Turkish-Americans

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Turkish Americans

Turkish Americans (also Turkish-Americans or Turko-Americans ; English Turkish American , Turkish Amerikalı Türkler or ABD Türkleri ) are residents and citizens of the United States of Turkish origin.

There are a total of 189,640 Turkish Americans according to the 2000 census. Together with people of genealogical origin from Turkey or the Ottoman Empire, there are over 500,000 Turkish Americans in the United States.

The states with the largest proportions of Turkish-American residents are New York City Metropolitan Area , New Jersey , North Carolina , Wisconsin , Ohio , Illinois , Indiana , Florida , Maryland , California, and Texas . Government data on immigration are not entirely reliable, however, as a significant number of Turks were born in the Balkans or the Soviet Union .

Turkish-Americans mostly speak Turkish or American English as their mother tongue; many, especially those from older generations, are also able to speak Kurdish , Armenian , Pontic Greek , Aramaic , Assyrian or Lasic as their mother tongue alongside Turkish and English . Turkish-Americans are mostly Muslims , but the proportion of Alevis , Turkish Christians and Turkish Jews is significantly higher than in Turkey.

history

The Turkish Village at the World Colombian Exhibition - also known as The Chicago World's Fair in 1893
A group of immigrants, most of them wearing the Ottoman fez and surrounding a large vessel decorated with a star and the crescent moon symbol of Islam and the Ottoman Turks, 1902–1913
A Turkish immigrant in New York in 1912

Immigration from the Ottoman Empire

From the 1820s to 1920, over 1.2 million people immigrated to North America from the Ottoman Empire . About 15% (just under 200,000) of these immigrants were Muslim, including over 50,000 ethnic Turks. Many ethnic Turks from Harput , Elazığ , Akçadağ , Antep and Macedonia embarked for the USA from Beirut , Mersin , Izmir , Trabzon and Saloniki , but described themselves as Syrians or even Armenians in order to avoid discrimination and easier access to the Receive port of entry. At the turn of the 20th century, both ethnic Turks and national groups of the Ottoman Empire, including Albanians , Pontic Greeks , Bulgarians , Romanians , Ukrainians , Armenians , Georgians , Serbs , Bosnians and Arab Christians , immigrated to the USA and settled in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest of the country.

The greatest number of ethnic Turks entered the United States before World War I , roughly between 1900 and 1914, when American immigration policies were very liberal. The entry of the Ottoman Empire into World War I initially put an end to Ottoman immigration to the United States. However, a large number of ethnic Turks immigrated to the USA from the Balkan provinces of Albania , Kosovo , Western Thrace and Bulgaria . They were later listed as Albanians , Bulgarians and Serbs according to their later countries of origin, although many of them were ethnic Turks and identified themselves as such. After 1915, due to the persecution of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire , the genocide of the Armenians and the genocide of the Aramaeans, a particularly large number of Ottoman citizens came to the USA from the northeastern and southeastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Most of them were war refugees and fled the massacres of Aramaeans , Pontic Greeks and Armenians in their home areas. Furthermore, many immigrant families who were ethnically Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Macedonians or Serbs had a child of Turkish origin whose parents were killed after Macedonia was partitioned between Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece after the Balkan War of 1912–1913. These children were cared for , baptized and adopted , and then exploited as field workers. Even before the foster parents had to emigrate to America, these children were listed as family members, but many of these Turkish children still remembered their ancestry.

Most of the Turks who first came to the United States were rural, illiterate, and poor, but showed a striking degree of ethnic solidarity and sought that their traditions not be completely lost. They were more of the lower income groups and their main goal was to do some kind of job for as many years as possible to become part of the country and save enough money to buy land and houses in their original country of origin. The number of returnees among Ottoman Turks in the USA was relatively high; almost half of the Muslim Turkish-Americans emigrated to their original country of origin.

Immigration from the Republic of Turkey

Following the announcement of the Allied occupation of Istanbul in 1918 and the Royal Greek occupation of Smyrna in 1919, fighting broke out in the United States between Turks and Greeks in factories and on the streets, resulting in over half of the Turkish-American community from the United States States emigrated to Turkey. Many of them also wanted to fight for the independence of their country of origin during the Turkish Liberation War.

