110 Ahmet İçduygu
Certainly, migration from Turkey to Western European countries reached
unexpected levels during the 1980s and 1990s, when some 1.8 million Turks
entered Western Europe, almost doubling the Turkish immigrant population
of 1980 in the region. In addition to continuing family reunif ication f lows,
many of the Turkish immigrants arrived in the receiving countries by way
of marrying someone who already lived there: marriage migration became
a new form of family reunif ication. The high number of these marriages was
mostly due to emerging transnational networks; 1980 appears to mark the
beginning of the networking stage of the Turkish migration cycle. It is also
at this stage that the number of second- and third-generation offspring of
migrants reached signif icant levels.
During this period, there was also another form of migration f low to
Europe: asylum-seeking. Since the 1980s, more than two-f ifths of the people
moving from Turkey to Europe (nearly 700,000) were seeking asylum (see
Table 3.4). In the case of asylum seekers, as noted elsewhere (İçduygu 1996a),
it is tempting to look for further evidence to prove who is a genuine refugee
and who is an economic migrant. Indeed, these asylum seekers were often
viewed with suspicion by the receiving countries, and considered as part
of a mass attempt by Turks to illegally enter into their societies in search of
employment and social benef its. However, as realised by many European
countries, the outbreak of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey provided an
obvious environment in which most asylum claims could be considered
to genuinely require quite serious assessment and, consequently, some
assistance and protection. In the period 1980-1995, around 400,000 asylum
seekers went from Turkey to Western Europe. In addition to the rocketing
increase in the year of the 1980 military coup, the number of asylum seekers
increased quite sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the annual average
number of Turkish citizens off icially registered as asylum seekers in Western
European countries increased from about 15,000 in the early 1980s to nearly
45,000 in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Table 3.4). Recent evidence has
shown that, although there has been a considerable decline, the number of
asylum seekers from Turkey still reached high levels in the late 1990s, with
an annual f igure of 25,000. However, in recent years, the f igure has declined
signif icantly to annual f igures of less than 7,000 in the period 2006-2010.
In addition to the f lows of people on asylum and family grounds, there
existed a clandestine movement from Turkey in which a migrant might be
undocumented in terms of not having a valid passport before leaving the
country, having entered the receiving country illegally, or having entered
legally on a visitor’s visa and overstayed. Estimation of the volume and
conditions of clandestine migration is diff icult and the existing f igures