Bureaucratic challenges that refugees encounter: Burden of being a refugee in a small city1

Abstract

This study focuses on the encounter between bureaucrats and immigrants in immigration studies and the bureaucratization of immigrants’ daily life in a small city in Turkey; refugee identity is constructed by incorporating some of the local realities, different responses to migration, social encounters, living together, and the reflection of diversity in urban public spaces in everyday life, the sociology of the city or the migration history, gains different aspects and contents in encounters with local or urban bureaucracy. This identity, shaped as a burden, ineffectiveness and waiting, becomes essential in the immigrant’s self-definition.