I am an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. My work examines everyday political behavior under conditions of extreme inequality.
To study this topic, I draw on different instances of immigration politics. For example, I have studied how the U.S.-Mexico border – where migrants cross—has become a popular site for ordinary Americans to engage in emotionally draining, physically arduous, and often ineffective forms of collective action. I have also interviewed Canadians about why they sponsor refugees who they do not know personally but for whom they volunteer significant amounts of time, money, and resources. My current research examines why some naturalized Canadians and their second-generation children support anti-immigrant parties and politicians. In all these case studies, my work focuses on dominant groups (citizens) and how they make sense of others less privileged than themselves (non-citizens). I investigate why these dominant groups mobilize in the ways they do and the material and ideological consequences of these collective endeavors.
These topics interest me because of my own lived experiences with migration, power, and politics. Like other middle-class Turkish men who came of age in the late 1970s, my father sought economic opportunities abroad. These ambitions were structured by the legacy of post-World War II guestworker programs – like the German Gastarbeiter—which recruited labor from Turkey and other countries in the Mediterranean region to help rebuild societies that the war had destroyed. My father’s father, a talented glassblower, had nearly gone to Germany to work for a company that manufactured beakers, flasks, and other laboratory equipment. His proficiency in German (acquired through a Turkish school curriculum that hoped to generate future workers for Germany) had made my grandfather particularly attractive to the company’s recruiters. However, the Gastarbeiter program did not allow wives and children to accompany male workers. Not wanting to be separated from his family, my grandfather turned down the opportunity, instead working for the Turkish public railway system as a civil servant.
My father also did not end up going to Germany. Nonetheless, like other guestworker initiatives past and present, the Gastarbeiter program created the institutions, cultural norms, and gendered expectations that shaped how young men like my father envisioned earning their livelihoods: by going abroad.
And abroad he went. After a brief stint working as an engineer in Libya, my father, like many others of his generation and social milieu, was drawn to the explosion of well-paying job opportunities in Saudi Arabia. By the 1980s, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) had become, in political scientist Robert Vitalis’s words, “America’s largest single overseas private enterprise,” having helped consolidate the power of the conservative, pro-American House of Fahd. This influx of FDI created a huge labor demand that the Fahd regime met by importing foreign workers.
The Jim Crow-style racial hierarchy that ARAMCO relied on in its camps shaped how the rest of Saudi society was organized—and how our family fit into the country’s stratification system. At the top were the Americans, British, and other Global North ‘expats’ who staffed executive and managerial roles in companies working for and around the oil boom. Below them were the large numbers of U.S. military personnel and their families, who ensured that Saudi Arabia remained “America’s Kingdom.” In the middle were global south ‘expats’ like my father, who held relatively well-paying jobs, lived in subsidized villas and apartment flats, and sent their children to private schools. At the bottom were the maids, gardeners, construction workers, and other so-called ‘low-skilled’ migrants who, despite making the Kingdom hum, could not bring their families with them, were paid poorly, and, in the absence of labor laws, were vulnerable to employer abuse.
In 1990, Iraq annexed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s small but wealthy northern neighbor. I had just turned six. I was old enough to understand that international ‘politics’ had suddenly made all the grownups in my life very tense and preoccupied. Many American and British families immediately fled the country. My parents, however, like many other Global South families, decided to stay, believing that Iraq would eventually back down as the UN-mandated withdrawal deadline drew closer. My parents did worry, though. Our apartment complex was close to the Saudi Armed Forces’ military airbase, a prime target for Iraqi scud missiles. With a neighbor family, my mother helped transformed a bedroom into a makeshift safe room, stocking it with food, bottled water, and a battery-operated radio. They used strips of brown packing tape to secure big plastic sheets over the room’s windows to prevent shards of glass from flying everywhere in case of a nearby explosion.
Then one afternoon, a few weeks after the UN-imposed deadline to withdraw had passed and the US-led coalition had officially started an aerial bombing campaign against Iraq, the cartoons I had been watching on the Saudi government-and-ARAMCO operated channel suddenly stopped. A red screen appeared. A calm voice, speaking first in Arabic, then in English, told viewers to refrain from panicking while alerting people that incoming scud missiles had been detected. The eerie sound from the television echoed the siren I could hear outside. I remember running to the kitchen where my mother was and telling her something was wrong. When she saw the television screen, she scooped me up, grabbed our go-bag, and rushed to the bedroom in our neighbor’s apartment, our makeshift shelter. Soon after, my father arrived. We huddled in the back room with our family friends until the next morning, when the wail of the sirens finally ceased.
