turkISh emIgrAtION ANd ItS I mplICAtIONS 111
should be viewed with some scepticism. For this reason, no f igures are
cited here.
In sum, there are three main reasons for the growing population size of
Turkish communities in Europe. Firstly, Turkish workers were staying for
longer periods than originally planned, and were bringing in their spouses
and children. Secondly, there had been an increasing f low of asylum seekers
from Turkey since the early 1980s. Thirdly, as more spouses were reunited,
the birth rate of the Turkish population rose. Indeed, evidence shows that,
while there was a relatively small increase in the actual number of Turkish
workers in Europe in the period between 1985 and 1995, the increase in the
number of their dependants was considerable.
The ten destination countries in Europe which attracted the vast majority
(more than 95 per cent) of emigration from Turkey in the course of the 1980s
and 1990s were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands,
Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Among these ten countries, Norway
and the UK were new immigration countries for Turkish migrants – mostly for
the asylum seekers – while the remaining eight countries had been receiving
migrant workers since the early 1960s. During the f irst half of this period, in the
1980s, there was a huge increase in the average population f low, rising from an
annual f igure of 50,000 in the early 1980s to 100,000 in the early 1990s. Although
there was a relatively steady decline observed in the last half of this period,
some 50,000 emigrants still left for Europe in the second half of the 1990s. In
addition to asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, the majority of these
migrants were spouses or future spouses, arriving through family-formation
migration. In this recent period, those who might be considered as ‘new labour
migrants’ and ‘student migrants’ did not constitute a sizeable f low. The 2000s
appears to be a new era characterised by a considerable slowdown in emigra-
tion and asylum f lows from Turkey to Europe.
It appears that the emerging economic boom and increasing life satisfaction
lowered the push factors that encouraged emigration in the 1960s and 1980s in
Turkey. It was not, however, only the economic situation that created promising
life conditions in the country. The relative political stability that emerged in
the 2000s, the economic and political liberalisation that took place from the
1990s onwards and, in general, the dynamics of contemporary globalisation,
all contributed to a migration transition in Turkey in which the country was
transformed into a country of immigration and transit: in short, these develop-
ments over the last decade help to dispel stereotypes about Turkey as just a
source country for migrant workers to other countries (İçduygu & Kirişci 2009).
Since the mid-1990s, there has been a continuous decline in the volume
of emigration from Turkey to Europe, and some rising trends are observed