Social and cultural integration of senegalese immigrants living in Istanbul

Abstract

This article describes the cultural and social difficulties that accompany the integration process of Senegalese immigrants, particularly those who have settled in the city of Istanbul. More specifically, it examines the immigrants' environment, their feelings, perceptions, and motivations, as well as the individual and collective strategies they use to integrate into Turkish society. Such a perspective necessarily places the individual at the center of our concerns and seeks to analyze the factors that ensure the dynamics of his or her progress in the host society. To do this, support was taken from the concept of symbolic interactionism of George Mead (1963) an application with the experience of Senegalese settled in the city of Istanbul. It aims to try answer the following question: How do the coping strategies implemented by immigrants influence the outcome of their integration process in the host society? More precisely, how do immigrants interact with the host environment and the identity processes they develop there? After comparing the theoretical data with the interview data of 52 Senegalese migrants in Istanbul, it was concluded that most Senegalese immigrants interact with the social and cultural references of their country of origin to integrate into the host society. Therefore, this limits their effective integration in Turkey.