Step-by-step Migration through Turkey: From the Indian subcontinent to Europe

Abstract

The phenomenon of irregular transit, or step-by-step, migration is not a new trend as it has been increasingly witnessed in many parts of the world in the last three decades. For instance, at the surrounding regions of Europe, countries like Turkey, Morocco and Ukraine are subject to flows of irregular migrants who come from the third countries and intend to enter Europe from these peripheral territories. While the nature, dynamics and mechanisms of these flows are relatively well-documented in recent related literature, there are limited number of studies which focus on the particular cases of migrant groups. This essay tends to fill in this void, by focusing on the cases of transit migration in Turkey who come from the Indian sub-continent mainly with the intention of going to Europe. While the essay elaborates on Bangladeshi, Indian, Nepalese, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan transit migrants in general, special emphasis is mainly on Indians. In the lack of comprehensive and reliable data, the paper is an exploratory study rather than an explanatory one, which attempts to map out a relatively new migratory form and process from India to Europe that develops as a step-by-step, or transit, migration through various countries: the case of Turkey, as a transit country, has provided us with a unique setting which has a relatively long-established tradition of being a transit country towards Europe for thousands of transit migrants mostly from the Middle-East, and is now also increasingly becoming functional for transit migrants who come from the Indian subcontinent and try to enter Europe.