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The Impact of Space and Time on Identity Claims of Immigrants from the Ottoman Empire to the U.S. between 1904-1923
Abstract
Immigration records indicate that over 600,000 individuals arrived to the United States from the Ottoman Empire during the Second Migration Wave (1880-1965). This study employs a purposive sample of 1699 manually collected immigrant records from the Ellis Island Foundation's ship manifest archive to explore the following research questions. First, which natio-racial identities did the immigrants report and what circumstances might explain their identity claims? Secondly, did they claim an Ottoman natio-racial identity associated with a particular geographical location or period? Bivariate and multivariate analyses of this unique data sample reveal thus far unknown findings about Ottoman immigrant identity claims. These data uncover four major natio-racial identity claims: Greek Greek, Ottoman Greek, Turkish Greek and Turkish Turk. Of those four, the majority of immigrants in this sample self-classified using the Turkish Greek natio-racial category. Greek Greek was second and was followed by Ottoman Greek, and Turkish Turk. Additionally, these data reveal the physical erasure of the Ottoman category and its replacement with the Turkish category, as well as the existence of a small cohort of immigrants who claimed their birth city's location in Greece when, in fact, it was located within regions of the Ottoman empire that constitute modern Turkey. This study frames these findings using racial formation theory and the concept of imagined communities.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries