On most mornings, a burly 32-year-old former oil engineer from Palmyra and a thickly muscled two-time winner of the Arab Body Building Championship from Damascus squeeze into a white Fiat Linea sedan and spend the day surveying the newest construction sites dotting the outskirts of Istanbul, one of the world’s oldest cities.
Out at one end of the metro-bus service that links central Istanbul to vast peripheries, the city’s tight patchwork of neighbourhoods with their distinctive skyline of domes and minarets gives way to a global suburbia of inter-State highways, gated high-rise apartment towers and automobile showrooms.
In 2015, Syrian émigrés Abdul Hadi Rabbata and Tarek Bitar set up the offices of Sweet Home Company (its motto was: Sweet Consulting, Safe Investing) in one such apartment complex to offer investment advice to fellow Syrians fleeing their country’s descent into chaos.
Best place to invest“Everyone leaving Syria is not poor. Many have money they want to invest in a safe place,” said Mr. Rabbata. “We reached out to Syrian friends working in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, the Emirates, and Iraq, and invited them to visit Turkey. We showed them the projects and explained, Turkey is the best place to invest in the Middle East.”
British and American politicians have raised the spectre of refugees swarming their shores, snatching precious jobs, and swamping the social services. Evidence from Turkey, the largest recipient of Syrian refugees, contradicts many of these claims. Only 10 per cent of the 2.7 million Syrian refugees registered with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Turkey live in government-run camps. A vast majority lives on rent in major cities, engaging with the formal and informal economy in myriad ways. The flipside of this is that agricultural and construction workers in the south have struggled to compete with Syrian peasants willing to work for lower wages.
Since 2011, Syrians and their Turkish partners have set up over 4,000 new businesses, according to research by Esra Ozpinar, Seda Basihos, and Aycan Kulaksiz of Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, and the numbers have only been rising each day. In 2015, home prices rose 18.4 per cent, the fastest in the world according to real estate advisory firm Knight Frank.
“Newly arrived refugees are spurring consumption by spending their savings as well as any wages they earn in the grey economy,” notes a 2016 report by ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, explaining that the Turkish economy is increasingly reliant on raising household spending, rather than expansion of banking credit.
The “Syria effect” on the Turkish economy, the S&P report says, is visible across sectors as refugees spend their savings on food and beverages, homes and rentals, second-hand cars and consumer durables. “We think the importance of refugee spending is not fully appreciated,” the report concludes.
Mr. Rabbata, the Syrian real estate agent, agrees. His Sweet Home Company has closed 15 real estate deals in the past year. “Recently, we started offering free investment advice on Facebook,” he said. “People are asking, what can I do with $3,000, what can I do with $10,000, and one person said, Abdul, what can I do with $50,000?”
For $3,000, Mr. Rabbata suggested the man buy a second-hand car and drive it as a taxi. For $50,000, he offered to enter into a partnership and use the money to set up Istanbul’s first recognised English and Arabic medium kindergarten school.
“We have identified the land, possible teachers and approached the local authorities,” he said. “We hope even Turkish parents will send their children to our school.”
Tip of the iceberg“Turkey has only about 50,000 documented foreign workers employed in the formal labour market, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. A vast majority of foreign workers are informal, undocumented workers,” said Professor Kuvvet Lordoglu, a labour economist at University of Kocaeli, explaining that the effect of the refugee influx on labour markets is not uniform.
Prof. Lordoglu’s research in five Turkish cities with large refugee populations reveals that most refugees set up their own small shops and businesses, worked informally for Syrian and Turkish owned businesses, or worked as wage labour in the agriculture and construction sectors.
In three of five surveyed cities, unemployment rose significantly as Syrians and Turks completed for the same low-wage agricultural and construction jobs. Agricultural jobs were particularly hard-hit, where Syrians displaced the Kurdish people who traditionally pick fruit harvests.
In the more industrialised cities of Gaziantep and Hatay, unemployment actually fell as factories hired more workers to deal with increased consumer demand. In Gaziantep, a district close to the Syrian border, exports across the border to Syria increased by a staggering 467 per cent in 2014 in comparison to 2012.
