The border event in the everyday: hope and constraints in the lives of young unaccompanied asylum seekers in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the everyday lives of young male migrants in a state care facility for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Istanbul, Turkey. We focus on how the EU-Turkey Statement, which came into force in March 2016, affected the young people’s options and hopes and how they responded to the resultant strengthening of border control. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and the Aegean area between 2015 and 2016 we show how this agreement became enmeshed with the young people’s life trajectories during a period of increasing authoritarianism in Turkey. While current contributions to border studies in Turkey mainly discuss new strategies of joint border management, the border spectacle of the irregular corridor to Europe and emerging humanitarian interventions at the borders, this article traces how political and legal transformations of border control trickle down to the everyday of unaccompanied minors. We suggest analysing the EU–Turkey border regime in 2015/16 as a ‘critical event’ (Das [2007]. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press) and show how violence, exclusion and humanitarianism affect young men’s lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied minor asylum seekers
• everyday border
• critical events
• refugee crisis
• EU-Turkey Statement
• photo elicitation

Acknowledgements

We thank Annika Lems, Kathrin Oester and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and Julene Knox for her highly professional copy editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sabine Strasser http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3741-4672

Notes

1 TECs were founded to provide school education for refugee children in Arabic (for details see e.g. Aras and Yasun 2016). The UNHCR estimated that there were more than 800,000 children of compulsory school age left without education in Turkey in 2016. Despite an increase in enrolment of 50 per cent or half a million Syrian refugee children since June 2016, over 40 per – or 380,000 – according to UNICEF, were still without education in January 2017 (https://www.unicef.org/media/media_94417.html, accessed 16 June 2018).

2 Abbreviation for Refakatsız Mülteci Çocuklar icin Çocuk ve Genclik Merkezi (Children and Youth Centre for Unaccompanied Refugee Children).

3 For the Temporary Protection Identity Document (TP-ID) the DGMM (Directorate General for Migration Management) ‘collects biometric data, including fingerprints, during registration and maintains electronic files for each beneficiary in the agency’s electronic file management system named “Göç-Net”’ (http://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/turkey/registration-under-temporary-protection#footnote4_to7owf1, accessed 3 July 2018).

4 In 2015 Turkey hosted about 2.5 million refugees from Syria and over 250,000 from other nations (UNHCR, http://reporting.unhcr.org/node/2544, accessed 20 September 2018). Until September 2018 the number of registered Syrians under temporary protection increased to almost 3.56 million, about 23 per cent of whom are under 18 (UNHCR, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113, accessed 20 September 2018).

5 Law on Foreigners and International Protection, DGMM (Directorate General of Migration Management) (http://www.goc.gov.tr/files/files/eng_minikanun_5_son.pdf, accessed 3 July 2018).

6 According to Aljazeera and some of our research participants president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that selected Syrian and Iraqi refugees who pass a screening process will be granted Turkish citizenship (Aljazeera 7 January 2017; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/erdogan-offers-citizenship-syrian-iraqi-refugees-170106195134961.html, accessed 14 July 2018).

7 In September 2018 the UNHCR ended the registration of foreigners wishing to apply for international protection in Turkey (https://static.help.unhcr.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/09/06134921/UNHCR_ending_registration_leaflet_ENG.pdf, accessed 24 December 2018).

8 Refakatsız Çocuk Yönergesi 2015 (Unaccompanied Child Directive 2015) (https://cocukhizmetleri.aile.gov.tr/duyurular/refakatsiz-cocuk-yonergesi, accessed 20 June 2018).

9 Periodic report to the United Nations’ Committee to the Rights of the Child (CRC/C/TUR/CO 2–3: 7, 14) https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC/C/TUR/CO/2-3&Lang=En, accessed 20 June 2018.

10 Press Release on the Statement (http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2016/03/18/eu-turkey-statement, accessed 20 March 2016).

11 European Commission/Fact Sheet (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-4321_en.htm, accessed 3 July 2018).

12 UNHCR on EU-Turkey Deal (http://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2016/3/56ec533e9/unhcr-eu-turkey-deal-asylum-safeguards-must-prevail-implementation.html, accessed 25 June 2018).

13 Annual Report on the Facility for Refugees in Turkey COM(2017)130 final (https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/sites/near/files/170302_facility_for_refugees_in_turkey_first_annual_report.pdf, accessed 14 July 2018).

14 According to the think tank ESI (European Stability Initiative) from April 2016 to the end of 2017, 1485 migrants were returned to Turkey, the largest number (386) in the first month. The average number of people returned to Turkey in these 21 months was 71 a month (https://www.esiweb.org/pdf/ESI%20core%20facts%20-%20Greece%20Refugees%20Asylum%20-%2026%20January%202018.pdf; accessed 16 June 2018).

15 Seventh Report from the European Commission on the progress of the EU-Turkey Statement (https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/sites/near/files/20170906_seventh_report_on_the_progress_in_the_implementation_of_the_eu-turkey_statement_en.pdf, accessed 20 June 2018).

16 TECs needed to be accredited by a protocol signed by the Ministry of Education and an NGO (functioning as a body maintaining the school). Every refugee between the ages of 6 and 15 who is registered and thus has a temporary identity card number (kimlik) is legally entitled to enrol in a school (Decree of the Turkish Ministry of National Education dated 23 September 2014, http://www.ilkergedik.net/uploads/dokuman/2014-21%20say__l__%20genelge.pdf, accessed 17 January 2019).

17 UNICEF Annual Report 2016 (https://www.unicef.org/about/annualreport/files/Turkey_2016_COAR.pdf, accessed 17 January 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 10001A_156476].