COUNTRY-BASED POLICY BRIEFING ON MIGRATION-RELATED SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC POLICIES: NATIONAL REPORT TURKEY

Turkey has always been a country of migration. The population movements from rural to urban which started in the 1950s have continued; migration to European countries began in the 1960s in the form of labour migration and was followed by various forms of commercial migration. Thus since the early 1990s, Turkey has also been experiencing in-flows of transit migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, diverse forms of irregular migration and increasing number of foreign residents. Turkey has now become both a country of emigration and immigration (İçduygu & Kirişçi, 2009; Erdoğan & Kaya, 2015). This overview generally considers existing national policies, although the province of Karacabey, Bursa is the selected MATILDE region. Considering the highly centralized governance in Turkey, any separate urban-rural/mountain linkages with the national policies is hard to be raised at this level.