JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES
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Turkish citizenship and apply as Syrians, in both cases risking uncertainty, rejection and
eventual deportation. Tania explained the situation as follows:
Everybody I know is thinking about leaving Turkey, even my Turkish friends. But they have
advantages. Because for example, they will go and they will apply as a Turkish [person] and
maybe for them, they can even be [regular] immigrants […] One person gave me this idea
once: “just go to Germany and tell them that you have a problem and go as an asylum seeker
there. Like, they will take you.” But now I’m a mix of everything that is not combining in any
possible way so […] I’m stuck.
For Tania, being both Syrian and Turkish did not ‘combine in any possible way’. She was
both, and at the same time, she was neither. For her, the situation of Syrians with citizen
ship of Turkey was inherently ambivalent and characterized by ‘stuckedness’, combining
spatial and existential immobility that many migrants and marginalized persons across
the world experience (Hage 2015, 4). While Turkish citizenship protected her from
deportation to Syria, Tania now felt stuck in other ways, both existentially and as if
she was physically stuck onto Turkish territory, with fewer opportunities to leave. She
and others struggled to travel on the same terms as Turkish citizens and also could no
longer access mobility strategies they had used as refugees.
Discussion/conclusion
This paper contributes to the literature on the value of citizenship through an exploration
of how Syrians with citizenship of Turkey experienced the outcomes of their naturalization
process. Syrians in Turkey used citizenship to access economic and social rights, in particu
lar, to move to provinces with better economic opportunities or to access white-collar jobs.
However, de facto access to these rights was qualified by class-based differences within the
group of Syrians, and experiences of racism vis-à-vis the dominant Turkish population similar to differential experiences of discrimination amongst Syrians under temporary pro
tection more broadly (Şimşek 2021). Higher-class Syrians with citizenship of Turkey who
had prior capital and education could benefit from greater economic security. For lowerclass Syrians, naturalization came with trade-offs: they had greater financial obligations and
lost access to resources available to them as refugees, including exemption from tax and
insurance payments and humanitarian assistance. Similarly, ongoing experiences of
racist discrimination as Syrians by employers and others meant that citizenship on equal
terms remained a "fantasy" (Anderson 2024).
Second, citizenship of Turkey also shaped the spatial mobility of Syrians. Compared to
temporary protection status, citizenship of Turkey was a ‘defensive strategy’ (Godin and
Sigona 2022, 1142): They were able to reduce arbitrary detention and deportation, either
within Turkey or to Syria. They could also access previously closed forms of international
travel. Nevertheless, upon naturalization, the limits to citizenship became more visible.
Ongoing everyday forms of discrimination as Syrians were independent of legal status.
Syrians with temporary protection were, by definition, temporary on Turkish territory
and expected to leave in the future, either through informal means or official resettlement
programmes. Conversely, Syrians with citizenship of Turkey could legally stay on Turkish
territory but they also felt they had to stay whether they wanted to or not. For some, this
created not only a sense of existential ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2015) but also spatial