WP2 Turkey: Country Report - İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi | AB Enstitüsü

Social Impact of Emigration and Rural-Urban Migration in Central and Eastern Europe
VT/2010/001
attractive for the Turkish contractual labour in the previous decade. For instance, as of 2008,
the number of Turkish-origin workers in Russia was 130,437 (Ryazantsev, 2009: 160).
Emigration patterns vary in accordance with the social-economic and political changes in
Turkey: a) cultural and ethno-cultural motivations; b) ideological motivations; and c) skilloriented
motivation. As explained above, most of the Turkish emigrants left the country on a
temporary or permanent basis due to social-economic reasons. Accordingly, there are quite
a number of people who left the country for various other reasons. Armenians, Greeks,
Assyrians, Ezidis and some other groups, who are mostly non-Muslims, left the country in
different waves when there were nationalist hate crimes directed against them. After the
1960s military coup, the leading members of some tariqats (Muslims sects) left the country.
Similarly after the 1980 military coup, thousands of left-wing politically motivated intellectuals,
activists, Alevis, Kurds, Circassians, etc. left Turkey. And finally, the last group of emigrants
who left Turkey in the last couple of decades are those qualified people, mostly students,
going abroad for post-graduate studies. Most of them have been going to countries like the
USA, Canada, the UK and Australia (Akçapar, 2009; İçduygu, 2009).
Recently, a significant issue among Euro-Turks is the increasing number of spouses brought
to Europe from Turkey. Such partners are known as “imported brides and bride-grooms”.
Such arranged marriages are usually preferred by conservative families, who believe that
brides from the homeland are culturally “pure” and thus capable of raising “better-educated”
children (Akçapar, 2007; Straßburger, 2004). Apparently, this is the new emigration trend
from Turkey. However, there is no available data on this matter.
Emigrants nowadays are very different from the way they were in the earlier years of
emigration. In the 1960s, mainly manual labour left Turkey. In the 1970s, family members of
those earlier emigrants joined them through family reunification. As already touched upon,
the 1980 neoliberal military coup changed the profile of the emigrants in the 1980s, and
mainly politically-oriented intellectual Kurds, Alevis, and Asyrians left the country. In the
meantime, emigration of skilled people started towards the other countries such as the USA,
Canada and Australia (Kaya and Şahin, 2005; İçduygu, 2009). Emigration of the highly
skilled towards these three countries still continues (Akçapar, 2009; İçduygu, 2009). For
instance, the highly skilled and educated profile of the Turkish community in the USA is
changing in the recent years, as unskilled or semi-skilled Turkish labor workers also arrive in
the country. Regular migration movements were often accompanied by irregular movements.
For example, it is reported that labour migrants reached the USA leaving cargo ships illegally
or overstaying their visa.
There have been around 2.5 million returnees in the early years of emigration between 1961
and 1974, when migration used to have a circular form, which mainly prompted males to
emigrate. Another substantial return took place in 1984 when Germany introduced an
attractive return scheme for those voluntary returnees. The number of returnees in 1984 and
1985 was around 300,000 (Hönekopp, 1990). Return migration in 1987 was around 150,000
but since then has been steadily declining as well (OECD–SOPEMI, various years). There is
recently a new phenomenon, i.e. the return migration of qualified middle and upper middle
class migrants of Turkish origin. It is estimated that around 8,000 Turkish-origin emigrants
and mostly their children come to Turkey each year in order to be employed in international
companies like Mercedes, Siemens and Bosch as well as in touristic resorts or international
Call Centres. 8 İnanç Kutluer, the Director of the Netherlands Migration Institute and himself a
Euro-Turk, states that each year approximately 1,000 young Dutch-Turks attracted by the
dynamic Turkish economy migrate to Turkey to be employed in international companies
(personal interview, Utrecht, 28 March 2007). According to EUROSTAT, outmigration of
Turkish citizens from Germany exceeded immigration of Turkish citizens to Germany since
8 There are recently several dissertations scrutinizing this newly emerging phenomenon. See Ehrsam
(2011), Kaiser (2003), Bal et al. (2006), and Südas (2010).
Final Country Report Turkey 6