Conversion as a Migration Strategy in a Transit Country: Iranian Shiites Becoming Christians in Turkey

The role of religion during migration processes has been overlooked by scholars in the past although the relationship between religion and migration has a long history. Normally, religion is considered as an integrating agent, but for some Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey, religion and especially religious conversion is used as a tool for migration. This article draws on the migration histories of Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey who initially intended to go further west only to have stayed in Turkey either because of the long procedures of asylum application in Turkey or because they were rejected and have become “illegal aliens” who do not want to return to Iran. Turkey still preserves geographic limitation of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. Therefore it does not accept non‐European asylum seekers to settle on Turkish soil. Ironically, however, most asylum applications were made by people from the Middle East, mainly from Iran. Based on the extensive fieldwork carried out in various cities in Turkey where the Iranian migrants are heavily concentrated, this article demonstrates how conversion from Shi’a Islam to Christianity is used as a migration strategy and how and to what extent these asylum seekers use religion and their newly acquired social and religious networks within churches of the transit country to reach ultimately the West as refugees. As conversion is sustained through social networks as well as churches and missionaries, this unique situation can be explained by employing the social capital theory within the context of an institutional component.     

Re‐Thinking Migrants’ Networks and Social Capital: A Case Study of Iranians in Turkey

Existing research on international migration has focused on the importance of social networks and social capital in the countries of origin and destination. However, much less is known about the importance of social networks and associated social capital in transit countries. Drawing on ethnographic research on Iranian transit migrants in Turkey, this paper argues that migrant networks and social capital are equally important in transit countries. These networks, however, do not always generate positive social capital for Iranian migrants as there are scarce resources and there is no “enforceable trust”. Iranian migrant networks reorganized in a transit country like Turkey are not static structures and they are largely affected by macro‐variables such as current immigration and asylum policies of Turkey and Europe, transnationalism and globalization, and other place‐specific features like Turkey’s location bridging East and West, the existence of human smuggling networks, and its proximity to Iran. But Iranian migrant networks in Turkey are also affected by micro‐variables, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity of individual migrants.     

New Approaches to Asylum?

Since its inception 50 years ago, the international asylum regime has shifted through a series of discernibly different approaches. The most recent approach has been characterized by restrictions on asylum-seekers, manifested initially through a reluctance to grant asylum, and today through a reluctance even to admit asylum-seekers.
There is now a growing consensus that this approach is unsustainable. States are recognizing that restrictions have not fulfilled their original aims of reducing the number of asylum-seekers, and furthermore have had unintended consequences that include the growth of human smuggling and trafficking.
UNHCR is concerned about the erosion of the entire concept of asylum. Asylum advocates, NGOs and human rights activists argue that restrictions have impacted as heavily on those who need international protection as on those who do not. As a result, a wide range of new initiatives are being proposed, which may pave the way for the evolution of a new approach to asylum.
This article analyses the evolution of restrictions in the asylum regime, explains the failing of this approach, and finally reviews possible ways forward.     

HIV and fertility in Africa: first evidence from population-based surveys

The historical pattern of the demographic transition suggests that fertility declines follow mortality declines, followed by a rise in human capital accumulation and economic growth. The HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to reverse this path. We utilize recent rounds of the demographic and health surveys that link an individual woman’s fertility outcomes to her HIV status based on testing. The data allow us to distinguish the effect of own positive HIV status on fertility (which may be due to lower fecundity and other physiological reasons) from the behavioral response to higher mortality risk, as measured by the local community HIV prevalence. We show that although HIV-infected women have significantly lower fertility, local community HIV prevalence has no significant effect on noninfected women’s fertility.     

AIDS, “reversal” of the demographic transition and economic development: evidence from Africa

Using country- and region-level data, I investigate the effect of HIV/AIDS on fertility in Africa during 1985–2000. Results differ depending on the variation used and the estimation method. Between estimates that exploit cross-sectional variation suggest a positive significant effect of HIV/AIDS on fertility, whereas within estimates that are identified of off time-series variation show both positive and negative results depending on the HIV/AIDS variable used. These within estimates are insignificant in most of the specifications.     

