Religion-Based Solidarity and Forced Immigrants-Host Relationship During COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the quality of life for all humans all over the world, it was reported that the pandemic succeeded in bringing people closer to each other by activating mechanical solidarity and a sense of acknowledgment. On the other hand, the forced immigrants were more affected during the pandemic compared to other groups, but there is no evidence that the pandemic made the hosts get closer to the forced immigrants. Looking from the religion-based solidarity point of view, this paper tries to investigate if the Turkish community became closer to the Syrians during the pandemic. Using an original data set, the result of the Mann-Whitney U test shows that there is moderate evidence of the role of religion in bringing the hosts closer to the forced immigrants in Turkey, anticipating that there is a small role of religion-based solidarity in Turkey during and after the pandemic.