Transnational heritage migrants in Istanbul: second-generation Turk-American and Turk-German ‘Returnees’ in their parents’ homeland

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses several less-explored dimensions of current scholarship on globalisation, migration and transnationalism: north–south migration streams, the role of second-generation ‘heritage migrants’ and the importance of social capital within unequal transnational social fields. We compare two circuits of second-generation migrants, Turk-Germans and Turk-Americans, engaged in ‘intensive transnationalism’ having independently moved to reside in their parents’ homeland. Istanbul becomes the site of homeland return for these distinct streams of educated heritage migrants. Cross-national comparison of the children of the more stigmatised Turk-German ‘guest workers’ with the socially less salient Turk-Americans of middle-class backgrounds offers insight into the way class networks and national capital are distinctly leveraged by adult children with immigrant parents of distinct contexts of homeland exit.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational networks
• second-generation immigrants
• heritage migration
• social capital
• inequality

Acknowledgements

The order of authorship is alphabetical representing an equal collaboration. Grasmuck's research was supported by a sabbatical and grant-in-aid of research from Temple University. Hinze's research was supported by Fordham University's First Year at Fordham Faculty Research Grant. Both authors are grateful to the American Research Institute in Turkey-Istanbul where they met and shared a bathroom and are indebted to John Landreau, Greg Holyk, Helma Lutz, Gül Ozyegin, Görkem Dağdelen and the anonymous reviewers for astute comments on early drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘Turk-German’ and ‘Turk-American’ for consistency and heuristically, placing ethnic ancestry as a hyphen or adjective to national citizenship. We are intentionally problematizing the more common usage of “German-Turks” as it implicitly conforms to a form of ‘ethnic nationalism’ that de-emphasizes the national belonging of German citizens of Turkish ancestry.

2. German for ‘recruitment stop.’

3. ‘Turkish immigrant background’ or Türkischer Migrationshintergrund is a German term, used to describe German citizens or permanent residents who have at least one parent of Turkish ethnic background.

4. The breakdown of Turkish immigrants entering the USA by decade is as follows: 1960s = 9464; 1970s = 12,209; l980s = 19,208; l990s = 38,687; 2000s = 48,397; and between 2010 and 2012 = 23,838:http://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration-statistics.

5. Of the 24 interviews, 14 were Turk-Americans and 10 were Turk-Germans.

6. The larger of these organizations listed 1134 Americans loosely affiliated with the website. The subsample from this organization was drawn systematically across the alphabetical list of addresses.

7. One of those organizations, the Rückkehrer Stammtisch (returnee roundtable) was founded primarily as a professional networking platform for young German professionals of Turkish ancestry moving to Istanbul, with 1598 members on Xing and 1672 on Facebook.

8. However, the circularity of many of the 1.5 migrants meant that they had averaged many more years in Turkey over their lifetime.

9. Almancı is a derogatory way of referring to Turk-Germans. While alman merely denotes Germanness, the suffix –cı denotes profession in Turkish. In combination, alman-cı alludes to the opportunism of those who left the homeland for professional advances.