Turkey began to receive refugees from Syria in 2011 and has since become the country hosting the highest number of refugees, with more than 3.5 million Syrians and half a million people of other nationalities, mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. An important turning point regarding the legal status of Syrian refugees has come with recent amendments to the Turkish citizenship law. Based on ongoing academic debates on integration and citizenship, this article will explore these two concepts in the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey. We will argue that the shift in the Turkish citizenship law is a direct outcome of recent migration flows. We further argue that the citizenship option is used both as a reward for skilled migrants with economic and cultural capital and as a tool to integrate the rest of the Syrians. It also reflects other social, political and demographic concerns of the Turkish government. Using our recent ethnographic study with Syrians and local populations in two main refugee hosting cities in Turkey, Istanbul and Gaziantep, we will locate the successes and weaknesses of this strategy by exemplifying the views of Syrian refugees on gaining Turkish citizenship and the reactions of Turkish nationals.

This article explores the intersections between economic resources of refugees and integration. It measures processes of adaptation of Syrians by focusing on the legal-political and socio-economic dimensions of integration. The focus of my analysis of the situations of Syrian refugees in Turkey is on class and related to financial resources that help Syrians to reach a kind of stability and security to those who lack rights. The key theoretical undertaking of this article is an attempt to develop the concept of ‘class-based integration’. The data consists of 120 semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Istanbul, Ankara and Gaziantep. I argue that Syrian refugees in Turkey go through ‘class-based integration’, which is in favour of refugees who do investments and who are skilled and leaves out refugees who are unskilled and do not have economic resources to invest in the receiving country from the integration processes. The article also shows that having economic resources could also support the construction of social bridges with members of the receiving society and overcoming the legal barriers to integration.

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This article focuses on transnational activities of Syrian refugees in Turkey examining the relationship between such activities and integration. The main research question addressed in this article is whether involvement in transnational activities hinders or supports the integration processes of Syrian refugees in Turkey, by drawing upon fieldwork in Istanbul, Ankara, Hatay and Gaziantep. I argue that Syrian refugees perceive integration as a survival mechanism and use transnational activities as a strategy for adapting to a new society, especially when they are faced with insecure legal status and a lack of access to rights in the receiving country. This study contributes to the literature on refugee transnationalism and integration by focusing on the refugees’ perceptions of on integration processes and addressing the question of survival.