Migration In Turkey

Historical Brief on Migration in Turkey

During the Ottoman empire period, the empire witnessed many migration movements. The Ottoman authority was following the open door policy in dealing with the immigrants who were coming from different parts of the world for different reasons. One of the reasons was the empire’s aim to increase the population which was believed to contribute to the economic development and strengthen the defense abilities of the empire. In addition, as a humanitarian religious and political attitude, the empire accepted to receive massive numbers of Muslims and non-Muslims refugees who have deported from different places. For instance, receiving the Jews and Muslims refugees who fled from Spanish Inquisition. Furthermore,

Tatar immigrants also had to leave from Crimea into Ottoman Empire when it became under the Russian control and the Muslims there were forced to leave. The same situation in the case of Circassians from the Caucasus and the descendants of Turk who had to flee from Balkans when the Ottoman Empire collapsed(Latif, 2002). During the beginning of the 20th century, the continuous gradually collapse of the Ottoman Empire had accompanied with massive waves of forced migrants from many former Ottoman regions into Anatolia. Simultaneously, a large influx of people escaped or forced to move out of the Ottoman territories such as when almost half million Greek Orthodox Christians fled after the Greek army was defeated in 1922. Later, as a part of population exchange treatment between Turkey and Greece, about 1.3 million Greek had to move to Greece and about half million Turks left Greece to Turkey. In the followed years, many new agreements including the exchange of people have been made between Turkey and Balkan states. The Armenian minority also have mostly derived out of Turkish borders ( içduygu,

Many agreements have been done with the Western Europe states started in 1961 with Germany and followed in 1964 with Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands and later with many other European countries. Turkish government aimed by sending those labor migrants to decrease the pressure on the local labor market and solve the unemployment problem. Moreover, the hope those unskilled worker migrants will come back after gaining new skills and getting new knowledge and participate in the industrial sector. However, those worker migrants decided to stay in their host states, they got a permanent residence permits and did not go beck. During the period from beginning of 1960s till 1973 almost 780,000 workers had moved to Western Europe. The vast majority of them were moved to Germany with almost 80 percent. Later, the Turkish policy had changed toward sending workers as well as the European states also stopped receiving workers from non-EC citizens. Yet, the emigration kept from turkey to Europe through the families reunification and asylum seeking who escaped as a result of some political conflicts in Turkey especially during 1980s as a when the Turkish military have got involved in the political process. In addition, the eruption of the violence in south