Managing the migrant problem

The issue of migration that we are facing is in fact one of the sociological phenomena of which we find many examples in history. Throughout history, very different factors have forced or encouraged people to move. Forced migrations take place because of wars, political pressures, or other social and natural disasters or pressures.

That migration is increasing in the world we live in, in proportion to the population as well, shows that the showy lives we call globalization or modernization have no fundamental solution to this problem. But from a sociological perspective it is also seen that migration cannot be entirely prevented anyway. On the contrary, in the modern world, it is seen that with the development of weapons technologies, mass massacres and deportations have also become much easier and that human life has suddenly become very cheap and simple.

What is happening today with Russia's invasion of Ukraine is in fact, to some extent, another face of our contemporaneity too. That close to 5 million people have become refugees within a short period of two months is also an indicator of what disputes among people have come to cause by human hands themselves.

Migration is of course a problem, but the way of coping with problems is also an expression of the quality and capacity of a country and a society. Migrants generally head for relatively better countries. The number of migrants that Turkey attracts today grows, in a way, in parallel with the development Turkey has experienced. Turkey of course gives the feeling of an environment that is both safer and more livable.

Migration is a problem and, like all problems, it requires not ignoring it or cutting it off all at once but an intelligent management. A head that makes a lot of noise talks about sending them away by the ear, all at once. Unfortunately, this approach, which increasingly covets populist favor most hungrily, has nothing whatsoever to do with the intelligent management of the problem. Their way of managing all problems in the past has been like this too. Had it not been for schools, national education would have been easy to manage. In the sixties the coup makers, because they could not manage urbanization, were able to talk about forcibly returning people to their villages. The only thing they resort to, in the name of solving the problem at its root, is ignoring it or force. This is called not management but bullying.

When we say that forced sending away will never be an option, we are obliged to say that by this we have no intention of forcibly keeping Syrians in Turkey. Yet "forcible sending away" is a crime under international law, under refugee or asylum law.

Those who can say with ease that migrants should be forcibly sent away are in fact encouraging and inciting our entire nation to a crime and an offense. I am not even mentioning that this crime is already an assassination of our culture, our identity and our custom. Just one example: this fascist mindset, of which Europe has plenty as well, talks about forcibly sending Syrians away, but no one has so far been able to forcibly send away any migrant who has sought refuge in and settled in the country. Because talking is easy as long as there is no fairness, conscience or sense, but when it comes to practice, committing an international crime cannot be risked. For example, Denmark, which has for years been voicing that Syrians would be forcibly sent back and that it would apply a zero-asylum-seeker policy, has so far been unable to deport a single Syrian.

Yet the intelligent and humane management of migration is possible first of all through creating the conditions for return. Turkey has been working most seriously from the outset to create these conditions. Thanks to the safe zones it created with three military operations, it both prevented the migration of at least another 5 million Syrians who could come to Turkey, were ready to come, and had piled up at the border, and, by encouraging movement to these areas, it secured the quiet, voluntary return of at least 500 thousand Syrians.

In addition, through a project that is currently under way and also has international support, towns with working and social facilities, livable and preferable to conditions in Turkey, are being built in the safe zones. These structures, whose construction work is also continuing rapidly, will be completed in a very short time and the return of Syrians who wish to these areas will be encouraged.

Those who have seized on the discourse of sending back as material for populist politics, and who have been seized by the lust to consume it to the end as racist hate speech, at the same time accuse Turkey's administration of ignoring the migrant problem. What they do is only cheap political cunning, but its result is nothing other than making the management of migration even harder. Yet Turkey, with the extremely humane approach it has shown in migration management, has achieved, so to speak, an unparalleled moral gain as an example to the whole world. With all this racist hatred and inhuman rhetoric being raised, this moral gain, this superiority of Turkey, is being blown to pieces, and an impression of a Turkey of exactly the opposite kind is being created.

If this is not hostility to Turks, what is?

And do not many debates also come down to the stereotype of the "migrant who can go on holiday to his homeland"? To understand what the level of these debates has cost, no other example is needed beyond a respected professor who immediately jumps on this shallow and ignorant stereotype and can say "if they can go, let them stay." He does not ask: do those who are able to cross into Syria really go on holiday? How many go, or are able to go? What if the person who goes there has nothing left but the graves of relatives he can visit? Are there places on the other side of Syria that he can visit other than camps?

The number of people who can go to and from Syria for one reason or another does not even reach 1 percent of the present Syrian population. Because in the places most of them migrated from, they have neither homes nor hearths nor relatives left. If you have your eye on the graves that those who can come and go visit, and on the relatives who stayed behind there because they could not come here, what can that eye see, and how much?