Etyen Mahçupyan
There is an interesting analogy between the nearly 2.5 million refugees who fled Syria and took refuge in Turkey and the Turkish workers who went to Germany many years ago. In both cases, whether the incomers were guests or went to live permanently was a question that found an answer over the course of time. Moreover, this uncertainty applied to both the governments of host countries and the incoming foreigners. Thinking that they would return home sometime soon, Turkish workers in Germany lived in small rented houses near main train stations in cities and counted down the days without even emptying their suitcases. For many of them, it took nearly 20 years to comprehend and internalize that they lived there permanently and this period corresponded to the time when their children became adolescents.
Such a soft transition is not congruent for the mass that came to Turkey from Syria. First of all, these people did not come to Turkey to make better lives for themselves. They fled their country as they could not find the right to live there, making them refugees. In other words, although Turkey did not want to, it is dealing with millions of people it had to accept against its will. Moreover, the number of Syrian refugees might increase further.
The money that has been spent on Syrian refugees has reached $8 billion. Following the initial confusion, the government formed an administrative and legal mechanism that would bring a systematic approach to this issue after mid-2014. In order to see the dimensions of the matter, let us underline that there are 650,000 school-age Syrian refugees of all ages in Turkey at the moment. For instance, there are 40,000 Syrian children in Adana and only 15,000 of them have been provided the opportunity for schooling up to now. However, the problem is not limited to this alone, as a total of 5,000 out of these 15,000 children cannot benefit from schooling on a regular basis for various reasons such as living long distances from schools, lack of transportation opportunities and the fact that they have to work to make money.The clue we have here takes us to a basic problem that is produced by those who have to migrate to a foreign country very quickly. Naturally, they do not speak the language of the country to which they have come, and in such cases of humanitarian and political migration, families have difficulty finding job opportunities that allow them to earn a living. Children, however, constitute a cheaper labor force and can learn the language of the country easier. This situation leads to child labor exploitation on the one hand, and produces families that rely on the income generated by children, on the other.
This reality might lead to corruption in family balances in the future and increasingly pushes those children into illegal jobs for the sake of more money. When you add the presence of a wave of radicalization, which is able to captivate the youngsters of the day, to this picture, you understand that you need to confront a multifaceted and a more complex problem. The good news is that the government is fully aware of these problems and it has operated quite an active mechanism to ensure social integration on a humanitarian level. The bad news is that even though legal ground is needed to obtain permanent results from these steps, Turkey acts hesitantly about taking such steps. For instance, one of the most reasonable steps to prevent child labor exploitation and to protect the family structure is to pave the way for Syrian entrepreneurs and offer them opportunities to open businesses and provide them with export loans. This step, however, which implies that Syrians should be granted equality on a broader legal ground, should not turn into a type of discrimination that favors capital holders. The question is whether Turkey wants this or not, and what kind of consequences this step will have.