Getting used to seeing a Syrian origin minister in Turkish Cabinet

“Sweden had a female minister of Turkish origin. Can you imagine Turkey having a Russian blonde Orthodox woman in the Turkish Cabinet in 20 years’ time? I really can’t imagine Turkey changing toward this mentality. But perhaps realities on the ground are going to force a change in the mindset,” Professor Ahmet İçduygu fron Istanbul’s Koç University told me. “I said Russian, but I could have said Syrian as well,” added İçduygu, who is also the director of the Migration Research Center at Koç.

I can imagine Germans looking at us with a sarcastic smile, saying, “See, integration is not such a simple issue.” They would have the same sarcastic smile when we start discussing duel citizenship for Syrians, or Arabic schools or universities. However, I must say that perhaps we might prove smarter than the Germans, as I have heard that establishing a university with an Arabic curriculum has already been discussed in some circles at the state level.

Currently, the estimated number of Syrians in Turkey is approaching two million. “I am pretty sure that 10 years from now we will still be talking about two million Syrians living in Turkey,” Murat Erdoğan, the director of the Migration and Politics Research Center at Ankara’s Hacettepe University, told me.
There is a universal rule: If refugees have not gone back after a certain time period, it is indicative that they are there for a much longer stay.

There are more than 300,000 Syrians in Istanbul at the moment, according to Erdoğan. “Let suppose that 5,000 of them are beggars. Where are the rest? Probably they have somehow been absorbed by the system.”

This is also an issue underlined by İçduygu: Syrians turn into labor migrants, which becomes...