On the whole, Prof. Lordoglu said, it is not correct to say that Syrian refugees have taken jobs away from the Turkish people. However, it is important to recognise the effects of migration on the local informal economies of the towns hosting large numbers of refugees to mitigate these effects and alleviate social tensions.
Law allowing work permitsIn January this year, the Turkish government introduced a new law allowing refugees to apply for work permits and enter the formal workforce with the protections it entails like minimum wages and health insurance.
But Syrians feel there is little reason for Turkish employers to pay minimum wage if they can get away by hiring refugees for rock-bottom wages. The only way to find meaningful work, several Syrians said, was to set up a business of their own.
“For the last five years, my life is like a movie,” said Aslan Najok, a 23 year old former student from Damascus who fled conscription to the Syrian army, was kidnapped by rebels, held for months, and finally freed after which he slipped across the border in 2011 and arrived in Gaziantep with 10 euros. For the next three years, Najok crisscrossed southern Turkey with a Syrian friend, working as home painters.
“In one place, the employer paid us $1500 less than the agreed price for our work, in another an employer gave us food and a place to stay, but balked at given us a salary. He said – why do you need any money? You have no children, and I’m paying for your food and home.”
Eventually, Najok found work in Istanbul as a salesman in a chain of furniture stores. “They treated me well, but they paid me in cash at the end of every month, and when ever I asked for a copy of my employment contract they said, we will send it to you soon. Till this date there is no record of me every having worked for that company.”
One day a Syrian businessman, based in Saudi Arabia, visited the store offered him a job.
“Now I’m setting up a furniture company in Istanbul for my client. We start small and then hopefully grow,” Najok said, walking around his small workshop just outside Istanbul, where two Syrian carpenters from Aleppo carved ornate wooden sofa legs.
“Aleppo had the biggest furniture market in Syria. We exported to many Arab countries,” said Abdul Qafi, who had his own furniture store in Aleppo, and now works with Najok,”I learnt carpentry when I was 13, now I’m 52.”
When a rocket exploded near in his house in Aleppo, Qafi headed to the Turkish border, with a little money, a few clothes and a battered photocopy of Motifs Ornementaux, a pattern book by 19th century French furniture designer Eduardo Bajot. “When I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets saying, I am Syrian help me, till someone directed me a Syrian neighbourhood.”
Three days before this story went to print, Najok called with bad news. “The owner is not happy with the progress of the business. He has decided to shut it down. Now, after years of struggle, I am without a job again,” he said, “But I am young, and will hopefully live long. Something will turn up.”
When Israel invaded Syria in 1967, Ahmad Yacoub’s parents fled their ancestral farms in the Golan Heights for the safety of Damascus.
“They moved to Damascus thinking, one day we will return to Golan,” said Ahmad Yacoub, as he sat outside his restaurant just off Estiklal Street, Istanbul’s tourist hub, “Forty-six years passed, a revolution came to Damascus and now we are in Istanbul.”
In Damascus, Yacoub ran a Yemeni food restaurant called Mandy Hadramout. “We named it after Hadramout – the province from where our Yemeni chefs brought this cuisine to us, and trained our Syrian cooks how to cook in the Yemen style,” said Ahmed Yacoub.
When the Syrian conflict began, the Yemeni chefs went back to Hadramout, where Yemeni security forces, the Saudi air force and American drones battle fighters and suicide bombers allied to Al Qaida and Islamic State for control of the Yemeni coastline.
The Mandy Hadramout restaurant has moved to Istanbul, with a new generation of Syrian cooks who continue to use Yemeni recipes for lamb pilaf, and chicken cooked with basmati rice and apricots. Business is picking up, but like his parents before him, Yacoub often thinks of the city where he grew up. “Each night I think, one day we will return to Damascus. I don’t want to wait 46 years like my parents, but this looks to be a long war.”
( This is the second in a three-part series on refugees filed by New Delhi-based journalist Aman Sethi, who travelled to Turkey and Germany last month and filed the three reports in this series. The full version of each of these will be at www.thehindu.com. Aman, who had previously worked with The Hindu, including as its correspondent based in Addis Ababa reporting on African affairs, is at aman.am@gmail.com .)
