The role of gender in the context of ''roots'' migration: why do Germany-Born Turkish women migrate to Turkey?

While a gender perspective has been applied in the broader field of migration studies, it has largely been neglected with respect to the phenomenon of return and roots migration – movement to the home country, or parental country of origin, respectively. A central goal of the present research is to probe into the role of gender-related factors in the context of roots migration, which is done by way of the paradigmatic case of Germanyborn Turkish women moving to Turkey. Based on a multi-scalar ethnographic approach employing semi-structured interviews, this study argues that motives for roots migration can be clustered into four, nonmutually exclusive categories: i) “dream”, ii) “opportunity”, iii) “romance”, and iv) “education”. A central finding is that that gender and gendered images of social roles, especially so in the context of romance-related movements (such as family reunion in the context of marriage), figured prominently in the interviewees’ migratory narratives. An equally important and pervasive issue was that of discrimination experienced in Germany. My main theoretical contention is that researchers need to show more conceptual awareness when using the term “return” migration (return to one’s home country), as a large portion of second-generation migratory patterns, both in the German-Turkish case and elsewhere, are in fact “roots” migrations (movement to the parental country of origin)