Michelle Lynn Kahn. Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish–German History
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Van Wyck, Brian. “Michelle Lynn Kahn. Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish–German History.” The American Historical Review 130, no. 4 (2025): 1753–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf443.
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The Author’s Original Version (AOV) is the un-refereed author version of an article as submitted for publication in an Oxford University Press journal. This is sometimes known as the “preprint” version. The author accepts full responsibility for this version of the article, and the content and layout is set out by the author..
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With this engaging first monograph, Michelle Lynn Kahn delivers transnational history at its most insightful. Foreign in Two Homelands centers on return migration, broadly defined to include cross-border flows of remittances, goods, discourses, images, and people. At its core, the book offers a long-overdue historicization of the migration wave triggered by the 1983 West German “Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners,” which encouraged so-called “guest workers” and their families to return to Turkey. In response, 250,000 Turkish citizens returned to their former homeland—“kicked out,” as Kahn puts it (9).