Between Political Exclusion and Economic Inclusion: Everyday Life Strategies of Moldovan Immigrants in Istanbul
In: Multiculturalism: Critical and Inter-Disciplinary PerspectivesSearch for other papers by Görkem Dağdelen in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Turkey received millions of immigrants with a Muslim and Turkish identity from parts of the former Ottoman Empire from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire to the present. As many irregular immigrants from different regions of the world began to migrate to Turkey from the beginning of the 1990s onward, Istanbul has served as the primary destination of the immigrants from post-Soviet countries and has become a centre of new forms of cultural interactions. Of these immigrant groups, this chapter investigates the Moldovan immigrants who work in the textile/clothing sector in Istanbul. I explore the ways in which Moldovan migrants deal with everyday life problems while experiencing different forms of inclusion and exclusion. My empirical data is based on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul in 2007 with 35 informal and in-depth interviews as part of my M.S. thesis. I argue that while Moldovan immigrants construct a local level belonging via economic life, they experience exclusion on the legal level. In other words, they experience an economic incorporation at the local level without having political membership at the national level. This situation is highly related with the differential exclusionary mode of incorporation for low-skilled labour immigrants in Turkey. Furthermore, cultural preferences of different actors seem to be one of the factors that affect both labour market outcomes and identity formations.