The sirens went off more frequently over the following months. Eventually, my parents decided that we should drive away from Riyadh. All I remember of this time is sitting in the backseat, squished between bags of food and clothes, looking out the window at the endless highway and desert landscape, caught between a sense of adventure, boredom, and confusion. Eventually, we ended up at Jeddah’s Casablanca Hotel, where we were sequestered in place with other Turkish families who had also fled Riyadh. I remember playing tag with the other Turkish children in the hotel lobby as my parents huddled with the other grownups, speculating about what was in store. Years later, I realized the eerie similarities between the 1942 film and its namesake hotel where we stayed.
By February 1991, the U.S.-led coalition had successfully forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. There was a sense of thankfulness towards the Americans—one certainly felt by my parents, too. The Americans had not only liberated Kuwait but also ‘saved’ us. Only years later did I learn that the U.S. was taking a page out of colonial Britain’s playbook when it came to the Middle East. Like its colonial predecessor, the U.S. also actively created and maintained political cleavages in the region to suit its imperialist projects. A U.S.-supported Iraq had accumulated enormous debt (particularly to its creditor, Kuwait) during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. A dispute over this financial debt prompted the Ba’ath regime to annex Kuwait. Relations between the two countries soured further when Kuwait refused to comply with the OPEC quota on oil production, which had been created to shift power away from the dominant Anglo-American oil firms to post-colonial societies in the Middle East. Despite being a founding member of OPEC (just like Iraq), Kuwait disregarded its organizational commitment, producing more oil than the quota and contributing to a precipitous drop in Iraqi oil prices. Iraq’s economy plunged into further turmoil. Annexing Kuwait to restore some of its economic power was Iraq’s response. Spearheading the first Gulf War to protect American interests in the region – particularly Saudi Arabia – was the U.S.’s response. Meanwhile, my family, like thousands of other foreign workers and their loved ones, were caught in this political quagmire, scared and uncertain about what the future held.
But this mare’s nest also ended up benefitting me personally.
The Gulf War caused American, British, and other Global North expats to pull their families out of Saudi Arabia. Suddenly, the so-called ‘international’ schools—built specifically for their (white) children—were left empty. The racial preference system that had informed the admissions process for these elite schools adjusted for the changed circumstances. Children from global south countries were welcomed. Spotting this opening, my parents enrolled me in the Saudi Arabian International School (later renamed the American International School).
Barely able to speak English, I began my journey through the American school curriculum, which was instrumental in my ability to thrive in a world structured by U.S. hegemony. After completing the international baccalaureate program, I went on to the University of Chicago to earn a bachelor of arts in History and Economics, followed by a master’s and doctorate in Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. These credentials—including a faculty position offer from the University of Toronto—gave me the requisite ‘points’ to immigrate to Canada without much problem. I became a Canadian citizen last year, finally having legal membership in the country that I live in.
It is perhaps also no irony that I ended up marrying a veteran of the second Gulf War. I was in the streets of New York City protesting America’s shock and awe bombing campaign in 2003, while my future husband-to-be was getting ready to deploy to the Middle East with the U.S. Armed Forces as a chinook pilot. We met seven years later in Arizona. I was doing fieldwork at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands; he was banking on the GI bill, finishing up his Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education. In many ways, we had led polar opposite lives. But what made us click was how we had both grown up as middle-class people in a world shaped by U.S. cultural hegemony.
Looking back on my life, I am keenly aware of the social structures that shaped my biography and gave me opportunities for upward social mobility. I benefited from labor migration systems that simultaneously mitigate and reproduce the violence of capitalism. I also benefitted from the opportunities that sprung from the interstices of U.S. imperialism, as well as attendant inter-state alliances, agreements, and conflicts. These macro-level processes and social structures shaped my biography. They also gave me privileges in life, that I will no doubt pass on to my own child.
In saying this, of course, I don’t mean to minimize my own agency or that of my parents and other elders. Rather, I am mindful that as my grandparents raised their children, and my parents, in turn, raised my sister and me, they were making decisions under circumstances not of their own making.
I study migration and politics to better understand those circumstances. My ethnographic approach is motivated by my desire to understand the unpredictable ways ordinary people make sense of, navigate, reinforce, and resist the structures they face.
I pursue this work with the hope that this knowledge will contribute to imagining more inclusive, more equitable, and more peaceful futures.