Irregular Migration, Security, and Politics: Cases From Iran and Turkey

Although immigration has traditionally been accepted as a subject for low politics during the Cold War era, it became a primary focus of the high politics as it relates to security. Iran has been subject to a mass immigration from Afghanistan between 1979 and 2019 due to the Afghanistan Civil war and the US occupation whereas Turkey has been subject to a mass immigration from Syria since 2011 due to Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War. To this end, Iran and Turkey often show similar experiences with immigration. However, there are also cases where their policies differ from each other. Both Iran and Turkey received a large number of immigrants, often reaching to 3.5-4 million. Such massive immigration has led to problems in various areas including domestic and foreign politics, sociodemographics, ethnic, religion/ sectarian composition as well as security issues in terrorism, foreign terrorists, ultranationalism, and anti-immigration. In this article, we conduct a comparative analysis of immigration and policies related to immigration of Turkey and Iran. In particular, we describe how their policies resemble and differ from each other towards immigration and provide remarks based on our analysis of their immigration experiences.