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Turkey in recent years has become the world’s largest host of refugees, assuming a major role in the management of Europe’s broader migration crisis. After the outbreak of violence in Syria in 2011, governments led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) implemented an open-door policy for displaced and dissident Syrians (Balkılıç and Teke Lloyd 2020; Kaya 2021, 359-60). This initially prompted the establishment of Temporary Accommodation Centers (TACs) in Turkey’s southern border towns[1] and culminated in the 2016 cooperation statement with the European Union (���տ���),[2] wherein Turkey agreed to prevent migrants from transiting to Europe. As of 2022, Turkey harbored approximately four million registered Syrian nationals and over 320,000 individuals from other predominantly Muslim countries.[3]

Since the closing of TACs beginning in 2018, most of this immigrant population has inhabited Turkish urban centers (Kurfalı and Özçürümez 2023). During the same period, Turkey also entered a protracted economic depression characterized primarily by sharp devaluations in its currency, rampant inflation, a cost-of-living crisis felt particularly acutely in cities,[4] and dwindling central bank international reserves.[5] Food inflation—which pushed Erdoğan to set up produce discount markets in urban areas in the runup to the March 2019 municipal elections—exceeded 100 percent in mid-2022,[6] and the Turkish lira lost more than 85 percent of its value relative to the US dollar. At the time of writing, inflation hovers around 70 percent and the government is implementing harsh austerity measures.[7]

Despite these economic woes, Turkish authorities have expanded welfare and other services available to migrant and refugee populations, committing to provide the “best possible living conditions and humanitarian assistance for refugees” (Kaya 2021, 360). To this end, they reportedly spent north of $40 billion (Dagi 2020, 209), dwarfing the €6 billion pledged by ���տ��� authorities in the 2016 agreement. Further, since 2018, Turkey has granted “exceptional citizenship” to more than 238,000 Syrian nationals[8] and other individuals previously ineligible for naturalization (Serdar 2022) despite public opinion polling suggesting a vast majority of Turkish citizens wishing for Syrian refugees and other regional migrants to return to their countries of origin (Dagi 2020, 212; Güney 2021).

This article seeks to explain the Turkish government’s logic in attempting to absorb a massive immigrant population amidst mounting economic challenges and increasing public opposition. How did Erdoğan-led administrations respond to a mass migration phenomenon that quickly transformed Turkey into a major transit and destination country, and following what rationales?

Scholarly and journalistic accounts alike overwhelmingly relate Erdoğan’s refugee and immigration policies to his broader foreign policy goals. A popular notion is the “instrumentalization” of the migrant crisis in relations with the ���տ��� (Okyay and Zaragoza-Cristiani 2016; Donelli 2018; Kaya 2021; Reiners and Turhan 2021) or other foreign policy objectives. Kaya (2021) argues, for instance, that the AKP seeks to augment Turkey’s soft power in the Middle East by opening doors to disenfranchised Muslims. Balkılıç and Teke Lloyd (2020) highlight how Erdoğan employs the issue to promulgate pro-Islamic moral and “civilizational” critiques of European Christendom. An oft-used perspective similarly suggests that Erdoğan “weaponizes” migrants (Greenhill 2022) to secure strategic leverage and concessions vis-à-vis Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad and the ���տ��� (Dagi 2020; Gülen 2020). In sum, the dominant view concludes that Erdoğan sees in mass migration an effective instrument of coercive diplomacy, wielding “migration-driven coercion” against Europe, much like Belarussian president Aleksandr Lukashenko, former Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi (Greenhill 2010, 1–5), and Vladimir Putin.

We argue that extant literature is overly focused on the power dynamics of international politics at the expense of the internal dynamics of the competitive authoritarian regime (Levitsky and Way 2020) that emerged in Turkey under 22 years of AKP rule (Esen and Gumuscu 2016; Castaldo 2018). While we concur that Turkey’s ruling party sees in the migrant crisis opportunities to further its foreign policy agenda, the question of how Erdoğan’s immigration and naturalization policies relate to his party’s domestic objectives deserves more attention. In this article, we outline these objectives and discuss how they are primarily based on the logics of political survival, ensuring the economic well-being of the business elite undergirding Erdoğan’s coalition, as well as furthering the party’s prolonged agenda of promoting Islam in Turkey. Specifically, we argue that Erdoğan’s immigration and naturalization policies cannot be analyzed detached from two underlying processes, both of which have characterized Turkey’s authoritarian political landscape since at least the 2010s.

