On the Analysis of International Migration Processes: Macro-Quantitative Perspectives and a Comparative Case Study on the Situation of the Turkish Community in Austria (Zur Analyse Internationaler Migrationsprozesse: Makro-Quantitative Perspektiven Und Eine Vergleichende Fallstudie Über Die Lage Der Türkischen Community in Österreich)

Abstract

The present article presents at first a German language summary about recent quantitative studies by the author and his associates about global development since the end of Communism in up to 175 nations of the world, using 26 predictor variables to evaluate the determinants of 30 processes of development on a global scale. In the article, we also analyze current trends and data on Austrian migration as a case study. In the article, we also analyze latest PISA data: recent OECD PISA reading ability results for Turks in Austria and for people of a Turkish immigration background, just as the ones for Albanians in Switzerland, are at the aggregate level of developing countries. We contradict current islamophobic interpretations in the tradition of Mr. Thilo Sarrazin, and show that not ‘Turks are the problem’ and also not ‘Islam is the problem’, but the low linguistic competence among many Turkish immigrants from Eastern Anatolia, who never had a chance to properly study in the course of their lives the Turkish state language nor the widely used Kurdish regional language let alone the language of the host country. With an average national reading scale of 465.89, the native population in Turkey achieves better results than any Turkish immigrant community in Europe, and in fact is not too different from the value of 481.84, achieved by native Austrian children without an immigration background. Just as in Turkey, there are also considerable differences between low PISA reading scores for many of the OECD immigrant groups abroad and high PISA reading scores in the home countries of the migrants concerned, such as in Poland, Korea, Italy, and Portugal. In all these countries the home country already achieves better national results than the migrant communities from these countries abroad. Historical blue-collar migration from poor and rural regions from Italy, Korea, Poland, Portugal and Turkey well explains such phenomena. Conversely, we find clear evidence of a real contemporary ‘brain drain’ from Austria, the UK, Albania, France, Brazil, Germany and Russia, where migrants abroad, as a rule, achieved better OECD PISA reading ability test results than fellow citizens in their country of origin. We also show that with Portuguese investments in education but U.S. immigration rates the current Austrian immigration model reached certain limits.