Abstract:

Research Paper Turkey has experienced the impacts of intense migration from the territories lost in the last term of the Ottoman Empire, its predecessor, towards Anatolia and recently has become a transit country of migration toward Europe and also a destination country for migrations with differed profiles. Experiencing such an intense mobility of migrants; while various immigration policies have been observed from the Ottoman period to the present day, it is observed that an integration policy aimed at the adaptation of immigrants has not been developed. It is seen that countries such as Europe, the United States, and Canada, which are notably known as the places where international immigration is experienced to a large scale, focus on the integration problem of immigrants intensively both in the form of practical policies and in the migration literature. Since the 1990s, migration trends have begun to change in the world and in Turkey, related to social, economic and political changes. In this study, it is argued that an integration policy compatible with the changing character of migration movements is more essential now. In this framework, the reasons for the absence of integration policies are examined from a historical perspective and the role of new administrative and legal regulations in the development of integration policy is discussed. In the study, it is argued that historical reasons such as the fact that the migrations were from territories once belonged to the Ottoman Empire and hence the issue of adaptation has not come up, has been effective in lack of integration literature and integration policies of Turkey. The exceptional character of recent migration movements in this sense is argued to be one of the factors that necessitate development of a new policy

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