Balkan countries are also well represented. Albanians and Bulgarians, the largest and second largest populations respectively, are leaving the country in large numbers.

Both immigrant groups largely worked in a non-self employed capacity, and thus they were caught up in the unemployment wave that has engulfed Greece. Immigrants the world over are better savers than locals, so many returning immigrants have substantial bank balances which go further in Albania and Bulgaria, both of which have a cost of living considerably lower than Euro-fueled Greece. Bulgarians often enough do not return to Bulgaria, but use their EU passports to seek employment elsewhere in the EU, as do Romanians, another sizeable population in Greece. Many Greeks now follow the example of Bulgarian returnees and live in Bulgaria, as do large numbers of Greek entrepreneurs.

Serbians living in Greece differ from immigrants from neighbouring Balkan countries. First of all, they are far smaller in number. Serbs or Yugoslavs formed about one per cent of the documented foreign population in Greece in the early 2000s, though the non-documented number must have been higher. Yugoslavia always had a more liberal emigration policy than other communist countries, and like the Greeks and Italians, Serbs tended to emigrate to Germany and Sweden, or Austria, as well as to North America and Australia.

During the most acute periods of the Yugoslav wars, including the bombing of Serbia in 1999, Greece and Cyprus saw an influx of Serbian refugees, but this was a temporary asylum enabled by friendly governments and the Orthodox Church rather than real immigration. Serbs in Greece tended towards self-employment and particular professions, most notably and obviously sport. Greeks and Serbs have a high rate of intermarriage and this complicates the statistics as well. A fair percentage of Serbs in Greece have Greek nationality, and many of these “Greek” citizens look elsewhere in Europe for opportunities. Last summer, I remember meeting a Serb fellow who lived in Greece for ten years and he was off to his uncle in Perth, “to study . . . and to stay.”

Living in Serbia, I have spoken to many Serbs who lived in Greece or Cyprus at one time or another and have returned. In some cases, the work was seasonal, and was generally involved in the tourist trade. Last year, over 700,000 Serbs vacationed in Greece, and this provides an excellent employment opportunity for Serbs who speak Greek.

This seasonal type of employment is usually (like so much in Greece) “off the books,” and will likely continue regardless of the crisis. Others, such as the more entrepreneurial types that make up a good proportion of Greece’s Serbs, have a different story to tell. There is Nenad, who lived several years in Athens with his family. An avid sportsman, he developed a considerable business designing and manufacturing awnings and tents for boats and recreational vehicles. He moved back to a small town near Nis, in southern Serbia, where his monthly costs are a fraction of those in Athens.

Though the crisis “accelerated his return” and payment from clients became an increasing problem, he cited the bureaucratic factors and an “unfriendly bureaucratic regime towards foreigners” as the primary reasons for his repatriation. As a Greek citizen who once lived in Greece, and got to know its soul-killing bureaucracy first hand, I can imagine how bad it is for foreigners. Serbia itself is hardly a paradise in terms of bureaucracy and corruption, but in comparing systems, Nenad found the Greek to be considerably more onerous. Somewhat similar factors prompted our friends Zoran and Jasmina to leave Cyprus. They moved to Paphos shortly after the bombing of Serbia in 1999, when the Cypriot government opened its arms to Serbs. They set themselves up in a 3D Architectural Modelling business, the first of its kind in Cyprus.

Again, the day-to-day “Cypriot reality” of petty bureaucracy and official and (particularly) unofficial barriers to foreigners convinced them to leave after seven years. They left in 2006, before the crisis, and with a fair amount of savings they put to good use in Serbia. On my last trip to Greece in November 2011, at the Athens airport, I spoke with Gordana, an articulate corporate woman who worked for a large Greek company in Athens. Switching from Greek, to Serbian, and to English with a sophisticated ease, she told me how she requested a transfer to the company’s Serbian subsidiary because her Greek salary was dropping due to new taxes and salary reductions, and that the bureaucracy surrounding her work permit “was, frankly insulting.” She had nothing but good to say about Greeks but again harshly faulted the bureaucracy and her treatment by “official Greece.”

Serbs in Greece are less a barometer for the crisis’ impact on immigrants in Greece than a health check on the state of Greek bureaucracy and society in general. The same bureaucratic and other barriers that have choked Greek businesses, stifle those legal immigrants who wanted to put their entrepreneurial skills to work in Greece. Immigrants enrich any society – Australia is one of the best examples of this-and Serbs have a common religion and culture which made them fit easily into Greek society. Unfortunately, the Greek (or Cypriot) reality intervened. As Jasmina agreed, “the system made us leave.”