Survival of the Excluded: Azerbaijani Immigrant Women’s Survival Strategies and Industrial Work in Istanbul

Abstract

In recent years, Turkey has become a popular destination for the irregular migration of Azerbaijani people. Every year almost half a million Azeri come to Turkey for various reasons. However, most of these migrants seek employment in the large Turkish informal sector. This paper is an attempt to build the survival strategies of Azerbaijani migrants into the existing migration literature and show how these strategies can also be a way of generating a successful export industry in Turkey. In this regard, survival strategies developed by Azeri migrants in response to the Turkish migration regime, which is designed to exclude every migrant not considered somehow ethnically Turkish, include family migration, maximising family income while minimising the cost of daily family survival.