First is the incremental autocratization predicated on the endurance of Erdoğan’s electoral appeal (Somer 2019; Gumuscu 2023; Hintz 2024; Somer and Tekinırk 2024). The gradual disappearance of democratic regime attributes under a domineering chief executive has enabled and continues to sustain the ruling party’s “highly centralized control over [a] patron-client system” (Esen and Gumuscu 2017, 363), entrenching favoritism in the distribution of public and private resources and rents (Buğra and Savaşkan 2014; Gürakar 2016). While using its political mandate to cater to other core constituents—the urban poor and pious Muslims (Aytaç 2014; Dorlach 2015; Bermek 2019), the AKP simultaneously built and deployed a system of “rewards and punishments” to “form and expand a loyal business class” (Esen and Gumuscu 2017, 364). Its resulting influence in the business world reinforces AKP domination of state institutions with “an extensive clientelistic network that closely ties different segments of society to the state,” adding to Erdoğan’s power (Aydın-Düzgit et al. 2023: 81). The question of where migrant flows and naturalization policies fall in this economic landscape must be subject to closer scrutiny.

The second process is the AKP’s pro-Islamic social engineering from above, or top-down “Islamization of social and political life” (Gumuscu 2024), which came to the fore during the 2010s (Somer 2019; Tekinırk 2022) and manifested itself in disparate avenues spanning education and youth policies (Lüküslü 2016; Yilmaz 2018), authoritarian interventions in social and cultural life (Özbudun 2014, 157; Çevik 2019; Hintz 2021), spatial transformations of symbolic and public spaces (Harmanşah 2014), invention of alternate commemorations and traditions (Kaftan 2021; Solomonovich 2021), Turkey’s foreign policy orientation (Saraçoğlu and Demirkol 2014; Hintz 2016, 2018) and official (state) ideology and identity (Alaranta 2015; Dayıoğlu and Köprülü 2019; Hovsepyan 2023). These policies comprise much of the legal and socio-cultural infrastructure of what the AKP calls “New Turkey.” If such avenues constitute core elements of the AKP’s pro-Islamic initiative to refashion Turkey, then scholarship should also analyze the AKP’s migration and naturalization policies through a similar lens given the social and demographic changes these policies can induce over time.

We maintain that AKP-led integration of masses from predominantly Sunni Muslim societies and simultaneous transformations of Turkey’s asylum (Kaya 2021) and citizenship policies (Serdar 2022) in ways that foreground Islamic bonds are entirely compatible with and logically linked to aforementioned policies of “stealth Islamization” (Gumuscu 2024). As the substantial shifts that have already taken place in the demographic structures of Turkish cities since 2011 (Dagi 2020) imply, the AKP’s stance on immigration carries transformative potential and may help reinforce the sectarian dominance of Sunnis and social conservatism in Turkish society. Therefore, we treat Erdoğan’s immigration and naturalization policies as complementary to his prolonged quest to foster a pious Islamic social fabric in Turkey (Lüküslü 2016).

Below, we expand on our reasoning that the internal dynamics of the regime in Turkey must also be taken into account. Our analysis suggests that the AKP approaches the predominantly Muslim immigrant mass in Turkey as a human reserve that can potentially serve its electoral endurance and cultural-ideological agenda, uncovering a novel resource which autocrats may leverage to satisfy their winning coalitions and pursue ideological goals—migrants.

 

Growing incumbent vulnerability in Turkey and the AKP’s political survival

Present-day Turkey constitutes a prime example of democratic erosion—the incremental eradication of democratic regime attributes under popularly elected officials (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Maerz et al. 2020)—and is best understood as a hybrid regime (Diamond 2002) that harbors some elements of democratic politics but has drifted towards autocracy for many years. Before the AKP came to power in 2002, Turkey tallied 0.5/1.0 in the Varieties of Democracy institute’s liberal democracy index, which considers factors like judicial independence and the rule of law, government accountability and transparency, and the state of civic and political rights and liberties. This score gradually declined after 2004, bottoming at 0.1 in 2017. During these years, Turkey’s opposition actors and parties remained relatively ineffective against Erdoğan (Somer and Tekinırk 2024), who led his party to several high-profile electoral victories with relative ease.

