Turkey: A Puzzling Case to Understand Public Attitudes toward Immigrants (original) (raw)

One of the keys to understand Turkish society is to focus on different types of migration Turkish Republic has been through since its establishment. Turkey, however, had been mostly known as a sender country rather than a receiving one. Thus even prior to the Syrian refugees which had reached 1.05 million i , Turkey has become a receiving country, and therefore the number of immigrants and the number of studies on immigrants are in increase ii . These studies in general focus on different groups of immigrants and their experiences and there is almost no study which focuses specificly on the public attitude toward immigrants in Turkey. This commentary, therefore, has the aim of presenting Turkey, with its claim of 'traditional hospitality', as a puzzling case with low immigration and simultaneous high levels of anti-immigration attitudes.