Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [128]
One of the most astute observers of this phenomenon is Kazim Erdoğan, an Alevite Turk from another Sivas-area village. He arrived in 1973 with a backpack and no work permit, spent some time in jail pending deportation, then used a university admission to remain in the country, and ended up thriving academically. He now runs a social-psychology practice that helps Kreuzberg residents adjust to German life. “I would estimate that 95 percent of the Turks living here have come from rural backgrounds and have stayed rural in their minds—because they were told they’d be going back, that they’d have to go back, so they never saw a reason to learn German and to adapt,” he told me. “The only thing that kept them going was the notion that this was temporary. They just didn’t see any reason to adjust—they were told they could save money and move back and join the middle class in Turkey. I would assume it was that hope that enabled them to endure circumstances that otherwise would have been intolerable. But it also prevented them from becoming citizens here … Those who migrated to the cities in Turkey are closer to achieving their goals, whereas here I’m constantly being confronted with the living dead.”
Alara Bayram entered Germany during a period, beginning in 1976, when between 50 and 60 percent of all Turks entering the country were under 16 years of age; the rest were almost entirely women, brides who had seldom met their grooms.23 Today she lives in a small apartment on a barren street in Kreuzberg with her four children. She wears a headscarf, though her three daughters, who are fluent in German, don’t. Her oldest son, 17, has dropped out of school and speaks little German, and Alara worries that he’s becoming an alarming duplicate of his father. None of her children are German citizens. “Three of them want to become German, but I tell them not to lose their Turkishness—they should think about their home,” she says, referring to a country they have only visited on beach vacations. “This is no place for them to start a life, I tell them. I’ll go back someday, and I hope they follow me.”
The German arrival city took its shape and character as a direct result of citizenship policies, and Alara’s life, too, has been shaped by them. In those years, naturalization was available only to adults who had lived in Germany for 15 years. Citizenship was defined, strictly along blood lines, to ethnic Germans and their descendants (despite the dark historical resonances of such policies). So most Turkish workers were denied any access to German society or to many public benefits. The possibility of becoming integrated, or of marrying a German, or becoming a part of the local school community, was remote.
In Berlin, as in much of Europe, the alien-seeming practices that arose from those policies often came to be seen as “Muslim”—including symbolic matters, such as women wearing headscarves, and more ominous acts, such as forced marriage and honor killing. But this behavior, to a large extent, was being created within Europe by European policies: It was a Western-manufactured Islamic conservatism. For instance, the rise of forced marriages in Germany just as they were on the decline in Turkey is an inevitable and understandable result of Germany’s ceasing all immigration just as immigrants had become integral to the economy. “These people aren’t naturally conservative or religious,” says Dr. Erdoğan, “but they’re often put in situations where they have to adopt