‘It’s not enough to migrate. You have to deserve to be an immigrant!’: Narratives as weapons of struggling for the true/best immigrant group identity

Based on the case of Bulgarian-Turkish immigrants who live in Turkey, the aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the meaning and the functions of the narratives in the special contextual conditions of the migration experience. This contextual and functional approach shows us that narratives in the present life of Turkish immigrants who migrated Turkey from Bulgaria, have a quite vital function as a form of expression and an experiencing realm of sub-immigrant group identities which do not have any forms of expression or concrete borders observable from the outside and which emerge only in narrative domain in parallel to contextual conditions. In this study, it has been examined how the immigrants construct and represent their sub-immigrant group identities in parallel to the situational context in the narrative events they come together, considering the contextual conditions of the immigration process which uncovers the meaning and the functions of narratives today