114 Ahmet İçduygu
- Initially the overwhelming majority of migrants from Turkey were em-
ployed in manufacturing industries, construction services and mining
but, in recent decades, more and more migrants found employment in
service sectors. - In the early stages of migratory f lows, although there were some migrants
who were skilled workers, the majority were generally village-born, young
married men and women with small children, limited formal education
and little experience of working in an industrial setting. - Emigration itself directly affected the employment status of Turkish
migrants in the receiving countries and upon their return to Turkey. It
particularly affected the status of women, mostly taking them from the ag-
ricultural sector to manufacturing and service sectors, or enabling them,
for the f irst time in their lives, to participate in the labour force. Increased
economic well-being as a consequence of this change in employment
status raised the emigrants’ social status, removed their burden of debt,
or opened up opportunities for schooling, training or entrepreneurship. - Nowadays, migrants from Turkey and their children are perceived as
having serious diff iculties integrating into the social, political, economic
or cultural lives of their European settlement countries; for instance, in
Germany, where nearly 1.9 million Turkish citizens live, the unemploy-
ment rate of these citizens (over 20 per cent) was continuously well above
the rate of the total labour force (around 10 per cent) in the 2000s. In the
Netherlands, where there is a sizable Turkish migrant community, the
level of the migrants’ education is signif icantly lower than that of the
native Dutch population – almost 40 per cent of Turkish adult migrants
aged 15-64 have only completed primary education compared to only 9
per cent of native Dutch adults (Avcı 2006). - However, there are also indicators which reveal some degree of integra-
tion of Turkish migrants in Europe: from the early 1990s to the early
2010s, nearly 1.4 million Turkish migrants and their children became
citizens of the European countries where they resided (see Table 3.5);
in the late 2000s, there were more than 68,000 businessmen of Turkish
origin in Germany, providing jobs to over 338,000 persons (Şen, Ulusoy
& Şentürk 2008). - While, to a certain extent, emigration f lows from Turkey to Europe still
continue, there has also been some return migration, mostly in the form
of a f loating population of former emigrants between their host countries
and their homeland.