I read Rinus Penninx’s A Critical Review of Theory and Practice: The Case of Turkey with interest, as I have heard quite a lot about Turkish migration to Germany and the Netherlands in recent years, but knew very little about its origins. I am particularly interested in the social and political aspects of migration, but Penninx’s focus is very economic, which was valuable for me to read simply because it’s not my typical reading.
Unfortunately, his discussion of the origins of the phenomenon are brief: “Turkish labor migration to Western Europe has no colonial basis. It is assumed that the young Turks, who at the end of the 1950s went to West Germany as practical workers to learn trades, served as quartermasters of the increasing flow of migrant workers Turkey to West Germany.” Why did they go to West Germany specifically? What trades were there to be learned in Germany that couldn’t be learned in Turkey?
After this, Penninx reviews the history of Turkish migration to Western Europe (particularly West Germany, Austria, Holland, and Belgium). He defines a first phase of migration as the migration of young, single men, as mentioned above, from the 1950s to 1963. He then defines a period from 1963 to 1966 as a period of growth, many aided by the Turkish Employment Service, something Penninx seems to assume the reader knows of, and something I assume to be the opposite of the West German Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit. This was followed by an economic crisis in 1966 and 1967 that led to lessened recruitment and some temporary returns, followed by massive growth through 1973, along with an increase in female migrants. Following the end of active recruitment in 1973, the Turkish labor flow was partially redirected to Arab countries though it continued to Western Europe via family migration.
Penninx then goes on to discuss the impact of this migration on Turkey, noting that most migrants were not unemployed when they departed, and that they skew towards male, between 20 and 40 years of age, from developed and urban areas, and having higher education and professional skill levels than the average Turkish worker. Despite this, the research Penninx presents seems to show that the impact on labor markets in Turkey was not extremely impacted and may have even experienced an increase in output. More important, both for standards of living and debt reasons, are remittances, worth 1.7 billion dollars in 1979, equal to 75 percent of Turkey’s exports. Of course these numbers are now over 30 years old and one wonders how they have changed. I would guess that as Turkey’s economy has grown and these populations have settled more permanently, perhaps bringing families over to Europe, the scale of remittances has decreased, but the question requires further investigation. A point he makes that I found enlightening was that on paper, it looks like a huge flow of money into Turkey, that could have huge consequences, but in practice it’s relatively small amounts of money in the hands of many people, and is thus less likely to bring about the massive economic benefit or change imagined–instead, migrants improve the standards of living for their families, build homes, and invest in small businesses like groceries and tractors that are more influenced by local economic conditions than external forces.
As an American who has only become conscious of things like migration in the post-9/11 era, it’s fascinating to read these articles from the 1980s and earlier where migration from Turkey to Europe is mentioned without even a passing mention to Islam or cultural integration or political opposition to migrants and the like. It’s become such a cultural-moral issue in recent years that I don’t believe I’ve read anything recently discussing migration from a purely economic- or development-based viewpoint.
Especially since 2015 or so, so much of the immigration conversation has been about refugees rather than everyday labor migration. Another aspect of this topic I’d like to look into more is the dichotomy between Turkish labor migrants and descendants of migrants living in Europe that are fans of Erdogan and the Turkish state, as pictured at the top of this blog post, and Turkish refugees fleeing from Erdogan’s increasingly repressive policies, especially following the 2016 coup attempt.
The reason I was interested in doing a closer reading of this article was because I recently applied for permanent residency in the Netherlands, which turned out to be an incredibly easy, painless for me, but is apparently not for people from other countries, like Turkey. They have a fairly arbitrary East/West division (it’s more North/South but we’ll ignore it) that seems basically designed to include only people from former Dutch colonies, former British colonies, the former USSR, and a few select, very pale people (Japanese, for instance). A map included below, which the author says has a few small errors, shows this division. Among other things, people from the areas in purple do not have to learn Dutch or take a basic citizenship exam to receive residency. I thought the exclusion of Turkey but the inclusion of almost every other Turkic-speaking region was interesting, especially because the existing Turkish population in the Netherlands should make social integration much easier for Turks than Tajiks or Kazakhs or what have you. This also might be an interesting topic to look into for future blogs.
Sources:
A Critical Review of Theory and Practice: The Case of Turkey
Author(s): Rinus Penninx
Source: The International Migration Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Special Issue: International Migration and Development (Winter, 1982), pp. 781-818
That map is really fascinating. So Central Asians are on par with other Europeans for applying for residency in the Netherlands? and yet they make this hard for people from Turkey, even though there was a large migration flow to the Netherlands from Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. Morocco as well.
You give a good summary of Penninx’s article, which itself is a summary of the limited studies that had been done up to 1982, plus some of his own research. The empirical part of this article concerns remittances: how was all of that money being spent in Turkey? You note that much of what you have read about migration is far more engaged with questions of culture. For a long time, migration studies was something of an economics and demography subfield, something we really see reflected in this overview.