‘Turks’ in London: Shades of Invisibility and the Shifting Relevance of Policy in the Migration Process

This paper reports the results of a pilot study into 'Turkish' Migrants in London. Drawing on notions of 'superdiversity', 'invisibility' and 'nodal points' (where migrants' actions intersect with policy), the account first maps out the three main constituent groups under study: Turkish Cypriots, 'mainland' Turks, and Kurds from Turkey. The main analytical part of the paper consists of an examination of the migration process of the three groups to London, built around the experiences of a small sample of migrants and key informants, and broken up into a number of stages – pre-migration and departure, arrival and adaptation, and settlement and the future. Throughout the analysis and in the conclusion, emphasis is laid on the intersection of migrants' life-stages with the policy nodes, which are shown to have variable relevance for migrants' decision-making.