Youth Transitions of Descendants of Turkish Immigrants

Abstract

Writing this, I am sitting at a table in the library of a tertiary vocational school in Zwolle, a medium size Dutch city. I am surrounded by the descendants of immigrants from Turkey. They have no idea I am writing about them, much less that I understand, and admire, how they are talking in a creative half-Turkish half-Dutch argot. I catch their discussions, which are about everything ranging from the exams next week to the annoying boss at a bijbaan 1 ; from worries about finding an apprenticeship to Turkish TV heartthrob Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ's acting in last night's episode; from the latest iPhone features to plans for next summer's holiday in Istanbul; plus a whole lot of gossip about friends in between. Listening in on these conversions, I cannot help but wonder why doubts about these young people's integration dominate current public debates rather than questions about their daily realities: the obstacles that they encounter at school and on the labour market; how they navigate these barriers and how they negotiate the multiple frames of references that enrich their lives. This book seeks to answer these questions, which have indisputable present-day urgency though actually began being asked decades ago. In 1980, Gündüz Vassaf, a prominent Turkish scholar of psychology, spent a sabbatical in Europe, first in the Netherlands and then in Germany and conducted one of the first studies on the children of immigrants, the findings of which he published in the book Daha Sesimizi Duyuramadık: Avrupa'daki Türk Işçi Çocukları. 2 The title was inspired by something a descendant of a Turkish immigrant told him: "We are not a lost generation, nor are we stuck in between; we just haven't had our voices heard." Vassaf called attention to the problems that children of Turkish immigrants were facing and warned that negligence by both host and home countries would have serious consequences for the futures of these