Turkey grants Syrians the right to work, but is it too little, too late? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/01/turkey-syrian-refugees-granted-right-to-work.html#
Yet a large number of the more highly qualified Syrians are already among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have made it to Europe. They are gone. By granting Syrians work permits, Turkey is trying to stop the remaining, more highly qualified Syrians from going to Europe, as Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan recently said. In an interview with Haberturk television on Jan. 16, Akdogan said, “European countries ... admit Syrians who belong to certain categories [of] qualified labor. Turkey, too, has shortages in certain fields. There are also some other fields where a bit less qualified people can work. The Labor Agency makes announcements for open positions in certain fields but no one would apply. ... [Syrians] can be employed in various fields. If we hadn’t issued the work permits, the qualified labor force would have gone to other countries and we would have been left with a much different picture.”
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In an intriguing column on Dec. 15, Saim Tut from the Dirilis Postasi daily offered firsthand accounts of how qualified Syrians were wasted. “What have we done to help educated and qualified Syrians who are trying to open a permanent room of life for themselves in this country, which they see as the closest to them? Nothing,” the columnist wrote. “Most recently, I helped a young pharmacist, a graduate of [Damascus’] Kalamoon University, to get a job as a footman at the restaurant of a benevolent friend of mine. … Yesterday, I went with a heavy heart to [Ankara’s] Esenboga Airport to see off my friend Firas, a nuclear engineer from Hama, to Germany. A few months ago I wrote an article titled ‘Wash the dirty dishes well, Syrian engineer!’ And yes, this had happened right before my eyes. Just how benevolent, how glorious we are!