JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 9 a job]. But later, for most people, you will always be Syrian no matter what kind of identity [card] you have. A similar story was related by Judy, in her 30s and originally from Aleppo, also a natur­ alized citizen of Turkey. She had been working as a teacher in a temporary education centre, a UN-run separate education system for Syrian refugee children that ran until 2016. After naturalizing, she applied for a job as an accountant, her original profession. As a Turkish citizen, she had hoped for better wages and formal employment with access to social security. However, she found that she was still treated differently: You know that when we as Syrians work anywhere, our wages are always lower. When I sub­ mitted a CV [to a company] and the procedures went through and [the boss] told me: OK, you will get 3000-3500. I said: excuse me!? What about health insurance? And he said: not right now. [I said:] Why not? I am actually Turkish! […] [But] he did not take [my citizen­ ship] into consideration. Once Judy received citizenship of Turkey her future employer still refused to hire her on equal grounds to her Turkish co-worker. Although she had the legal right to the insur­ ance and equal pay as ‘actually Turkish’, she was unable to claim this right because she remained Syrian in the eyes of the employer. Conversely, Syrians of Turkmen origin who had grown up speaking Turkish at home were sometimes able to avoid ongoing racist discrimination because they were able to pass as fully Turkish (see e.g. Ginsberg 1996). While they spoke a different accent to the Istanbul one, they explained that most Turkish residents of Istanbul would think of them from the Eastern parts of Turkey. For example, Ghazal and Musa were both of Turkmen background from Damascus, Syria. They were able to naturalize because Ghazal had a Turkish grandmother. She explained that she and her family consciously hid their Syrian background from landlords and in everyday interactions to avoid the dis­ crimination associated with it: We told [the owner] that we are Turks, not Syrians. If we tried to rent a home [as Syrian], they wouldn’t agree to let a house to you, but if you say that you are Turkish, they will. In addition to experiences of racism, the class position of Syrians with citizenship of Turkey shaped access to material and economic rights associated with Turkish citizen­ ship. First, this occurred through access. Through President Erdoğan’s reference to "highly qualified" individuals who could "contribute" to Turkey, naturalisation explicitly targeted higher-class Syrians (Akçapar and Şimşek 2018). However, the association between accessing naturalisation and class was not clear-cut. Not all higher-class Syrians appeared to receive invitations to naturalise, and amongst those invited many were rejected or never received a response. Conversely, some working-class Syrians also accessed citizenship, including amongst my interlocutors, potentially through the overlap of citizenship with ethnic prioritisation as Turkmen. A second relationship between class and naturalisation was how citizenship of Turkey opened up certain types of employment opportunities. Higher-class individuals could use Turkish citizenship to access desirable white-collar jobs such as within NGOs, the UN and schools, especially for Syrians who spoke fluent Arabic, Turkish and English and could work as translators mediating between Syrian