Rethinking the High Skilled Migration through the Lens of Social Class: The Case of High Skilled Migration from Turkey to Germany

There is a long history of migration from Turkey to Germany yet the migration of the highly skilled is a new phenomenon. This paper aims to discuss the new wave of migration from Turkey to Germany through the social class perspective and study it as a middle-class migration based on qualitative research of 50 in-depth interviews with young people and young adults who had migrated from Turkey to Germany during the last decade. Our research demonstrates (as already underlined by previous research) that the new wavers tend to distinguish themselves from the old wave and create boundaries between themselves and the population in Germany with a migration (particularly guest worker) history from Turkey on the basis of their education and cultural capital. It is interesting that discussions around Social class are quite invisible in this picture and the highly skilled often emphasize their educational qualification as their personal success and their parents’ eagerness to give their children a good education. This way of relating to old wave migrants echoes also the hierarchization of migrant experience by migration and integration policies which categorize high skilled ones as “good and deserved” whereas the others (such as refugees or low skilled migrants) as the ones to be controlled and integrated. Tending to put themselves in a superior position, the high skilled seem to oversee the continuity and commonality of historically established social inequalities which affect both themselves and the old wave. This paper discusses the fragility of highly skilled migrants from Turkey to Germany, whose migration experiences are characterized with insecurities and difficulties, but who are unable to translate these precarious experiences into a social class and inequalities political discourse, question the injustices they are faced with from an historical perspective and skip potential moments for the solidarity of migrant struggles.