The impact of mass migrations on immigration policy of Turkey

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the impact of mass migrations on immigration policy of Turkey. Republic of Turkey has been engaged in migration issue since its foundation in 1923. In fact, due to her geographical location Turkey has always been a host and a transit country in migration. Therefore, Turkey has had to deal with migration flows at massive scale several times due to her geographic location and political instabilities in her neigbourhood. Obviously, mass migrations have great impact on the sociological, economical and political life of a country and they are extremely hard to be controlled. Therefore, it requires a lot of resources and effort by a country to cope with migration issues. In this vein, Turkey also has made several laws and regulations and established different commissions, institutions on specific migration flows such as concerning the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, migrations from Bulgaria or later on from Syria. In this thesis, mass influxes to Turkey are examined historically. The push and pull factors of mass migrations to Turkey are introduced besides Turkey’s responses to these mass influxes. This thesis argues that Turkey couldn’t secure efficient time and resources to the immigration issue and opted for short term solutions rather than making comprehensive law and establishing a special institution on migration for a long time. This was mainly because of both huge number of refugee influx from Syria as never seen before and European Union’s pressure on Turkey have strong control on this refugee influx.