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In June 2022, Istanbul’s Yenisahra neighborhood in the Ataşehir district erupted in violence when false rumours began to spread that a 15-year-old boy had been killed while fleeing a group of Afghan waste pickers. Within hours, hundreds of people flooded the streets, chanting “We don’t want foreigners in our country!” Vigilantes who went on a so-called “Afghan hunt” took their anger not toward the migrants themselves, many of whom had already gone into hiding or fled the area, but toward the Kurdish recyclers who had long employed and sheltered them in their depots. Many recyclers were injured in the chaos while trying to defend their livelihoods. Their recycling depots went up in flames, were stoned, and were looted during the attacks. What unfolded was not a spontaneous protest but rather a coordinated act of nationalist vengeance—a violent pogrom disguised as civic outrage.
The pogrom in Yenisahra marked a turning point in Istanbul’s recycling industry. That summer, informal recycling depots across the city grew quieter by the week. The Afghan migrants who once sustained these operations, hundreds of thousands of workers who salvaged the city’s waste, had seemingly disappeared. The hollow echo of an industry running without its essential workforce was louder than ever.
At the time, I had just begun my ethnographic fieldwork, immersing myself into the unpredictable rhythms of Istanbul’s waste worlds and tracing the growing violence recycling workers endured at the hands of the Turkish state. I visited countless depots tucked into the city’s hidden corners, speaking with depot operators and waste pickers who labored through the night. Whenever I asked what had happened to the Afghan workers, recyclers gave the same answer, repeated with certainty: “They are all collected” (hepsi toplatıldı). The phrase stayed with me.
The verb toplamak means “to collect.” It describes what waste pickers do daily: gathering, sorting, and selling discarded materials. Yet during that summer of state-sanctioned violence and mass deportations, the same word took on a different meaning. Recyclers began using it not only to describe their daily work of collecting cardboard, paper, plastic, and scrap metal from the city’s refuse, but also to describe how the police rounded up migrants from Afghanistan and sent them to removal centers.
To collect waste. To collect people. These two meanings flowed together, revealing how language itself becomes entangled in the infrastructures of waste labor, bordering regimes, and state power.
The Fluid Life of a Word
In Turkish, toplamak is a fluid, elastic word. It also means to gather, to tidy, to compile, and to accumulate. Add the suffix —yıcı and it becomes toplayıcı, “the collector.” That term names nearly half a million informal workers who keep urban waste management systems running in Turkey by collecting recyclable materials every day as a means of survival. Despite the relentless forms of violence they are met with by the state, these workers keep the city clean by collecting what others discard.
During my fieldwork, I noticed how the word “to collect” shifted across contexts. “They collected Afghans from the streets,” one recycling worker told me. “They collected them from the depots,” said another. The phrase explained the sudden emptiness in the city’s informal recycling depots following the mass displacement of Afghan migrants. Each repetition of the word tied together two realms: one of materials and one of humans. And the boundaries between them seemed to blur.
This fluid movement of meaning echoed what anthropologist Robin Nagle observed during her time with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY): “language matters.” In her book Picking Up, Nagle shows how sanitation workers develop a “DSNY lingo” that mirrors the rhythm and texture of their labor. Learning to “speak sanitation,” Nagle writes, is part of learning to inhabit the city’s waste infrastructures. In Istanbul, I found a similar dynamic unfolding in the recycling industry. The same word that described the daily routine of recyclers also invoked the violence that dismantled their livelihoods.
In Turkish, it is unusual to use the verb toplamak in reference to people. Objects can be collected; human beings cannot. Yet when the government’s treatment of migrants begins to resemble the handling of things, the language adapts. In everyday speech, the verb slips from one realm to another, blurring the distinction between materials and lives. Language, too, flows through these waste management infrastructures, absorbing their violence as it travels.
For the recyclers who used the phrase, “They are all collected” was not meant to demean or dehumanize the migrants they had worked beside, but rather to describe the reality they had witnessed. This choice of words was pragmatic and even mournful. It conveniently exposed the inconsistent and violent realities of Turkey’s border regimes that collectively punished their migrant employees because of their irregular entry into the country.
