The role of immigration networks during the process from Turkey to the USA: Giresun Yağlıdere sample

This study is about the Turkish immigrants from Yağlıdere district of Turkey who migrated to the US's New Jersey through immigration networks and built up their own community and capital. My dissertation which focuses on the migration process of Yağlıdere Turks to New Jersey has benefited from qualitative research techniques and based on academic and field search phases. In the academic phase, the concept of immigration, international approaches to this concept and migration from Turkey to abroad subjects have been studied. And for the practical phase, the process of making a decision by the Yağlıdere person, and during and after procedure of immigration has been put under scope. In relation to these, social economical welfare, level of education, their relation with the host society (American) and home society (Turkish), level of local language (English), ways of marriage, social status and social networking styles have been deeply analyzed. Semi-structured interviews, participants' observations are forming the fundamental data acquisition methods. During data acquisition, I made use of snowball sampling and criterion sampling techniques. . The acquired information has been analyzed by MAXQDA 2018 qualitative analysis programme. According to the study results, Yağlıdere Turks from Turkey's Giresun city have ended up building their own social capital in an isolated way from the host society. Finally, it has been derived from all the study that family and relative relationships are playing a very important role in the lives of Yağlıdere Turks in building immigration networks which took them from Turkey to America. Key Words: Immigration, transnational migration, social capital, migration networks, Yağlıdere Turks living in America