Could stressing the Turkish background of the German scientists who developed a corona vaccine backfire?
The German company BioNTech and its partner Pfizer have announced recently that a vaccine candidate for the coronavirus was more than 90 percent effective. What is perhaps as striking as the vaccine new itself is that the media frenzy surrounding the German scientists — Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Ozlem Tureci — behind the discovery. The couple, who are married, and are both children of Turkish immigrants, has become the center of sweeping public and media attention. Is this not news worth celebrating, given years of investment and policy into making integration work for unskilled immigrant workers coming from non-EU countries? Well, yes and no. I will start with the “no” and then briefly come back to why it is also a “yes,” as I explore the questions of inclusion, equity, and integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities in Germany and beyond.
The answer is an elaborate “no,” for several reasons. To begin with, the extensive celebration of Dr. Sahin and Dr. Tureci’s achievements carries the risk of reproducing the widely embraced notion that they are exceptions to the rule and “a shining example of successful integration,” unlike the “typical” member of their immigrant community. While they were singled out as “good immigrants” and “role models,” little attention was paid to how such praise entails an insensitive and ambiguous put-down of the Turkish-origin ethnic minorities living in Western Europe. Sahin himself expressed his frustration in an interview with The Financial Times about how their Turkish background is used to valorize the contributions of immigrants and their children: “Of course there are people with migrant backgrounds who are encouraged by our story. You can use us as an argument for migration, and if something is not optimal, you can use it against migration. We should just focus on the facts.”
In a world where one’s opportunities in life were not affected by one’s ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious background, we would not show much interest in the origin and life story of the scientists who developed a vaccine.
Moreover, such narratives attribute the disadvantaged position of ethnic minorities to their own failure to integrate, downplaying, and overlooking the role of structural inequalities and discrimination in limiting upward social mobility. To put it simply, the success story of Turkish-origin scientists is used to tell people with a migration background that they will succeed as long as they work hard enough. While Turkish immigrants first moved to Western Europe as workers more than half a century ago, they are over-represented in low-skilled and low-wage jobs and have low levels of educational attainment in comparison to ethnic majorities. Still, we need to dig a little deeper to understand why, unfortunately, hard work alone is not enough to succeed for many children of immigrants.
The achievement of Dr. Sahin and Dr. Tureci is used by media to argue against anti-immigration and racist discourses of the far-right and to applaud the German system for making it possible for the scientist couple to follow their dreams and become successful. These narratives, however, only tell one side of the story as neither the society nor the societal institutions offer equitable experiences to Turkish-origin ethnic minorities. Ironically enough, even Dr. Sahin himself barely avoided being sent to a vocational school, as he said in an interview in 2014, thanks to the interference of his German neighbor. This incident is unfortunately not a one-off, but a systemic problem that has been addressed by researchers across Western Europe.
The structural barriers in education negatively affect the experiences and the future of many ethnic minority students. Not all of the students have a neighbor to support them deal with deeply ingrained injustice and racism at a systemic level. In a study on school experiences of Turkish-origin students in Germany, researchers found how deficit perceptions of students’ cultural and linguistic resources and lack of discussions of racism and its impact work to the detriment of Turkish descent minority students. My own recent research in Belgium has also shown how teachers’ low expectations, and (implicit) bias cause Turkish-origin students to receive advice not to pursue academic tracks despite their high scores. Even when students receive high grades, their success is often attributed to luck. These studies underlie that ethnic minority students who make it to higher education often go through a difficult process of having to continually prove their motivation and intellectual capacity to their teachers and peers. How can it be that schools — the very institutions that are supposed to offer equitable opportunities and facilitate the so-called integration of ethnic minorities — reproduce such inequalities?
Given that most children of Turkish immigrants are rarely given a chance to demonstrate their contribution to the societies that question their value and legitimate position in it, it is understandable why many use this opportunity to take pride in being Turkish and a child of an immigrant.
Such deficit discourses and negative assumptions about the capacity and motivation of Turkish-origin students in schools are often embedded in biased mainstream representations and exclusionary othering of ethnic minorities in Western Europe. Turkish-origin ethnic minorities are usually stigmatized due to their non-European cultural and religious background and not acknowledged as valid and equal members of the societies they live in. Their positive contribution to the Western European societies that many consider home is rarely recognized while they come under the spotlight when the issue is so-called problematic integration. This means not only the structural barriers they continuously experience but also their everyday realities as active citizens of Western European countries are rendered invisible.
This brings us to the “yes” part of the answer. I believe that this news might be viewed as worthy of celebration by those whose voices are rarely heard and whose contribution often goes unnoticed. The widespread social media attention to the achievement of Turkish-German scientists from Turkish Europeans is an active response to the negative representation of their ethnic identities and their stereotypical construction as “workers.” Given that most children of Turkish immigrants are rarely given a chance to demonstrate their contribution to the societies that question their value and legitimate position in it, it is understandable why many use this opportunity to take pride in being Turkish and a child of an immigrant.
In a world where one’s opportunities in life were not affected by one’s ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious background, we would not show much interest in the origin and life story of the scientists who developed a vaccine. Imagine if it were a couple of American, German, or British scientists behind this, the kind of questions we would ask focus on their scientific discovery and more practical aspects of it, such as when the vaccine would be accessible and allow us to get back to our lives as usual. The current focus on the biographies of Turkish-German scientists is telling in the sense that we are still far from that ideal world where everyone is offered equitable opportunities at succeeding in life. In the words of Dr. Sahin, a world that needs “a global vision that gives everyone an equal chance.”
