Transit as Underground Infrastructure: Migrants and Asylum Seekers between Istanbul and Frankfurt, 1980–95

In the 1980s, West Germany’s Frankfurt Airport turned into a gateway for (forced) migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. More than 100,000 air passengers asked for asylum in the airport’s transit zone between 1980 and 1995. Many of them traveled via Istanbul Airport, which likewise became a transit hub on the way to Europe or North America. This paper asks what we can learn about transit by spotlighting a specific route – the air connection between Istanbul and Frankfurt – and the migrants who traversed it.

Adopting a micro-perspective and leaning on the concept of “Viapolitics” (Walters 2014, 2022), the paper shows how border and immigration regimes unfolded along the route and impacted migrants in transit. It foregrounds the twisted itineraries and contingency strategies adopted by migrants in the face of tightening control and limited access to air passage. To do so, it draws mainly on archival records of the German airport border police, which include interviews with migrants, as well as published sources on the situation in Istanbul. These sources indicate that the migrants’ room for maneuver depended on their personal background, including class, age, and gender. They shed light on different forms of agency, from the usage of alternate routes and forms of transportation to the acquisition of false documents, the help of smuggling agents, and subversive knowledge. The paper reveals that the increasing contingency of transit led to the emergence of transnational (smuggling) networks and a black market centered in Istanbul that extended to Frankfurt. This “underground infrastructure,” the paper argues, influenced the ways in which the route and its accessibility changed over time from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. Hence, the paper goes beyond the conception of transit as an individual experience and demonstrates its structural effects on migration patterns and regimes.