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80 Opinion
country (that’s right, the fella in the palace who’s, in election
mode, been talking about "returning a million") is forbidden.
Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, Turkey’s problem with uncontrolled migration has moved up a few places on the long list of the country’s woes that have got beyond the point where they can be solved.
Curiously, the regime has been pushing Turkish doctors
and engineers to depart Germany for home, while not even registering who is entering Turkey via its eastern and southern borders. Not an effective approach to human capital.
Turkey, a perfect semi-colony, is not famous for solving its problems. Instead, it is skilful in doing whatever is required to necrotise them.
Since 2011, Turkey has been under a political authority
that has invited everyone from Syria to Afghanistan into
the country. After more than a decade, the Turks have now decided that the millions who arrived must now be sent back to their countries of origin. Most noble.
Turkey seems rather determined to create some serious violence over the migrants in the country. It is also well
BOOK REVIEW
bne June 2022
capable of doing so. Almost every day by now, there are clashes in various neighbourhoods.
As an example of the Turkish state’s more organised track record in creating violence, there is the determined killing and torturing of a sufficient number of Kurds per season (the season begins in spring). Such determination managed to create and sustain the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which, still motivated by the Turkish state’s bombing operations, is sailing through its 50th birthday.
The PKK even managed to found a state in northern Syria under US patronage. Islamic State then broke in between
the Kurds and the Damascus regime. While Erdogan was protesting “Kobane is falling” to Islamic State, Turkey gained a new neighbour, which carries posters of PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan.
It's a matter of time before murderous violence in socially corroded Turkey against migrants flares up. It would be no surprise if it breaks out soon or at the point where the Erdogan regime loses at the polls (elections are due at some point
by June 2023 at the latest). Some state violence might help escalate the process.
How the handling of migration from the eastern EU states pushed the UK towards Brexit
Clare Nuttall in Glasgow
"Here to Stay: Eastern Europeans in Britain” tells the story of the hundreds of thousands of migrants
from the new EU member states from Central and Southeast Europe who have moved to the UK in the early 21st century. Author Yva Alexandrova charts the crucial missteps made by British politicians on the left, who might be considered natural supporters of the new working class of Eastern Europeans, that contributed to the vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum.
The book is particularly relevant at the moment, as it was published two months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that led to yet another debate over migration from Eastern
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Europe, this time on letting in Ukrainian refugees – though the sympathy from the British public for refugees from the war- torn country is in stark contrast to attitudes to earlier waves of economic migrants from the region.
Setting the scene, Alexandrova traces the history of migration from Eastern Europe to the UK from the Jews who fled the pogroms in the Russian Empire from the 1880s onward to
the citizens of ex-socialist countries who came to the UK after their countries joined the EU. She writes how Eastern Europe is viewed as “Europe but not Europe” and how old views of the region as populated by “barbarians” plus the modern view of post-communist Eastern Europe as “poor and largely