A study on the views of the people of İzmir on refugees

During the past several years especially since 2011, the massive migration of Syrian refugees caused a spike in both academic research and interest in the area of refugee studies. Within the studies of migration, the overall tendency intensively produces the information that: the factors that are constructed upon the nation-state such as national, social and cultural homogeneity are threatened by immigrants/refugees/asylum-seekers, a kind of "New Others". Lots of different kinds of information about migration produced by migration studies to politics, from the press to non-governmental organizations is recreating and adding to the existing problems of migration. In this study which highlights the contradiction to this general tendency, for the capitalist/nation-states, the immigrants/refugees/asylum-seekers are more useful and functional than ever, it is also examined that the "new others" of the world and how they have been recreated the national identity of the citizens of nation-states and the mutual story by these new others with hiding the actual perpetrators while creating the scapegoats which the exploitation system continues upon. The trajectory of our research in the light of the elements we sorted above, is to understand the perspective and analyze the condition which shaped this perspective of the locals of İzmir towards the refugees who escaped from the violence hurricane in Syria in 2011. In this respect, with the perspective towards the refugees who have been made homeless, stateless, nationless and rootles the notion of nation-state and its borders, citizenship, its neoliberal politics, the adaptation and integration; and in a general sense the discourse produced towards the refugees are examined. Also, we endeavour to make the real perpetrators the main topic of conversation regarding the perspective of the local populations concerning the refugees. Even though the refugees were studied and evaluated with the lens of only statistics and safety concerns, the field research aims to grasp the matter on a deeper level in İzmir where the location is unique in understanding the migration of both domestic and from outside. In this study where we choose the method of qualitative research, the in-depth interviews were conducted with 64 local fellows of İzmir, and those interviews are interpreted in the light of themes that emerged during the field study. Lastly, suitable for qualitative research the goal of this study is to learn the relationship between the locals of İzmir and the refugees and their way of seeing the refugees, instead of trying to generalize the matter on a bigger scale. KEY WORDS: Migration, Refugee, Human Rigths, Perception, Izmir.