Integration Trends Among Syrian Refugees: The Case of Gaziantep City

Today, the overwhelming wave of refugees is a problem experienced by Turkey as well as the wider world. By now a busy route of immigration, Turkey became the scene of the largest and most rapid mobility of refugees in the Republic era, as the Syrian Civil War began and intensified. According to official figures, there are around 3.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. That figure is not distributed homogenously throughout the country, and is mostly clustered in the cities closer to the Syrian border, and in metropolises. Indeed, one can even speak of a concentration in specific neighborhoods of such cities. Such a state of affairs was not conducive -to say the least- to the adaptation of the refugees, and their integration with the local population, for the refugees bring their own culture, behavior patterns, life styles, ideologies, religions, languages, and life-long habits wherever they go. The areas receiving the refugees, in turn, have their own and distinct socio-cultural patterns. Therefore, immigration also refers to the meeting of distinct economic, socio-cultural, and ideological patterns of two distinct areas, in just one. This, in turn, plays a positive or negative part on the cultural, economic, and social integration of the two cultures, with reference to the level of similarity or difference thereof. The present study is based on a survey carried out with 240 refugees in the city of Gaziantep, which hosts approximately 10% of the refugees in Turkey. The survey was directed towards individuals in the 15-34 age group, which may arguably be the group with the highest potential for resistance towards adaptation in Turkey. The survey results were analyzed both with respect to specific groups based on gender, age, race, level of education, and profession, as well as in general. The ultimate aim was to shed light on the perceived obstacles before the social integration of Syrian refugees. The findings shed light on a detailed discussion on the problems of cultural integration Syrian refugees suffered in the city of Gaziantep