Migrants flock into Greece - and sneak out to Italy UPDATES

ATHENS, 12 July (Reuters) - Greek police raided an illegal immigrants' camp in the port city of Patras on Sunday, moving out 150 people and levelling shacks with bulldozers.

Hundreds of immigrants, mostly Afghans, had lived in squalid conditions at the camp for years, prompting protests from residents. "We evacuated the camp," Thanassis Davlouros, chief of the Patras Police, told Reuters.

"We moved about 110 immigrants to Patras hotels and other camps in Athens and 40 minors to a special centre in northern Greece. The immigrants were mainly Afghans", Davlouros said. It was not immediately clear what would happen to them next.

Around 80 police officers took part in the operation.

PATRAS, GREECE — The migrants who flock to this busy port city try just about anything to get out. They cling to the undersides of tractor-trailers being loaded onto ships and ferries. They sneak into refrigerated trucks, shivering among crates of vegetables. They seal themselves like amateur Houdinis into false-bottom cubbyholes in the backs of vans.

Their destination is Italy, the next stop after Greece on the people-trafficking routes into Europe. Some are caught before they make the crossing. Some die of suffocation in their airless hiding places.

Many of them come via Turkey from the Middle East and Africa. But most are believed to be Afghan men, a group that has become so entrenched that it runs its own sprawling shantytown about 10 minutes' walk from the harbour.

Fights flare up regularly between rival gangs of migrants and smuggling rings. Earlier this year, the tensions exploded into a running battle between Somalis and Afghans through the fashionable pedestrian district near the quays.

Greek authorities now say they intend to round up undocumented migrants and knock down their makeshift encampments before the summer tourist season gets into full swing. Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos, calling the camps a sanitation and security nightmare, said migrants would be locked up in an old military barracks outside town until a new detention centre is built.

But locking up migrants is not a solution, social workers says.

“They think of those people as criminals and not as refugees,” says Christos Karapiperis with the Patras branch of the Hellenic Red Cross.

People living near the two sites have already objected to the planned transfer, saying they do not want the migrants as neighbours either. So have the few Greek aid workers who visit the camp.

The threat of detention is also unlikely to discourage determined migrants who see Patras as a way-station to the rest of Europe, according to immigration experts and refugee advocates.

“You can't keep them away. They come back,” said Alexandros Zavos, president of the Hellenic Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Athens. “What can you do?” he added, “Build more jails, more camps, camps for 200,000 people? That's unimaginable.”

The same questions are being asked at other saturated border crossings within the European Union.

“The numbers are so huge that it's becoming extremely difficult for us to pick out the political refugees from the economic migrants,” said Konstantinos Bitsios, secretary-general of the Ministry of Interior. Greece, he added, is “unable to cope.”