In the 1920s, hundreds of Turkish immigrants, including Arabs from the Levant, came to the valleys of California and Arizona as farm workers . However, a second exodus of Turks occurred during the Great Depression . The Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk sent Turkish ships to America and offered free shipping to Turkey to every ethnic Turk who wanted to leave the country; many Turks accepted the offer and left for Turkey. One factor that urged Turkish-Americans to immigrate to Turkey was the lack of Muslim women to marry in the United States. The vast majority of Turkish immigrants at the time were men; only a few brought their wives and families with them. The Turks who married non-Muslim women were assimilated into American culture, and therefore the number of Turkish-Americans who retained their Turkish-Turkish culture in the United States was very small. Others who retained some degree of ethnic identity experienced the same as they could only form small communities of their own with makeshift mosques. Only more educated immigrants with a stronger personality and will could keep their own identity as Turks. Many Turks who immigrated from the early days of the new nation state of the Republic of Turkey saw the USA as culturally alien, wherever they were driven by sheer misery and where they only wanted to stay as long as necessary. As a result, they refused to build mosques and thus put down permanent roots. Since the new Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal was a secular republic, Turkish immigrants often no longer formed Muslim-religious communities. At the beginning of the First World War, the ethnic identity of the Turks began to differ from the basic Islamic identity. Still, it was difficult to understand how one could be a Turk and a Muslim and live in a predominantly Christian country.

Another wave of Turkish immigration came during World War II when the United States passed the Alien Registration Act . Thereafter, in particular, Turks from the elite, academics and specialists immigrated to the United States because of better educational opportunities and economic advantages ( talent drain ). Along with these immigrants, many Turkish workers from the working class settled in the United States, as after the Second World War most of the Turkish immigrants came mainly from the rural regions of Turkey. They settled in large industrial cities and found employment as unskilled workers. The majority came to provide economic support to their families in Turkey, as Turkey's economy suffered severely from the aftermath of the last world war, even if Turkey remained a western allied state that had not participated in the fighting. After the 1950s, a highly skilled group of immigrants came to the United States, mostly doctors, engineers, and scientists. Today Turkish Americans are represented in every community and class of society.

Demographics

According to the 2000 United States Census, there are 117,575 Americans of Turkish or partially Turkish origin; according to the American Community Survey 2005 164,945 were determined. Since the beginning of Turkish immigration, many Turkish Americans have mainly settled in large urban centers. Most Turkish Americans settled in Paterson, New Jersey and the New York City metropolitan area , as well as in Boston , Chicago , Detroit, and Philadelphia . Other concentrations of Turkish Americans are found along the east coast in New York , New Jersey , Connecticut , Maryland, and Virginia ; some have also immigrated to California (specifically Los Angeles ), Minnesota , Indiana , Texas , Florida, and Alabama .

The US cities with the highest proportion of people of Turkish origin in 2000 are:

Community Location type Turkish American
Islandia, NY Village 2.5%
Edgewater Park, NJ local community 1.9%
Fairview, NJ district 1.7%
Golden's Bridge, NY place 1.6%
Point Lookout, NY place 1.4%
Marshville, NC city 1.4%
Boonton, NJ city 1.3%
Bellerose Terrace, NY place 1.3%
Cliffside Park, NJ district 1.3%
Franksville, WI place 1.3%
Ridgefield, NJ district 1.3%
Chester, OH local community 1.3%
Bay Harbor Islands, FL city 1.2%
Herricks, NY place 1.2%
Barry, IL Big city 1.2%
Cloverdale, IN city 1.2%
Highland Beach, FL city 1.2%
Friendship Village, MD place 1.2%
New Egypt, NJ place 1.1%
Delran, NJ local community 1.1%
Trumbull County, Ohio local community 1.1%
Summit, IL Village 1.1%
Haledon, NJ district 1.0%

