turkISh emIgrAtION ANd ItS I mplICAtIONS 105
Turkish government quickly began to seek a new market to sustain labour
migration. These were the circumstances in which Turkish emigration to
Australia and to the Arab countries started. The timing of the bilateral
labour-recruitment agreement with Australia in 1967 ref lected the efforts
of the Turkish emigration strategy of ‘falling back on another country if one
showed signs of saturation and diminished absorption ability’ (Bahadır 1979:
106). There was, of course, a signif icant contrast at that time between the
migration policies of Turkey and of Australia. While Australian immigration
policy was based upon the expectation that immigrants would permanently
settle, Turkish emigration policy was guest-worker-oriented. The signing of
a migration agreement with Australia was a new step, undertaken to main-
tain the continuity of emigration. In the period 1968-1974, more than 5,000
Turkish workers arrived in Australia (see Table 3.2 and Figure 3.1). Overall,
nearly 12,000 Turkish workers and their dependants arrived in the country
between 1967 and 1975 (İçduygu 1991). Today, the size of Turkish emigration
to Australia is measured in a few hundred new emigrants arriving each year,
in addition to more than a couple of hundred people migrating to Australia
from Turkey annually through family reunif ication and marriage-migration
f lows. Australia, together with the USA and Canada, has also been an at-
tractive destination for highly skilled migrants from Turkey. Nevertheless,
it should be noted that the number of Turkish migrants going to Australia
constitutes only a very small fraction (approximately 1 per cent) of total
emigration from Turkey.
The 1980s witnessed a high level of male labour emigration from Turkey
to the Arab countries, mainly Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iraq (İçduygu &
Sirkeci 1998). There was a correspondence between Turkey’s search for
new receiving countries and the demand for labour in these countries. As
stated by Appleyard (1995), the dramatic upsurge of oil prices after 1973,
and the accompanying increase in the income levels of the oil-exporting
Arab states with very small populations, boosted this demand for labour.
The result was a large inf lux of contract workers from other developing
countries. This was the broader context in which migration from Turkey
to the Arab countries occurred. In the period between 1975 and 1980, about
74,000 workers went to the oil-exporting countries. By 1980, this number
had reached almost 0.5 million. The total number of migrant workers who
had experience of selling their labour power in the Arab countries was over
700,000 from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s (see Table 3.2). However, by
the mid-1990s, the number of Turkish workers in Arab countries began to
decline as a result of the completion of large-scale infrastructural projects
in the oil-exporting countries and also of the unfavourable circumstances