Indeed, these words circulated through the city with the same unstable flow as the waste itself, capturing the contradictions of material value and disposability. “To collect” drifted across territorial boundaries, unevenly organized urban landscapes, and the shifting hierarchies that determine whose labor and whose lives are allowed to circulate. It connected people and objects, legality and illegality, belonging and exclusion. It exposed how language itself can carry the residues of violence, sedimented through repetition until it feels ordinary.
The Collectors and the Collected
In the steep streets of Dolapdere, two Kurdish brothers, Hikmet and Hasan, ran a small depot stacked high with recyclable waste. I met them that summer, not long after the violent pogrom in Yenisahra. “On the second day of Eid, they collected a lot of our men,” Hasan told me. “We had thirty or forty workers; now, only five or six are left.” Their business, like many others, had suffered deeply from the disappearance of migrant labor. Without the Afghan recyclers who kept the waste moving, the familiar rhythm of waste picking faded from the recycling industry. “The authorities deported all the Afghans they collected,” Hasan said, recalling the raids he had witnessed.
A few streets downhill, I met Osman, a depot operator from Aksaray, who echoed the same language. “There used to be ten Afghans here,” he said. “They completely collected them. None are left.” Osman’s business has also been negatively impacted by these “collections.” When I asked whether he supported the operations, he shook his head. “But you can’t really tell these migrants, ‘Don’t collect!’” he said with frustration, this time referring to the work of picking waste. Osman opposed these “collections” not only because they hurt his business, but because migrants needed and wanted to work. In his words, two forms of collection collided—the economic and the violent, the material and the human. The word that once defined his livelihood had come to describe its downfall.
Months later, I visited Küçükpazar, one of Istanbul’s oldest neighborhoods near the Süleymaniye Mosque and Golden Horn. Once filled with recycling depots and migrant workers, the area was now caught between gentrification and deportation. There I met Necati, a Kurdish depot operator, who pointed to an abandoned building and said, “There used to be a hundred Afghans here. But they are all gone with the last collection.” The phrase sounded procedural, as if the deportations were simply part of the same municipal schedule that governed garbage pickup. The “last collection” carried a sense of both finality and routine. The deportations had become so frequent that they were spoken of like predictable and regular operations.
Between 2022-23, the pushbacks and deportations of migrants and refugees continued unabated in Turkey. Turkey’s Office of Migration Management reported record numbers of deportations that year and celebrated them as a major “success.” In official statements, tackling irregular migration was framed as a crisis contained, a restored social order. By the spring of 2023, as Turkey prepared for a pivotal election, the government sought to restore its damaged reputation after the catastrophic earthquakes of February 6.
During this climate of vast uncertainty, many transnational migrants had vanished from Istanbul’s recycling world. Some were deported, others fled to Europe or took up agricultural jobs in rural Anatolia. Those who remained lived in constant fear of being “collected” again.
In April 2023, I arranged a visit to Hakan’s spacious warehouse in Bostancı. Hakan, a Kurdish depot operator, had employed and sheltered dozens of Afghan migrants before. I was curious to see whether the police raids on recycling depots had continued while the nation was still reeling from disaster. The pace of the raids had slowed, but they had not stopped. “I still see teams running around chasing Afghans,” Hakan told me. The government, it seemed, intended to maintain the visibility of its authoritarian control, deporting as many migrants as possible before the elections. “The police searched a few depots,” he said. “If they found any Afghans, they would collect them and take them away.”
Over the past year, Hakan’s depot had been inspected several times, though less aggressively than before. One of his workers, serving us tea as we spoke, remarked quietly: “The police don’t come here anymore because they know it’s already over.” He was referring to the visible absence of migrant recycling workers across the industry. With no one left to chase or deport, the police saw no reason to organize further “collections.” The raids had simply run their course; it was “over.” The Afghan migrants were gone.
Lauren Woodard is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.