Homesickness of the Migrant Worker: An Alienation Story

This paper criticizes societal abstraction and using its terminology in migration studies. It proposes another conceptualization in order to analyze the migration phenomenon: personal abstraction in relation to the society. Being situated as an epitome of the migration policy derived from the societal abstraction, the case of "guest workers" who migrated from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s is re-evaluated in the alternative abstraction using literary texts to debate the consequences of the temporary labor migration program. The paper focuses on the phenomenological understanding of the migrant worker and his/her homesickness by means of revisiting three main social types complying with the personal abstraction in relation to the society: Simmel's stranger (1908), Park's marginal man (1921), and Siu's sojourner (1952). Furthermore, the migrant worker's alienation from space-time which is represented by homesickness is proposed as the main consequence of the migration in terms of long-for-far and fear-for-near.