Shedding light on Türkiye’s Syrian refugees
Türkiye currently hosts around 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees, the largest refugee group in the world. The majority live in urban centres, with roughly 240 000 living in government-run refugee camps. While there has been considerable research into the impacts of these refugees on the native population, little was known about the Syrian refugees themselves. The influx was too large, and Türkiye had little experience dealing with such large migrant inflows. Syrian refugees in Türkiye are also not permanent residents and therefore not included in household surveys. To shed light on this large refugee population, the SYRREFTDHS project, which was funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, studied key aspects of their lives, including access to public services, employment opportunities and demographic and health outcomes. SYRREFTDHS used as a primary data set the Turkey Demographic and Health Survey of 2018, which included a national representative of Syrian refugees in Türkiye. “I have examined a critical issue for Türkiye, which has implications for several low- and middle-income refugee-hosting countries as well as European refugee-hosting countries,” says Murat Guray Kirdar, professor of Economics at Boğaziçi University in Türkiye and SYRREFTDHS project coordinator. “The project produced knowledge about a vulnerable population that has gone through tragic events.”
Uncovering the effects of civil war and migration
Kirdar and his team examined the refugees’ integration into the labour market and refugee children’s integration into education, comparing the outcomes of natives and refugees. The team sought to find whether there was a direct effect from civil war and refugee status, taking into account that natives and refugees may already differ significantly in terms of demographic outcomes and economic well-being. The project also focused on the refugee population alone and examined the effects of two critical junctures in refugees’ life – the onset of the civil war and the arrival in Türkiye under refugee status – on their outcomes. “In particular, I examined the effects of these two critical junctures on refugee women’s marriage outcomes,” adds Kirdar.
Underlying social disparities
The project revealed several key findings. Syrian refugees in Türkiye have much higher employment rates in the early years after arrival than refugees in Europe, though most jobs are limited to the informal labour market, which provides low-paying jobs with precarious conditions. Non-arranged marriages increase more than arranged marriages after refugee women arrive in Türkiye. “We explain this finding with an intergenerational power shift,” Kirdar says: “Older generations were less wealthy; and older individuals’ employment rates are significantly lower than those in Syria.” Refugee children born in Türkiye have a lower birth weight and height for age than native children, even after the team accounted for socio-economic differences. “This suggests remaining deficits reflect conditions in the source country before migration,” remarks Kirdar.
Disseminating the project findings
Kirdar organised two conferences to share the findings of the project: one in Ankara for an audience mostly of government institutions, NGOs and Turkish representatives of international organisations; and one in Istanbul for an audience of academics. Kirdar is now working on projects using the same data, and another similar one from Jordan about Syrian refugees there. “I have also worked on analysing certain interventions to improve the refugees’ living conditions, such as the Emergency Social Safety Net programme in Türkiye,” adds Kirdar. “In the future, I will be particularly interested in evaluating the impact of similar interventions.”
Keywords
SYRREFTDHS, Türkiye, Syria, refugees, migration, civil war, social disparities
