Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

When Helmut Kohl became chancellor in October 1982, he resolved to fulfill the CDU’s promise of turning a remigration law into reality. But given the potential backlash at home and abroad, he knew that achieving his goal – getting rid of half of the Turkish migrant population – would be difficult. How, after perpetrating the Holocaust forty years prior, could West Germans kick out the Turks without compromising their post-fascist values of liberalism and democracy? How could they do so while minimizing criticism from the Turkish government? The answer, codified in the 1983 Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz), was to pay Turks to leave. The West German government offered unemployed former guest workers a “remigration premium” to take their families and leave by September 30, 1984, with no option to return. While the remigration law fell short of Kohl’s 50 percent goal, it sparked one of the largest mass remigrations in modern European history. Between November 1983 and September 1984, 15 percent of the Turkish migrant population – 250,000 people – returned to Turkey. Nearly half of those return migrants came to regret their decision, as they encountered difficulties “reintegrating” both socially and economically into their own homeland.

The first section of this chapter looks at how the two terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ came to be defined as distinct from each other in the context of the modern state. The second examines how states define and categorise refugees through laws that seek to contain and limit their flow. The third section is concerned with the consequences of limiting the definition of a refugee, which has led to an unequal burden between developed and developing states. The final section will canvass the various options presented to reduce the present imbalance where the vast majority of the world’s refugees eke out an existence in refugee camps in developing countries. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the choices made by states in border protection become the key determinants of how refugees will be accepted. Adherence to international refugee law will not necessarily address all the problems associated with refugees, but nor will seeing refugees as unwanted intruders in contrast to ‘desirable’ migrants.

Paleoecological studies can provide some insight into factors influencing a species’ present-day distribution, and its present-day distribution can, in turn, provide some insight into its future distribution. Being able to predict future distributions is very important because climate, an important influence on species distribution, is now changing at a rapid rate. Within a population, individuals may have a random, uniform, or clumped dispersion, though a clumped dispersion is most common because essential resources such as food, light, and undisturbed habitat are often spatially clumped. Distribution patterns change over the short term, as a result of dispersal, and over the long term from factors that influence range expansion and contraction. Abiotic factors, such as climate, soils, light availability and disturbance, and biotic factors, such as behavior, life histories and interactions with other species, can influence the distribution of species. Changes in these factors can lead to changes in distribution, including range expansion, range contraction and extinction. By quantitatively describing a species’ ecological niche, ecologists can understand a species’ present distribution, and may be able to make predictions about its future distribution.

For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

Identifying a predominant focus in spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetries, this chapter suggests that diasporic self-mapping is often ambivalent as poets navigate shifting or liminal spaces. The chapter argues that geopolitical differences distinguish Asian Australian experiences from those of their Asian American counterparts. It examines the mediation of migration and understanding of past and present in the work of Ee Tiang Hong, and how transnational mobility informs the hybrid and spliced practice of Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis. The chapter analyses an intergenerational feminist interest in borders and journeys in the work of Bobis and Eunice Andrada. It then examines how later-generation poets may face quite different challenges in navigating ancestral homeland and the search for connections, or, alternatively, find a freedom in travelling and uncertainty. The chapter also considers transcultural and translational strategies, and discusses Omar Sakr’s mapping of “unbelonging.” The chapter concludes by asserting that the rich heterogeneity of poetries cannot be reduced to a single term, even in such a disruptor term as “Asian Australian.”

This chapter traces the rise and decline of the conviction that Britain was a nation uniquely hospitable to refugees and especially proud of its longstanding traditions of asylum. In fact, social attitudes and state policies towards migrants fluctuated dramatically throughout the modern era, triggered by a variety of controversial or destabilizing events ranging from dynastic royal marriages to continental revolutions and international conflicts. By 1905 Britain had passed its first general immigration control act, providing a framework governing who could be permitted to enter the country and under what conditions, regulations that have continued to be refined and extended to this day. Yet this legislation also took up issues about statehood and citizenship that can be traced back to the French Revolution in 1789 and which reverberated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, issues that have been represented and explored in a wide range of literary and cultural genres by writers and artists including Charlotte Smith, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Agatha Christie, and Iris Murdoch. By 1960 a new post-war recognition of the scale of what was increasingly recognized as a fully global migration crisis had changed these insular local debates forever.

Livestock first entered southern Africa a little over 2,000 years ago and by the mid−1600s Khoe-speaking herders were widely distributed across the western third of the region. Debates over how pastoralist societies developed and how and by what routes livestock were introduced have been transformed over the past two decades by significant major fieldwork projects, a growing number of detailed genetic and linguistic studies, and new interpretative frameworks partly inspired by deeper acquaintance with pastoralist practice in East Africa. Important advances have also been made in understanding Khoe rock art, the chronology of pottery, and the relevance of disease in constraining the southward spread of livestock. This chapter reviews these developments, while also grappling with the thorny question of how, if at all, forager and herder societies can be differentiated archaeologically and what form relations took between those who kept domestic livestock and those who did not. Questions of identity (ascribed and asserted) and the degree of coherence to be expected between genetic, linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources come to the fore.

This introductory chapter sets out the aim of the project, which is to reassess the social and cultural relations between the Aegean and the Mediterranean through a new examination of some of the earliest Greek pottery finds overseas. The focus is on Protogeometric and Geometric ceramics from Greek and Phoenician colonies, certain Phoenician metropolises and further Indigenous sites in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, which were analysed by Neutron Activation. The analytical results are examined against the background of the social and economic relations that were generated through the production, exchange and consumption of the pottery finds under scrutiny.