Social networks and the asylum cycle: the case of Iranians in the Netherlands

"This paper examines the traditional distinction between the migration of refugees and labor migrants in the context of Iranian asylum seekers in the Netherlands. The empirical strategy adopted is to apply a framework designed specifically to explain labor migration to the case of asylum migration, and the social networks approach is identified as the most appropriate. This paper examines the role of social networks through the asylum cycle, focusing on the decision to migrate, the choice of destination, and adaptation in the host society. The key conclusion is that the validity of the distinction between refugee and labor migration varies through the asylum cycle even for the same individual."     

Asylum Policies, Trafficking and Vulnerability

This article is located at the intersection of three recent debates on asylum in Europe: the efficacy of asylum policies; the trafficking of asylum seekers, and their growing vulnerability. Most commentators agree that there are relationships between these three debates, but the nature of those relationships remain unclear. Yet the need properly to understand the nature of these links has become especially pressing in the context of a raft of new policy initiatives on both asylum and trafficking, and concerns for their consequences for asylum seekers. At least part of the reason for this lack of clear understanding is significant gaps in empirical research. This article begins to fill some of these gaps, and in so doing to unpick some of the relationships between asylum policies, trafficking and vulnerability. It focuses on the experiences of asylum seekers in Europe, thus presenting a "bottom up" perspective on trafficking and asylum policies. The findings are derived from research among Iranian asylum seekers in the Netherlands, conducted between 1994 and 1996. The article discusses some of the reservations that surround this approach, including methodological issues such as trust, and the difficulties of applying more widely a narrow case study. Within the context of these reservations, it draws three main conclusions. First, empirical evidence to support the view that increasing proportions of asylum seekers are being forced to turn to traffickers in order to negotiate restrictive asylum policies. Second, the ways in which trafficking is exposing asylum seekers – including at least some "genuine" refugees – to new forms of vulnerability. Third, that direct links exist between asylum policies, trafficking and vulnerability, and that the blame for growing vulnerability lies more with asylum policies than with traffickers or with asylum seekers themselves. Finally, these empirical conclusions are targeted on a series of policy implications.     

Limits to Harmonization: The "Temporary Protection" of Refugees in the European Union

This article examines the limits to harmonization at the level of the European Union through a case study of policy towards people who fled the war inBosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s.
Specific attention is paid to the development of the policy of granting"temporary protection" instead of full refugee status to Bosnian asylum-seekers, which stretched across all fifteen member states.
It is argued that "temporary protection" emerged as a set of specific responses to the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia, involvingcompromises between states' desires to restrict asylum on the one hand, but meet demand from public opinion and international organizations to offerprotection to refugees on the other.
Subsequent analyses have suggested that these compromises might providean effective way forward for harmonization of policy at a European level,and even a reformulated international system of refugee protection.
However, the authors question this view: they analyse the extent to which"temporary protection" for Bosnians was coordinated, and whether it actually provided the states and individuals with the benefits that have been suggested.     

The uncertain lifetime and the timing of human capital investment

I examine the effects of mortality decline on fertility and human capital investment decision of parents taking into account the uncertainty about child survival. I propose a model, where parents decide on their fertility before the uncertainty is realized, but they choose to invest only in human capital of their surviving children. The model implies a positive relationship between mortality and fertility and a negative one between mortality and educational investment. It has been argued elsewhere that as, in reality, most of the mortality decline occurred in infancy, it should not affect the human capital investment decision, which comes later in life. Thus, increased survival chances should not promote growth by raising the human capital investment. This paper argues the contrary and proposes a mechanism where mortality decline at any age before the teen years can promote growth by raising human capital investment regardless of the timing of the educational investment.      

Developing an Index of Deprivation Which Integrates Objective and Subjective Dimensions: Extending the Work of Townsend,Mack and Lansley,and Halleröd

This article presents a new approach to index development, extending the methods used by Townsend, Mack and Lansley and Halleröd to measure deprivation in the developed world. The index combines three ‘objective’ dimensions of deprivation (i.e. monetary, consumption and work-related), and weighs them according to subjective perceptions regarding which items are more critical to deprivation. A particular application of factor analysis to determining deprivation measures and their corresponding weights leads to a more sophisticated and theoretically robust index than those used previously. The index draws on data from interviews with both partners of 17 households randomly sampled from a Turkish squatter settlement. The article contends that the methodological and substantive advantages of this approach are relevant to both developing and developed contexts.