UCLA

Sociological research has examined how temporary legal statuses suspend migrants’ lives between inclusion and exclusion in a polity. Yet scholarship analyzing the effects of temporary policy on the organizational terrain of migrant reception is scant. This dissertation addresses this gap by asking: How do explicitly temporary migration policies shape service provision for refugees? Specifically, how do forced migrants themselves—both as consumers and purveyors of services—shape these organizations? And what are the implications of these activities for refugees’ access to services? I answer these questions through a qualitative, longitudinal study of one organizational field in a case of forced migrant reception: healthcare provision for Syrians in Istanbul. In 2014, Turkey established the Temporary Protection Regulation, granting registered Syrians free access to state healthcare services. Yet, despite the extension of free state healthcare, Syrian doctors mobilized to provide care through informal, nonstate providers and have gradually institutionalized their services. Drawing on over 175 interviews with Syrian patients, Syrian doctors, Turkish doctors, NGO administrators, and government officials, the dissertation examines the persistence of these clinics, the factors driving refugees to seek out nonstate services, and the efforts of refugee doctors to formalize their work within a complex legal environment that both accepts Syrians and forestalls their full integration. Integrating scholarship on organizations, refugee reception, and immigrant entrepreneurship, the study traces how Syrian healthcare providers institutionalize in Istanbul’s urban fabric. The dissertation argues that when national policies are ambivalent about integration, immigrant organizations embed themselves in the host community by leveraging local and transnational networks for legitimacy and resources. First, it analyzes how informal immigrant organizations survive in “humanitarian niches” that emerge in host states shocked by large refugee populations. Next, it examines how providers adapt their work within shifting opportunity structures, as humanitarianism recedes as an organizing principle. Finally, it demonstrates how immigrant organizations gradually re-position themselves as facilitators of transnational economic exchange and essential providers in their localities. Over time, humanitarian organizations privatize, serving diverse groups of local immigrant beneficiaries and international tourists, even as national policies hinder their full legalization—a phenomenon I refer to as “cosmopolitan embeddedness”.