Identifying Syrian refugees in Turkish microdata

This article proposes a strategy to identify Syrian refugees in Turkey’s Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS). Even though Turkey’s HLFS contains information on the migrants’ year of arrival to Turkey, it does not provide details on their nationalities. This unfortunate feature mixes Syrian refugees with the standard flow of migration who arrived to Turkey during the Syrian war. I propose to eliminate the standard flow of migrants arrived between 2011 and 2017 by matching them (based on their characteristics) with the migrants arrived in the 2004–2010 period. This method obtains, indirectly, nonstandard migration, i.e., Syrian refugees. The results show that the age distribution of the nonstandard migrants identified matches the age distribution of Syrian refugees as officially released by the Turkish government. At last, I propose a post-stratification adjustment of the survey weights to find the actual geographical distribution of Syrian refugees in Turkey.