With economic depression gripping Turkey after 2018, however, the AKP’s electoral performance witnessed significant setbacks while the pro-democracy opposition underwent important learning episodes and achieved electoral gains (Selçuk and Hekimci 2020; Wuthrich and Ingleby 2020; Somer and Tekinırk 2024). First, critical losses in the 2019 local elections pierced the AKP’s armor of electoral invincibility, forcing it to cede the metropolitan mayoralties of Istanbul and Ankara and severing the decades-long control it exercised over the massive economic and other resources that come at the disposal of these key municipal offices. Next, in the May 2023 presidential elections, despite his unrestricted use of state resources on the campaign trail, Erdoğan had to secure his incumbency via runoff for the first time against a largely coordinated opposition (Aydın-Düzgit et al. 2023, 81; Esen et al. 2023). Most recently, Erdoğan’s party suffered even greater losses in the 2024 iteration of the municipal elections as the main opposition consolidated gains made in 2019 and even surpassed the AKP in overall vote percentage for the first time ever.

These important developments suggest that despite the AKP’s grip on power and electoral resilience spanning over two decades, growing incumbent vulnerability is a fundamental factor that observers must recognize when looking at Turkish politics today. Drawing on selectorate theory (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003), we assume that Erdoğan would like to maintain a winning coalition—the subset of the population whose support provides him with political power over the remainder of society. Further, given how openly party officials discuss their quest to cement AKP’s political power with cultural hegemony (Hintz 2021; 2024),[9] we can also assume that political survival for Erdoğan comprises more than electoral victories and features forward-looking goals such as ensuring that his party’s worldview, values, and preferred ways of thinking and acting remain dominant (Bora 2024) even if it were to be voted out of power one day. The government’s frequent emphasis on “raising pious generations” (Lüküslü 2016) and “preparing” the Turkish youth and society for the future is case in point.[10]

Can Erdoğan leverage the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim social-demographic background and marginal economic status of the massive immigrant population in Turkey to further his agenda of top-down Islamization and satisfy his winning coalition? Below, we take a closer look at the ways in which mass migration and naturalization policies can buttress Erdoğan’s bases of political, economic, and ideational power or possibly undermine him.

 

The migrant population as a political, economic, and demographic resource?

The legal framework of the Turkish government’s refugee response is based on the Law on Foreigners and International Protection (2013) and the Temporary Protection Regulation (2014).[11] These grant freedom of movement, access to healthcare and education (Kaya 2021, 359; Serdar 2022, 56-58), and an identity card that can be used to apply for a work permit in “sectors, occupational branches, and geographical areas (cities, towns, or villages) determined by the president” (2014, Article 29, emphasis added).[12]

While these laws render protected individuals ineligible for naturalization regardless of their duration of stay (Serdar 2022, 51), president Erdoğan’s July 2016 announcement that the Ministry of Interior was “taking steps” to extend citizenship rights revealed the possibility for their permanent legal inclusion (ibid, 58).[13] These steps envisioned changes in the 2009 Turkish Citizenship Law (TCL),[14] but when opposition parties in the parliament refused to support the AKP with legal reform, the government shifted its focus to using executive decrees.[15] The systematic application of exceptional citizenship provisions defined in the TCL—which give the centralized executive authority full discretionary power over the applications of those “whose naturalization are considered necessary” (Article 12/c) and “those recognized as migrants” (12/d)—was then facilitated by Turkey’s implementation of an executive presidential system in 2018 that transferred the authority to grant exceptional citizenship from the Council of Ministers to Erdoğan’s new hyperpresidential office (Serdar 2022, 55).

In short, the AKP concentrated the power to pick and choose who can and who cannot earn citizenship—and thereby voting rights—in Erdoğan’s hands. While there are nominal selection criteria like speaking a “sufficient” level of Turkish, the degree of discretion and arbitrariness exercised in the decision-making process, the lack of transparency and consistent data on the exceptional acquisition of citizenship (Serdar 2022), as well as the face-to-face interview process, suggest that Erdoğan’s administration has the ability to filter in a particularistic citizen profile, such as his professed sympathizers or Muslim Brotherhood affiliates who consisted the majority of the Syrian opposition (Carpenter 2013). This discretionary power adds to Erdoğan’s ability to forge clientelistic linkages with the migrant population as it positions the latter as prospective citizens.

