Stratified rights of migrants from Hannah Arendt's perspective on the right to have rights: The case of Türkiye

Hannah Arendt, who has voiced one of the harshest criticisms about the human rights, claims that human rights fall short of recognizing the right to have rights which should be the most prominent rights of a human being. The right to have rights is defined as the right to live in a framework where one is judged according to her/his actions and thoughts. As Arendt criticizes human rights and defends the right to have rights, the migrants' rights get more complex and stratified. This thesis addresses the inequalities and injustice resulting from the migrants' specific civil, social and economic rights that vary based on their legal statuses, embracing the concept of civic stratification and guided by the context of the right to have rights. The thesis construes Arendt's perspective of the right to have rights as living in human conditions. Thus, the framework required for enjoyment of the right to have rights is where the biological needs are fulfilled, one is entitled to build a world of her/his own and come together with others to speak and act. The conceptual framework is built on civic stratification as the complex hierarchy of the migrant status and affiliated rights is defined. The thesis categorizes the migrants in Türkiye as the migrants by the terms of the Settlement Law, the internationally protected (refugees, conditional refugees, and subsidiary protection), the temporary protection, the stateless and the irregular migrants, and lastly the other foreigners. This thesis, which employs qualitative research methods, focuses on the axes of civic stratification rights and its material and moral resources, taking the mentioned categorization as a basis. As far as the axis of rights is concerned, the national legislation is screened as the legal basis of the rights recognised for the statuses. Regarding the material and moral resources, the elements that reveal the capacities of the statuses to benefit from the rights such as social standing and social networks, command of information, and general know-how, dignity, and communication are examined through the existing researches. When the statuses are analyzed from the perspective of stratified citizenship, it is observed that hierarchies can be formed not only in terms of rights of each status; but also in the areas of civic gain, civic deficit, civic expansion, and civic exclusion, which are shaped by both rights and material-moral resources. It is asserted that the stratified citizenship system deprives migrants of the right to have rights and, consequently, of the human condition activities that embody labor, work, and action. Linking the right to have rights and the practices within the framework of civic stratification is considered to promote Arendtian thought and contribute to the debates for migrant rights in Türkiye.