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When I was visiting Berlin in the late 2010s, a couple of friends mentioned new Facebook groups of recent Turkish immigrants. The new generation of educated Turks did not initially see themselves as joining the established Turkish diaspora. They created closed groups of their own, keeping their distance from the descendants of the earlier "Gastarbeiter" generation.
The primary driver of emigration from Türkiye in the 1960s and 1970s was economic necessity. As Germany's post-war economy boomed, entire villages from Anatolia relocated and took up work in German factories.
A recent KONDA survey for “Bi’ Dunya Kivıicim Dernegi” covered 3,118 highly educated people of Turkish origin living abroad. Many had left during the past decade. Its central finding is that emigration has become part of Türkiye’s social-mobility system.
For my generation of Turks, and perhaps earlier, upward mobility in Türkiye meant studying at a good university and hence moving from Anatolia to Istanbul (and sometimes Ankara). For part of today’s educated generation, that journey no longer ends there. Istanbul has become an intermediate stop between provincial Türkiye and global cities.
According to survey results, only 29% of respondents were born in Istanbul, yet 62% were living there before leaving Türkiye. The city had first drawn them in—educating or employing them—before ultimately becoming their point of departure.
The new route starts in Anatolia, with a stop in Istanbul for college and/or early professional life, but ends up in Munich, Berlin or London.
The people who take this new route are not primarily the children of a narrow private-school elite. Many were educated in Türkiye’s best public universities.
Together, graduates of Middle East Technical University, Bogazici University and Istanbul Technical University account for nearly 40% of participants. Private universities like Bilkent, Koc and Sabanci rank much lower. This is an excellent demonstration of the new social ladder that leads abroad.
Earlier generations moved toward Istanbul because it concentrated the education, social space and institutional opportunities unavailable in much of the country. Today, some of those who reached Istanbul keep moving for the same broad reason. Every generation looks for better social conditions where they can realize their potential.
These people, unlike the previous generation of immigrants, did not leave because they failed to climb Türkiye’s ladder. They left because they climbed far enough to see that the next step was elsewhere.
Will they return? Not soon. 85% have no concrete return plan. 92% of those with children want them to build their lives outside Türkiye.
But they are not disconnected from Türkiye. On the contrary, many remain immersed in Türkiye through family, frequent visits, elections and digital media (same independent YouTube channels that their peers watch in Türkiye). The survey shows that 82% visit regularly, while 79% intend to vote in future Turkish elections.
Türkiye cannot respond by asking people to stop climbing the social ladder, or by expecting nostalgia to bring them back. Many have built careers, families and legal status abroad. Their children’s futures increasingly lie there as well.
Once emigration becomes part of the social ladder, return cannot be the only measure of success. Türkiye’s challenge now is to build the channels through which knowledge, investment, technology and professional relationships can continue to move. “Brain circulation” will become the new keyword to understand the dynamics of the new diaspora.
In the era of “brain circulation,” Türkiye’s real loss would not be that some of its most capable people live abroad, but that their knowledge, capital and networks eventually learn to bypass the country altogether.
Avoiding this requires a new layer of diaspora policy designed for internationally mobile professionals, not merely an updated version of the institutions built for the labor migrants of the 1960s.
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