“Europeanization” and undocumented migrants’ rights in/through spaces of informal labor

With the announcement of the draft law on “the protection of foreigners” in 2011, expectations run high in Turkey that once the new legal measures-- by and large dictated by the EU accession process-- are put into effect, the existing gaps in the implementation of policies concerning migration and asylum seeking will be redeemed and the migration regime in Turkey as a whole will be “Europeanized.” An explicitly stated goal of the draft law is to improve rights for asylum seekers while combating more efficiently what gets designated as “illegal migration.” Concomitantly, revisions to the law (5683) on “Foreigners’ Residence and Travel” have imposed the 3 month limit on tourist visas, rendering work permits a necessity to avoid irregular status for migrants who work in the informal sector. 

Taking as its starting point the critical insight on the neoliberal state’s systematic tolerance for “illegality” to sustain a vulnerable and disposable workforce, this paper seeks to assess the above legal reforms in question beyond the dichotomy of illegal labor migrant vs. asylum seeker and instead through a focus on labor rights for undocumented migrants.  The ethnographic data will be drawn from  two groups of migrants, Bulgarian Turkish and Armenian migrants, whose ethnic affiliation positions them  differently vis a vis both formal and informal legal practices. Given the official exemptions that have been granted to migrants working in the informal sector, the paper will also address the kinds of legal hierarchies that are created not just across different ethnic groups but across different work sectors.