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P. ZISS
refugee beneficiaries and the Turkish management (see also Nimer and Rottmann 2021).
Formal employment and white-collar jobs were less accessible to working-class individ
uals, who remained in the large informal economy of Turkey.
At the same time, for some interlocutors, citizenship of Turkey was associated with
losing economic and social rights accessed as temporary protection holders. Some
argued that they had greater obligations towards the state as Turkish citizens, such as
paying taxes and social security to access healthcare, both of which Syrians under tem
porary protection were exempt from. As Majed, a naturalised citizen of Turkey originally
from Aleppo, explained:
If I became unemployed now, I would have to pay for the hospital and I would have to pay
off debt every month. Honestly, I think hospitals and taxes are [disadvantages of Turkish
citizenship].
Just as many Syrian workers and business owners with temporary protection status
choose to remain in the informal economy in order to retain a greater share of wages
and profits (Akcali and Gormus 2021; Ertorer 2021), naturalisation was thus associated
with losing access to previous economic strategies of navigating state obligations within
informality.
Moreover, some lower-class interlocutors argued that they lost access to benefits
accessible to Syrians under temporary protection, specifically the kizilaykart. For
example, Ghazal and Musa had previously lived in Gaziantep in the Southeast of
Turkey with temporary protection. When they were invited to apply for naturalization,
they did so to be able to move to Istanbul to access better employment opportunities. In
Istanbul, however, they were only able to find work in the informal sector. When they lost
access to cash assistance after naturalizing, they experienced greater precarity, and their
teenage son dropped out of school to work and support his family. Based on their experi
ence, Ghazal’s brother decided to forego naturalization.
We were getting a lot of benefits before getting the Turkish citizenship. My son was at
school, and although my husband was working, he was paying only for our food and this
kind of stuff. [From the kizilaykart], we were able to pay our rent, electricity, and water ser
vices. We didn’t buy anything else from that card, only to pay our rent and services. […] My
brother was able to have [Turkish citizenship] but he wouldn’t take it, because he couldn’t
afford living without the aid by the Turkish Red Crescent.
In short, for some Syrians in Istanbul, Turkish citizenship was associated with clear
material benefits, such as greater economic opportunities and security of housing.
However, both de jure and de facto access to social citizenship rights was qualified by
the generally weak social security systems in Turkey, as well as racialization and class.
Syrians with Turkish citizenship lost legal access to assistance available to refugees
under temporary protection. Access to better jobs and housing in practice was con
ditional on passing as Turkish. In the context of welfare retrenchment, large informal
sector, and widespread racism against Syrians (Şenses 2016; Şimşek 2021), naturalization
had both instrumental benefits for economic and social rights but was also associated
with negotiated drawbacks and ambivalent material economic effects.