There are other reasons why Erdoğan might garner significant support from newly naturalized voters as well. His party is by far the most pro-migrant in Turkey, and, accordingly, “most Syrians seem to view the AKP as their original allies and the best guarantor of the community’s future in Turkey” (Levkowitz 2023). The pro-Muslim Brotherhood stance Erdoğan maintained for many years (Tür 2019) sits well with Assad’s Islamist opponents. The AKP also enjoys popularity among ordinary Syrians[16] as well as migrants from other regional countries, given its proactive engagement with them especially at the local level.��While it would be obtuse to suggest that all 238,000 Syrians granted exceptional citizenship will consistently vote for the AKP, the size in the enlargement of the electorate is significant relative to the margins of victory in recent electoral contests. Further, even if the AKP fails to secure enough new votes this way, the potential to alter the long-term demographics of Turkey’s electorate by giving voting rights to preferred profiles is not insignificant.

Besides this first mechanism, which operates at the mass level and primarily targets disenfranchised groups, another is the investor citizenship program launched in 2016, which offers citizenship rights to affluent individuals and their families—such as citizens of resource-rich Gulf countries that have recently announced major investment programs in Turkey[17]—after holding for three years real estate valued at $400,000 or above. This program provides significant revenues to both Erdoğan’s administration through application fees as well as to Turkey’s construction and real estate sectors through rising housing demand. The commodification of Turkish passports, therefore, helps buoy sectors of critical importance to the government’s economic network. In 2020 alone, this program generated $1.7 billion (Surak 2023), providing substantial revenue to sustain political support from these and other related sectors (Irons and Tekinırk, working paper).

 

Considerations for future research on Turkey’s open-door policies

We maintained above that a fruitful understanding of Turkey’s open-door policies in recent years requires attention to not just its international politics and position but also its domestic political situation and specifically the incumbents’ strategic initiatives to preserve and potentially enhance their electoral, economic, and cultural-ideational bases of power. Besides pursuing foreign policy goals, Turkey’s ruling party also actively seeks the domestic political incorporation of the broader migrant populations. This shows that “migration-driven coercion” on a purely diplomatic level is not the only method through which autocrats can weaponize migration.

Moreover, Turkey’s absorption of millions of disenfranchised migrants requires further attention as it feeds the AKP’s complex patron-client network with abundant and cheap labor in a business environment characterized by rising prices on other factors of production. This suggests another mechanism resting on the influx of exploitable migrant labor, some of which is channeled into select areas via work permits and most of which into the informal sector (Aksu et al. 2022; Badalič 2023; Gulek 2024). Critically, this comes in an electoral context of the AKP bearing signs of weakening (Yavuz and Koç 2024). It is not far-fetched, therefore, to suggest that Erdoğan orients his open-door policies towards buttressing his electoral and economic bases of power via selective granting of exceptional citizenship to those likely to hold his policies in favorable esteem and the maintenance of business-class support for his party. Simultaneously, they also aid his authoritarian promotion of Islam by asserting his notion of a Muslim nation.

Another theoretical point follows. Scholarship seems to largely overlook the domestic aspects of the soft—that is, ideational and cultural—dimension of power that is aptly recognized at the international level of politics. By showing how the policies discussed above relate to the AKP’s ideal of a distinctly Muslim Turkish society, we stress that a soft dimension of power in the domestic context is well worth considering.

Finally, a practical point. Our analysis implies that the Turkish government thus far has favored elite interests in its approach to migration, be it political survival for the incumbent or preserving the profitability of the economic elite in an otherwise challenging economic environment—at the expense of public welfare and popular interests. This disregard of broader demands and grievances highlights a potential political liability by exposing Erdoğan to the possibility of his main opposition playing a constructive role in problem resolution, as evidenced by the recent engagement of the Republican People’s Party with Syrian authorities.[18] By increasing the magnitude of the problem for potential political gains, the AKP may have paradoxically given its opposition a chance to assume a more prominent role. We leave these analyses for future research.

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Metehan Tekinırk is a political scientist and currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University. He is primarily interested in comparative political culture and institutions. His work specifically focuses on populism, nationalism and national identities, and democratic erosion.

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Dylan Irons is a Visiting Assistant Professor of International Relations at Colgate University. His primary research concerns economic repression and forced migration, with area interests in the Koreas and a disciplinary interest in political economy.

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[16] Middle East Monitor, 16 February 2014, <accessed on 29 July 2024.>

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[18] Hürriyet Daily News, 10 July 2024, <accessed on 16 August 2024.>

 

Published on August 16, 2024.