| Paul Stirling University of Kent September 1988 |
| Edited version of paper delivered to the Conference on |
| Mediterranean Migrations held (It Al lloceima at the University Al Charif Al Idrissi, at the invitation of the Minister for Cultural Atirs of the Kingdom of Morocco, 11th -14th July 1988. For publication. Labour Migration and Changes in Anatolia. |
| I am currently working on a body of data collected by Turkish |
| colleagues and myself, in 1985-6, in a restudy of two villages near Kayseri in Turkey. l This data is not fully ready for analysis, and I am therefore offering some provisional findings and remarks on the research, and some general ideas. The aim of the research was to create a longitudinal ethnography over thirty five years of dramatic social changes in Turkey, by building on my detailed field notes from 1949 -52, a brief restudy in 1971 (Stirling 1965,1974), and a series of brief visits thereafter. Turkey - Migration |
| Since Kemal Ataturk created Turkey as a nation state in 1923, Turkey |
| has grown fast; in population and in wealth. In round estimated numbers, from 1923 to 1985, the population multiplied by four - from 12.5 million to 50 million -, the GNP by allegedly twenty, and the GNP per capita by five, to around $1000.2 In approximately the same period, the percentage both of people working outside agriculture and that of people living in towns rose from around or under 20% to around 50%. |
| To realise such growth, Turkey needed labour; not just labour but |
| politicians, entrepreneurs, financiers, civil servants, engineers, scientists, technicians, doctors, lawyers, teachers, craftsmen. and a whole host of specialists of all kinds, besides factory workers and labourers. Nearly all the people came from the villages. A large majority of the present urban population are first ~ generation village |
| l. I wish to thank my village friends and other informants, my |
| research colleagues, the Economic and Social Research Council for their Support and the Republic of Turkey for research permission. Please see appendix for details. |
| 2. Hale (1981), who quotes Bulutay,Tezel, and Yildirim (1974), as |
| does Keyder(1987). See also World Development Report I986. Of course, measures of CNP are notoriously arbitrary; see ODI (1988). immigrants to town. So there has been a vast internal migration, a migration which has supplied the manpower necessary for economic |
| growth, which was caused by economic growth, and which stimulated economic growth. And a vast amount of educating and learning both formal and by experience, has gone on. |
| At the same time, the villages themselves have changed. Soldiering |
| apart, relatively few villagers in the 1920s had had experience of earning in towns. Most village households relied mainly on subsistence agriculture for their main income, the rest, in the west and south, on cash crops.3 In 1986, almost no villages are without any remittances from villagers working outside the village, and probably most households have at least one person with such experience, at least among kin and close neighbours. Almost all villages now have roads and bus services, and people can and do constantly visit towns for all kinds of reasons.4 |
| In the 1960s, Turks began migrating to Germany and to other |
| countries in West Europe first, by formal arrangements agreed between governments. But far more wanted to go than the official channels needed or could handle, and by 1975 the waiting list reached some 2 million. Very soon men learned to find their own way informally. Remittances on a large scale flowed back to Turkey, and of course to individual households. After the international oil crisis of 1973, the situation changed dramatically, and Germany and other countries stopped officially importing workers. Informal flows were reduced and in time virtually stopped. The Turkish immigrants changed tactics, bringing their wives and their close kin to Germany, so that neither the total immigrant population nor the total number of workers changed very much. At this point, in the mid 1970s, a labour market for Turks opened up in oil rich Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and especially in construction. The switch in January 1980 of national economic policy from import substitution to export-lead industrial growth increased the demand for Turkish construction labour in the Middle East. This demand, and the rates of pay, began to decline in 1983 with the fall in oil prices, and the increase in rival labour supplies. But many Turks still work in the Middle East. 3 Compare Mumtaz Turhan on his own east Anatolian village. (Turhan 1951); also Keyder 1987. 4 These statements are based on reading, observations, conversations, and the press. 5 Keyder and Aksu-Koc (1988) provide an excellent summary of the literature on Turkish international migration. Most of my statements can be checked from this work. though of course they are summarising other researchers. - 3 |
| Pendular and Household Migration |
| Sometimes a labour migrant leaves his or her 6 household, with the |
