Next spring, Turkey will choose its fate in a high-tension presidential election, but Turks are already voting with their feet. Although the official statistics institute has not published immigration figures for a long time, specialists nevertheless estimate that hundreds of thousands of citizens, mostly aged between 20 and 34, leave the country of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Faced with the worsening economic crisis and growing authoritarianism, this dynamic is constantly accelerating: in France alone, requests for political asylum from Turkey have increased by 63% between 2020 and 2021.
Going through Mexico to join the American dream
For these exiles, all roads are good to take, even the most tortuous. In the first five months of the year, 11,827 Turks were arrested by border police in the United States. Mexico, which does not require a visa from Turkish citizens for their tourist stay, has become a privileged place of passage. Pinar, 27, flew to Mexico City in August, before crossing to the United States and surrendering to US authorities, where she filed an asylum application. In Turkey, she was the subject of two trials for “insulting the president” and “propaganda in favor of a terrorist organization”. These charges exploded in Turkey: in 2021, Turkish prosecutors opened 33,973 investigations for insulting the head of state (punishable by one to four years in prison), while they have, since 2016, returned nearly 2 million decisions on “terrorism” cases.
“But not everyone comes here for political reasons,” Pinar said. Remained locked up for seventy days in a detention center in Texas, she judges that the majority of the other Turks who shared her fate and claimed to be victims of religious or political persecution in order to obtain asylum, had mainly economic motivations. The young woman, of Kurdish origin, obtained her release on bail and now works as a cashier. She collects the money needed to pay a lawyer who will follow up on her asylum application.
For his part, Ahmet, a 35-year-old civil servant, is preparing to lay off from the Turkish civil service to try his luck in Germany with his wife and their 4-year-old son. “It is above all for him that we are leaving, so that he has access to quality education, that he can have a future, because here the future seems too dark to us”, testifies this engineer in Public Works, whose wife has already found work in this country in the chemical sector, which pays four times more than her current job in Istanbul. “My parents and many members of my family worked in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s and they don’t have good memories of it, recognizes Ahmet. But things have changed, many friends around me have left the Turkey to settle there lately.”
Faced with inflation, the flight of doctors
According to a study by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation from 2022, 73% of Turks between the ages of 18 and 25 would rather live in Europe or North America than in Turkey. A desire to start which concerns both the Kurdish villages in the east of the country and the suburbs of Anatolian cities where hyperinflation (185% in one year according to Enag, a group of independent economists) plunges families into misery. Among the candidates for departure, there are also many graduates, and in particular doctors: seven of them would leave Turkey every day.
Rana Tibet Set, 27, packed her bags for Germany in July with her medical degree in hand. “With a doctor’s income, currently in Turkey (less than 1,000 euros per month) you have to buy your car and pay for your holidays on credit, and it’s not worth hoping to become an owner”, slips the young woman , who was “suffocating” in an “increasingly polarized and tense” Turkish society and felt “like an outsider”. She does not rule out returning regularly to Turkey to work, from time to time, in private clinics, in addition to her position in Germany. But not before a real change of atmosphere in the country.