Migration, migration it was…

We are at the International Migration Symposium at Gaziantep University. With academic participants from nearly every corner of Turkey and the world, we are discussing how and to what extent the phenomenon of migration shapes the world we live in.

On the one hand, we have left behind the 50th year of labor migration to Germany. While the Germans were expecting workers, they realized only after quite some time that human beings had come to their country, but until they realized it, they could not know what dramas and tragedies were being lived in their own country, right beside them. Today, those who know, know; those who do not know want to go on refusing to accept these people either as workers or as human beings.

The human being is, in essence, not bound to the soil. This is a trait that distinguishes him especially from grasses and plants. The deeds of the human being that have become subjects of history have almost always come after a change of place. People who stayed in their own homeland have not been seen to make history, to do deeds that would become subjects of history. Ali Shariati related it: Arnold Toynbee established that all the civilizations known in history were founded, in the wake of a migration, by migrant generations.

This seems to be a consequence arising from the very nature of the matter. People who migrate, by transcending themselves, are practicing taking their own destiny into their own hands. If migration is not an exile that is compulsorily endured, if it rests on a decision taken by assessing one's own situation, it is in itself a great undertaking. The determination to change the world in the people who do this is not to be underestimated.

Ibn Khaldun drew attention to what potential for change and for changing the world lies in this easy attitude of nomadic people toward the world. The Holy Qur'an, for its part, points to the concept of hijra as an alternative form of action or form of existence in the face of a state of helplessness. While the oppressed who adopt helplessness as a culture are described as having "wronged themselves," the question asked in response to their attempt to lay the blame on the oppressors who have left them helpless, or on factors outside themselves, is one on which no amount of dwelling would be too much: "Was not God's earth spacious?"

Here migration, or hijra, corresponds above all to a state of mind. It is a magnificent sign that in the creation of the human being there is always a way out against helplessness and despair: God's earth is spacious. Before this spacious earth of God, migration becomes "göç," a going. The problems, the narrowness, the hardships that led to migration migrate away from a person's life together with the migration.

Globalization is, in a way, a new horizon brought about by the increased mobility in the world, a new level of social relations. One reason why the world is changing so rapidly today, and why we are experiencing such radical change in such a short time, is the increased mobility in the world. From the horizons fused together by this mobility, very different cultures, very powerful ideas, practices and models emerge.

In Turkey too, when we take into account the dimensions of internal migrations (from countryside to city, or from town to big city) that began in 1950, it seems much more possible to make sense of political processes as well as social change. The urban population, which was around 25 percent in 1950, has reached 77 percent within 60 years. There are very few countries that have moved 52 percent of their population from the countryside to the city within a period as short as 60 years, and been able to set a similar share in motion between different points.

This mobility has, for one thing, socialized a tremendous will for change in Turkish society. The change we are living through today at the political level is, in a way, a product of this social mobility. It is no coincidence that the anti-democratic forces in Turkey have also adopted an anti-migration attitude. For in Turkey there has been a linear relationship between increasing population mobility and the demand, will or development of democratization.

The understanding that has dominated 90 years of Turkey has always seen migration as a problem. Instead of seeing it as a phenomenon to be coped with and even to be seen as an opportunity, it has seen it as a disease to be suppressed and, if possible, reversed. That is why, whenever it has had difficulty coping with the problems produced by migration, it has resorted to the easiest way for a solution: "Come on, let's go back to our village!"

Social problems are at the same time opportunities in the hands of skillful administrators. It is quite possible to seize this opportunity and use it in the direction of development. Yet unskilled politicians, in the name of solving all problems at the root, prefer to condemn society to complete immobility and stagnation. If there were no schools, the Ministry of National Education would be run very nicely; if the population did not grow, there would be neither a housing problem nor an infrastructure problem nor a health problem. If cities did not constantly receive migration, it would be very easy to plan them.

Yet the source of the problem is not the growing population but those who, though unable to manage this growing population, aspire to manage it with great ambition, greed and appetite.

When one is both unskilled and more ambitious than everyone, and moreover seizes the power to govern through intrigue and trickery, a country has no chance at all. A people subjected to this situation is left with no recourse, at the very least, but to migrate at all costs (to change their own selves) from one state of mind to another.