Foreign Identity Documentation and Turkiye: Perspectives from the Turkish Grand National Assembly

Identity documentation is a strategy that enables migrants to access many rights in a manner befitting human dignity, and this process is strongly influenced by the political culture of a country, depending on its geostrategic position. In the case of Turkiye, due to its migratory position as a host, transit, and sending country, wide fluctuation in the migration position causes an effort to shape the identification practices for migrants. This study aims to examine the contexts in which the issue of migrant identification is addressed by politicians in the Grand National Assembly of Turkiye, where mainstream politics is produced. For this reason, a descriptive discourse analysis of the written parliamentary questions submitted on migrant identity documents between 2011 and 2025 in the Turkish Grand National Assembly was applied using the Discursive and Dispositive Analysis Approach conceptualized by Jäger. One of the main conclusions of the study is that foreign identity documents are addressed from security, legal, economic, human rights, and operational perspectives, that migrant identity cards focus more on bureaucratic, legal, and administrative processes rather than the social and daily lives of migrants, and that the discussions on migrant identity cards have a multi-layered structure.