Well-known Turkish-Americans

bibliography

  • Koser Akcapar: Turkish Associations in the United States: Towards Building a Transnational Identity. In: Şebnem Köşer Akçapar, Gökçe Yurdakul (ed.): Turkish Identity Formation and Political Mobilization in Western Europe and North America (= Turkish Studies. Volume 10, No. 2). Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, Oxfordshire 2009, pp. 165-193, doi: 10.1080 / 14683840902863996 .
  • Mustafa Aydın, Çağrı Erhan (Ed.): Turkish-American Relations. Past, Present and Future. Routledge, London a. a. 2004, ISBN 0-7146-5273-3 .
  • Kemal H. Karpat : The Turks in America. Historical Background: From Ottoman to Turkish Immigration. In: Kemal H. Karpat: Studies on Turkish Politics and Society. Selected Articles and Essays (= Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia. Volume 94). Brill, Leiden u. a. 2004, ISBN 90-04-13322-4 , pp. 612-638.
  • Ilhan Kaya: Turkish-American Immigration History and Identity Formations. In: Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Volume 24, No. 2, 2004, pp. 295-308, doi: 10.1080 / 1360200042000296672 .
  • Ilhan Kaya: Identity and Space: The Case of Turkish Americans. In: Geographical Review. Volume 95, No. 3, 2005, pp. 425-440, doi: 10.1111 / j.1931-0846.2005.tb00374.x .
  • Ilhan Kaya: Identity across Generations: A Turkish American Case Study. In: The Middle East Journal . Volume 63, No. 4, 2009, pp. 617-632.
  • N. Brent Kennedy, Robyn Vaughan Kennedy: The Melungeons. The Resurrection of a Proud People. An untold Story of ethnic Cleansing in America. 2., revised, and corrected edition. Mercer University Press, Macon GA 1997, ISBN 0-86554-516-2 .
  • Rey Koslowski (Ed.): International Migration and the Globalization of Domestic Politics (= Routledge Research in Transnationalism. Volume 10). Routledge, London a. a. 2005, ISBN 0-415-25815-4 .
  • Roberta Micallef: Turkish Americans: Performing Identities in a Transnational Setting. In: Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Volume 24, No. 2, 2004, pp. 233-241, doi: 10.1080 / 1360200042000296636 .
  • John Powell: Turkish Immigration. In: John Powell: Encyclopedia of North American Immigration. Facts On File, New York NY 2005, ISBN 0-8160-4658-1 , pp. 297-298.
  • Eren Tatari: Turkish-American Muslims. In: Edward E. Curtis IV (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History. Volume 2. Facts On File, New York NY 2010, ISBN 978-0-8160-7575-1 , pp. 550-552.
  • Wayne Winkler: Walking toward the Sunset. The Melungeons of Appalachia. Mercer University Press, Macon GA 2005, ISBN 0-86554-869-2 .

further reading

Web links

Commons : Turkish Americans  - Collection of Pictures, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Selected Population Profile in the United States: Turkish. In: American FactFinder. US Census Bureau, accessed October 4, 2009 .
  2. ↑ US Census Tables. In: American FactFinder. US Census Bureau, accessed September 22, 2009 .
  3. ^ A b Immigration and Ethnicity: Turks. In: Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Retrieved July 9, 2008 .
  4. ↑ ATAA 2008 DELEGATION TRIP TO TURKEY AND TRNC. (No longer available online.) Assembly of Turkish American Associations , archived from the original on April 3, 2009 ; Retrieved January 17, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ataa.org
  5. ^ A b Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 627.
  6. ^ Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 614.
  7. ↑ a b c Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 615.
  8. ↑ a b c d Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 617.
  9. ↑ A brief history of the Turkish presence in the United States can be found at AmerikadakiTurk ( Memento of the original from January 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.amerikadakiturk.com
  10. ^ A b Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 618.
  11. ↑ a b c Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 621.
  12. ^ Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 622.
  13. ↑ a b c d Karpat: The Turks in America. 2004, pp. 612-638, here p. 623.
  14. ↑ Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, Oscar Handlin (Ed.): Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge MA 1980, ISBN 0-674-37512-2 , p. 994.
  15. ↑ Turkish Americans . everyculture.com
  16. ^ Turkish Ancestry by city. Epodunk., Accessed January 27, 2009 .