National Crises and Anti-Refugee Sentiment in Turkey

• In Event: Immigrant and Refugee Incorporation in Turkey

Abstract

Entering its tenth year, the Syrian Civil War has created the most substantial refugee shock of the era and created divides in host societies between those who are welcoming or hostile towards the refugees. The crises that host societies experience are particularly interesting in shaping the attitudes toward immigrants, as some embrace them during crises and others target them as a burden. We are interested in exploring anti-immigrant sentiments during social, political, economic, and health crises. How and why do attitudes toward refugees change during a crisis? What kind of a crisis is more likely to cause an increase in negative attitudes? Do factors such as political orientation or exposure to immigrants affect how crises shape the attitudes toward immigrants? To see the effects of various crises on anti-refugee attitudes, we explore the changing sentiments of Twitter users in Turkey, which is the host to the highest number of Syrian refugees in the world. Using recent techniques in computational text analysis and NLP, we scrape a dataset of about half a million tweets from Turkish Twitter users and explore how the attitudes change from pre- and post-crises with sentiment analysis. By comparing different crises that Turkey experienced in the last several years, we not only observe the impact of crises on anti-immigrant sentiments but also compare the changing attitudes across five different crises such as economic, security, health, and social crises as well as a natural disaster.

Authors

• Omer Faruk Yalcin, Pennsylvania State University

• Ahmet Akbiyik, Harvard University

• M. Tahir Kilavuz, Marmara University

• Abdullatif Köksal, Boğaziçi University