Migration Terminology
Migration is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives. Do you believe that you know the correct meanings of the terms you are using?
While I was taking a Migration Politics class, I realized that most of us don’t really use the terminology correctly. We have a tendency to call immigrants basicly to everyone who has been involved in some kind of mobility and I believe correct use of language has a direct effect on people’s behaviour, especially in a country like ours. Turkey is the 17th country in the list of “Immigration by Country 2021” [1].
To make this process less boring, I will try to explain some migration related notions to you by giving examples from Turkey. There are a considerable number of terms in general, hence this will be like a brief introduction.
I believe at least half of the people reading this have a relative that brings chocolate from Germany, Netherlands or Belgium to them. Since they are your relatives I will say that they went to these countries from Turkey, so they emigrated from Turkey and they immigrated to (let’s say) Germany and these movements are called migration. Actually, the term is used to define movements that took place both within the state or between states.
Furthermore, there are two types of migration namely; regular and irregular. The ones that I have mentioned above are all considered as regular migration; and irregular migration refers to unauthorized migration movements.
On the other hand, if you go to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower from Turkey, or if you don’t have enough Euros and you go to see the Bodrum Castle (Bodrum Kalesi in Turkish), these are both called non-migratory forms of mobility such as tourism or business trips.
Last but not least, for me maybe the most significant one is detention. It is a situation in which someone is officially kept somewhere and not allowed to leave [2]. If you wonder what is the relation of this term to our topic, here it comes: Immigration detention centers are basically the places that immigrants are kept. These places really exist and as far as I know they are very common in the UK.
However, I'm not gonna mention the details of this right now. I’m planning to write a post about detention centers next week if you are interested. Finally, if you wish to search for more migration terms, you can start by clicking here!
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