| intention of sending back part of his earnings, and returning in due course, at least for regular visits. Such a person remains a full member of the household, even its head, and I have counted all such migrant labourers as members. Sometimes a whole household moves to and settles in a different place where the members gain a new livelihood. Although these two cases are plainly very different, with very different consequences, no accepted pair of terms exists to distinguish them. In 1974, I used 'pendular' and 'permanent' migration. 'Pendular' is unsatisfactory, and 'permanent' very unsatisfactory. Here I change 'permanent' to 'household' migration; though that too is unsatisfactory. There are of course borderline cases; moreover, the distinction also leaves out unmarried individuals who leave home for good, and expect neither to contribute, nor to receive support. In contrast to Europe, such people are rare in Turkey, and almost non existent in these villages. S Village: Past Migration. |
| At some point - perhaps till the late 1920s - S village produced |
| roughly enough from its own poor land, and its animals to ensure its own survival 7 without income from outside. The village always had spare labour capacity outside the relatively short spring ploughing season, and the harvest (Stirling 1965 pp. 95 ,135 ). Village men, they told me in 1950, with simplifying exaggeration, only work four months a year; though in those four months, they do a years work. Villagers with insufficient or no land could work or sharecrop for households with a labour shortage, or they could serve the village as herders or watchmen; or they might service other villagers as artisans. I heard anecdotally of one or two wealthier households in the recent past who collected animals from the villages for the urban markets; and there had been a trickle of migrant labour. In the 1930s, several men had walked to Ankara - two weeks, staying as guests in other villages - to find unskilled work, and one man had been a ganger on the railways. But numbers were small and earnings also. |
| 6 Nowadays. I automatically show that I realise that not aU |
| humans are male. But in this case, wrongly. In these villages, so far, women have never migrated for work, but only as part of a man's household. A few, very few, take a job once they have moved. |
| 7 May I protest in passing at the current neo-Marxist fashion for |
| confusing three things - day to day survival, producing and socialising children, and ensuring the continuity of social and cultural systems - by using 'reproduce' for all three ? |
| - 4 |
| Around 1938-1940, two men became skilled construction workers, |
| and recruited younger kinsmen and neighbours as apprentices to learn the trade. An usta takes on a cirak, who works for him for next to nothing. In due course, the apprentice is given, or finds for himself, a chance to work as a master in his own right; later, some succeed in subcontracting and employing their skilled friends. In 1950, a plasterer earned about three times an unskilled labourer. I counted about forty skilled building craftsmen, mostly plasterers, in a village of 100 households and 600 people. A few of these were probably subcontractors. Already, it was clear that the village land could no longer feed all the village members, if they all returned, and ceased to earn outside. But the skilled men earned well, and most stayed away from the village for nine months or more each year. The secret was a good network for finding work. They were decidedly more prosperous than most full time farmers; but they all said that they would stay and farm if only they had enough land. I did not totally believe them. I was struck by the now well known fact that by and large the migrants did not come from the neediest households, but from the better off, those who had the resources and the contacts to exploit their surplus labour profitably. The main aims were to clear debts or to prepare to meet the heavy costs of a future marriage, or to improve housing; but people were interested already in accumulation. 'Target' migration was not the norm. |
| Migration was steadily increasing. Everyone needed more cash, from |
| the hungry poor to the village investors; and the village lands could neither absorb nor feed the growing supply of young labour. But migration could turn spare labour into material benefits. Soon - around 1957 - and in accordance with national trends the first villagers moved out with their whole households and settled in town ( Keyder 1987 pp.135,136 ). The first people went mostly not to the local town Kayseri, but to Antakya and Iskanderun, where building work was not interrupted by winter frost, and where a number of pendular workers already had good networks. Soon, the main place for this village became Adana, and later still, many went to Antalya. A few settled in Ankara, and rather more in Kayseri. But men from the village worked all over Turkey, and one or two settled in other towns. In the early sixties, the first villagers left for Germany, at first officially, and later as 'tourists' or by special arrangements with kin already there. Up to sixty men from the village went to Europe, and perhaps thirty had their households there at some point. About fifteen still do. Many more wanted to go. In 1973, it became officially impossible to get a work permit, and only those with connections who could find a way round the rules could go. |