Migrant as a transitional category : Turkish migrants in Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

Since the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Turks have gone abroad, particularly to West Germany, to sell their labour power mainly under the so-called guestworker scheme. Only a small proportion (an estimated 1 per cent) have migrated to Australia, doing so in a context which was considered — by the Australian government, although not by many Turkish migrants — to be permanent settlement. In the late 1980s, the number of Turkish migrants and their children in Australia totalled around 35,000. This study examines and provides a comprehensive perspective on the migratory flow from Turkey to Australia. It addresses various aspects of the migration and settlement history of first-generation Turks living in Melbourne, concentrating on the questions of how they experienced their migration to, and settlement in, Australia, and how they were incorporated into the life of this country, both inside and outside their workplaces, and what perceptions and attitudes they had towards their experiences. Whilst acknowledging the complexity of a social process such as incorporation of immigrants into a receiving country, the methodological approach taken in this study is two-pronged: it combines ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ levels of analysis, based on the data collected by the author in 1987, resulting from five months fieldwork in Melbourne, gathering structured and unstructured indepth interviews with 276 Turkish migrants. The qualitative work, a ‘case-study’ approach, explores the migration to Australia from the immigrants’ viewpoint analysing the way their lives had been dramatically affected by the whole migratory process. The quantitative analysis demonstrates the socio-economic, cultural and demographic changes emerging in the life cycle of these individual migrants and their families during the pre- and post-migratory periods, and associates these changes with the migrants’ structural and cultural adaptation patterns. This study emphasizes that the 1967 migration agreement between the Australian and Turkish governments marked a central point in the history of Turkish immigration, not only making possible the flow of Turkish migrants into Australia but also structurally affecting the successive stages of the migratory flow from Turkey and the successive stages of settlement and incorporation processes of the arriving migrants over time. Substantial Turkish immigration occurred only between 1968 and 1974 when the movement was largely through the assisted migration program based on the 1967 agreement. After the termination of the agreement in 1974, the migratory flow from Turkey slowed down, and it took the form of chain migration and family reunion — with the exception of the arrivals of university graduates who started to migrate on their own in the 1980s. Since Australia drew settlers from the guestworker-oriented pool formed in the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey, the majority of early migrants, unlike their later counterparts, had, on arrival, no intention of ‘permanent settlement’. They initially saw themselves as temporary workers and planned to return home; however many of them changed their original plans or failed to realize these plans, and either never returned or repeatedly came back to Australia. Thus Turkish settlement in Australia was characterized by a transition from temporary migration to unintended settlement. Although the immigrants’ initial intention of temporary migration had an important and continuing impact on the process by which these migrants became incorporated into various social contexts in Australia, the historically determined structure of Turkish immigration and settlement in Australia, independently of migrants’ settlement intention, had a capacity and function of its own in placing the immigrants into certain social and economic relations in the heterogeneous, stratified, and pluralistic social formation of the receiving country. While Australia has became a ‘new home’ for many Turks, the position of the immigrants in their ‘new’ social setting has been largely a dialectic outcome of the peculiar characteristics of these migrants themselves, of the society they entered, of the society they left, and of the larger context of the international migration they were involved in. Show more