After having discussed the various migration types and strategies from the villages of origin in Albania, I now ‘move’ across the border to examine in more detail migrants’ life trajectories in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. I start by discussing some of their experiences as they left their villages in Albania and arrived in Greece. The discussion that follows focuses on some of the strategies my respondents used to integrate into the socioeconomic life in the city, including negotiations of gender, ethnicity and religion. Furthermore, issues of immigration regulations are analysed, running as they do like a thread throughout the account in this chapter, since they affect almost every aspect of migrants’ lives. Then, the migrants’ position in the labour market is explored, followed by a discussion of their housing situation and spatial diffusion. Finally, I explore migrants’ feelings about their integration into Greece and their future plans.

Leaving Albania and arriving in Thessaloniki

Since I dealt with many facets of migration from my study villages to Greece in the previous chapter, I will focus here only on a few additional notes of importance. Most of my male interviewees had travelled over the mountains – that ‘was our entry visa’, as one of them put it. Some women had taken that route as well, but many others had arrived on visas and through family reunification.

Most of the early migrants had lived in various places in Greece, especially rural areas, before settling in Thessaloniki, as the above excerpt shows. By contrast, some of the migrants who moved later arrived directly in the city. The factor that made the difference was the strength of kinship networks that had been accumulated over the years. These networks were important for all my interviewees in facilitating travel, accommodation and work upon arrival, assistance with paperwork and familiarisation with the surrounding environment (see also Carletto et al. 2005; specifically for migrants in Thessaloniki, see Hatziprokopiou 2006; Labrianidis et al. 2004).