page_title: Turkish Americans
section_title: Mainland Turkish migration
hierarchical_section_title: Turkish Americans / History / Mainland Turkish migration
caption_attribution_description: English: Turkish girls holding the flag of the US and Turkey.
context_page_description: Turkish Americans are Americans of Turkish descent or origin. About 25,000 to 50,000 Turks came to the United States between 1890 and 1924, most of them male peasants from both the European and Asian areas of Turkey. They largely settled to Industrial centers such as Detroit, Boston, and smaller mill towns in Massachusetts, such as Lowell and Salem.
context_section_description: From World War I to 1965 the number of Turkish immigrants arriving in the United States was quite low, as a result of restrictive immigration laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924. Approximately 100 Turkish immigrants per year entered the United States between 1930 and 1950. However, the number of Turkish immigrants to the United States increased to 2,000 to 3,000 per year after 1965 due to the liberalization of US immigration laws. As of the late 1940s, but especially in the 1960s and 1970s, Turkish immigration to the United States changed its nature from one of unskilled to skilled migration; a wave of professionals such as doctors, engineers, academicians, and graduate students came to the United States. In the 1960s, 10,000 people entered the United States from Turkey, followed by another 13,000 in the 1970s. As opposed to the male-dominated first flows of Ottoman Turkish migrants, these immigrants were highly educated, return migration was minimal, migrants included many young women and accompanying families, and Turkish nationalism and secularism was much more common. The general profile of Turkish men and women immigrating to the United States depicted someone young, college-educated with a good knowledge of English, and with a career in medicine, engineering, or another profession in science or the arts.
  Since the 1980s, the flow of Turkish immigrants to the United States has included an increasing number of students and professionals as well as migrants who provide unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Thus, in recent years, the highly skilled and educated profile of the Turkish American community has changed with the arrival of unskilled or semi-skilled Turkish labor workers. The unskilled or semi-skilled immigrants usually work in restaurants, gas stations, hair salons, construction sites, and grocery stores, although some of them have obtained American citizenship or green cards and have opened their own ethnic businesses. Some recent immigrants have also arrived via cargo ships and then left them illegally, whilst others overstay their visas. Thus, it is difficult to estimate the number of undocumented Turkish immigrants in the United States who overstay their visas or arrive illegally. Moreover, with the introduction of the Diversity Immigrant Visa more Turkish immigrants, from all socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, have arrived in the United States, with the quota for Turkey being 2,000 per year.
caption: Turkish Americans holding the flags of the United States and Turkey
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