Citizenship: By the Numbers
According to Interior Minister Muammer Güler, in the last ten years 327,946 people gave up their Turkish citizenship and 17,826 lost their citizenship rights. He mentions a handful of people who lost citizenship because they were serving a foreign country in inappropriate ways (1), serving a foreign army during war (3), and 5 military personnel did not return from abroad. It would be much more interesting to know the reasons for the thousands of others who gave up their citizenship rights or whose rights were revoked.
124,647 foreigners were given Turkish citizenship: Bulgaria 44,400; Azerbaijan 15,558; Russia 7,518; Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus 6,723; Afghanistan 6,335; Syria 3,700.
In 2012, 39,185 work visas were issued to foreigners as well as 52,538 residence permits for foreign students.
It would be interesting to compare these figures with those of other countries -
I want numbers on the brain drain.
The main group of ex-citizens were obligated by their host countries to leave their Turkish citizenship before getting accepted into the host country’s citizenship (some host countries don’t permit dual citizenship; the most striking example is Germany)