How Does Syrian Immigration Affect Informal Labor Market in the Different Regions of Turkey?

The Syrian War has caused a major refugee crisis in the world starting in 2011. From then, almost 5.6 million Syrians have been externally displaced due to the impact of ongoing civil war in the country. Since the beginning of the Syrian War, 3.57 million refugees have immigrated to Turkey as refugees. Especially, the cities near in the Syrian-Turkey border and Istanbul are the most populated ones. As the Syrian immigration problem continues to grow in Turkey, the unsystematic settling of Syrian refugees has caused unstable sub-regional labor markets in some cities of Turkey. In addition to Turkey’s recent economic recession, increases in informal Syrian unemployment continues to form ‘supply shocks’ to informal labor in different sectors. This refugee problem is mostly seen in the informal sector because of the education level of the refugees and current government policies. This paper investigates the impact of Syrian immigration in Turkey in the informal employment, formal employment and unemployment. Using random and fixed effects regressions, this paper finds that places with more refugees had an increase in unemployment and lower the wages. This is due to both huge inflow of Syrian refugees and declining Turkish economy