In the context of the series of civil wars that have struck the Middle East since the 1980s, the politico-economic changes in the post-Soviet geography of Eastern Europe and the Russian states, and the continuous turmoil in those parts of Africa and Asia where access to Turkish soil has been possible, Turkey emerged as a regional hub for receiving continuous flows of forced migration. As suggested by ample evidence in recent work on migration flows into Turkey, many of these “irregular migrants,” “stateless peoples,” or “asylum seekers” eventually become continuously employed under very unstable circumstances, thus fitting into the definition of the “precariat” or precarious proletariat. This paper examines the context within which such pervasive precarity takes root, directly affecting vulnerable groups such as the Syrian forced migrants arriving in Turkey in successive waves. The marked qualities of the Syrian case in terms of social precarity, combined with the degrees of disenfranchisement and economically precarious conditions for survival, indicates an institutionalized paradigm shift in the Turkish state’s management of irregular migration.

This article examines how the labor market in seasonal migrant work in agriculture in Turkey has changed with the influx of refugees from Syria. Based on both qualitative and quantitative fieldwork in ten provinces of Turkey, the article discusses precarity in seasonal migrant work in agriculture and the impact of the entry of refugees on this labor market. The analysis of precariousness of both Turkish-citizen migrant workers and refugees suggests that precarity is a relational phenomenon. The multifaceted vulnerabilities of groups in the lower echelons of the labor market resonate with one another and the adverse incorporation of vulnerable groups into the labor market pushes the market in a more insecure and informal direction.

Since the war erupted in Syria in 2011, Turkey has followed an “open door” policy toward Syrian refugees. The Turkish government has been promoting this liberal policy through a humanitarian discourse that leads one to expect that Syrian refugees have not been securitized in Turkey. This article, however, argues that a security framework that emphasizes control and containment has been essential to the governance of Syrian refugees in Turkey, despite the presence of such non-securitarian discourses. To develop this argument, the article first builds an analytical framework based on a critical engagement with the theory of securitization, which was originally developed by the Copenhagen School. Unlike the Copenhagen School’s theory emphasizing “speech acts” as the vector of securitization, this article applies a sociological approach to the analysis of the securitization process by focusing on both discursive and non-discursive practices. In carrying out this analysis, securitizing practices, both discursive and non-discursive, are defined as those that: (1) emphasize “control and containment,” especially in relation to societal/public security concerns (here, specifically, the labor market and employment); and (2) establish a security continuum about various other issues—including criminality, terrorism, socioeconomic problems, and cultural deprivation—and thereby treat migrants as “risky” outsiders. Subsequently, in line with this analytical framework, the article seeks to trace the securitization of non-camp Syrian refugees, especially in the labor market. Finally, the article demonstrates that this securitization process is likely to conceal structural and political problems, and to close off alternative public and political debate about the refugees.

The influx of hundreds of thousands of people from Syria to Turkey, especially into major cities such as İstanbul, together with the Turkish government’s policies towards Syrian refugees, has led to various changes in urban spaces. This article has a twofold objective: it examines and discusses the everyday lives of these refugees with regards to the processes and mechanisms of their exclusion and inclusion in İstanbul, while employing a multiscalar analysis of migration in terms of combining nation-state policies of migration, citizenship, space, and the concept of the “right to the city.” Relying upon interviews and participant observation in the Kanarya and Bayramtepe neighborhoods of İstanbul between 2011 and 2015, I outline the ways in which Syrian Kurdish refugees have been actively transforming İstanbul’s peripheries through their interactions with the Kurds who were forcibly displaced from their rural homes in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s.

Within the context of the transformation of Turkey from a country of emigration to an immigration and transit country, the migration scene is becoming more heterogeneous, with both the formal and informal labor markets being increasingly internationalized. This paper focuses on de-qualification, defined as migrants taking on jobs that do not match their skills, which is a neglected issue within the migration literature on Turkey with the potential for further research. Based on open-ended interviews and participant observation in İstanbul, the paper elaborates on the different instruments of de-qualification. De-qualification is considered here as an important element of precariousness in the labor market, with different mechanisms functioning simultaneously; namely, accreditation problems, a language disadvantage, lack of information, and identity-based discrimination.