Occupational Status Attainment

Abstract

Over 50 years ago, large-scale Turkish migration to Western Europe started as institutionalised labour migration or the ‘guest worker’ system. At that time, factories, with the help of Turkish government agencies, started contracting Turkish workers to work in those industries suffering from a shortage of domestic employees. Turkish migrant workers took up jobs that were hitherto unknown to them and thus became occupationally mobile, almost by default. But little is, in fact, known about the distribution of the occupational and family backgrounds of these workers. The prevailing view is that recruitment was targeted at unskilled workers, predominantly with rural, if not agricultural backgrounds, whose occupational mobility after migration was, on average, upward (Castles and Miller 2009).