Little Istanbul, Big Politics: How Erdoğan's Culture War Crossed the Atlantic

On a Saturday afternoon in Paterson, New Jersey — a city with one of the largest Turkish immigrant populations in the United States — a community center is hosting what's billed as a cultural celebration. There's food, there's music, and there are, quietly, representatives from a Turkish-American organization with known ties to the AKP's overseas outreach apparatus. Not everyone in the room knows that last part. Not everyone needs to.

This is how transnational political influence works in 2024. It doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it just shows up with baklava.

The Diaspora as Political Real Estate

Turkey has approximately half a million citizens and people of Turkish origin living in the United States. It's a smaller diaspora than the Turkish communities in Germany or France, but it's a strategically significant one — concentrated in states with political weight, economically mobile, and increasingly caught between two countries whose relationship is perpetually complicated.

For the Erdoğan government, the Turkish diaspora in America represents something specific and valuable: a potential amplification network for domestic political narratives, a source of soft-power legitimacy in a country whose opinion matters enormously to Ankara, and — not incidentally — a fundraising and organizing base for political causes that operate across borders in ways that American campaign finance law wasn't exactly designed to anticipate.

Diaspora political mobilization isn't unique to Turkey, of course. Greek-Americans, Armenian-Americans, Cuban-Americans — the US has a long history of immigrant communities maintaining intense political engagement with their homelands. What's different about the current Turkish-American dynamic is the sophistication of the infrastructure behind it and the particular intensity of Turkey's domestic polarization, which doesn't stay neatly on one side of the Atlantic.

TRT World in Your Living Room

Understanding how this works requires paying attention to media. TRT World, Turkey's English-language state broadcaster, has invested heavily in its American presence and digital reach. Its content — professionally produced, algorithmically savvy, and editorially aligned with Ankara's preferred narratives — circulates widely in Turkish-American social media ecosystems.

But TRT World is just the visible layer. Turkish-language YouTube channels, WhatsApp group chats that function as informal news hubs, and Facebook communities organized around hometown associations or religious networks all serve as conduits for political content originating in Turkey. By the time a particular narrative — about the Gülenist threat, about Western hostility toward Turkish sovereignty, about the heroism of the July 15 resistance — reaches a Turkish grandmother in Queens, it has been reinforced through approximately seven different channels, none of which she would identify as propaganda.

This is, to be clear, not a phenomenon unique to pro-Erdoğan media. Opposition-aligned Turkish media also circulates in diaspora communities. Podcasts and YouTube channels affiliated with the CHP or with secular Turkish civil society reach audiences in American cities too. What's asymmetric is the institutional backing. State resources, by definition, go further than independent media budgets.

Choosing Sides in Someone Else's War

For Turkish-Americans who simply want to live their lives in Bridgeview, Illinois or Clifton, New Jersey without being conscripted into a political battle they left Turkey to escape, the pressure has become genuinely uncomfortable.

Several Turkish-Americans interviewed for this piece — most of whom requested anonymity, which is itself telling — described a social environment where political affiliation has become a sorting mechanism for community belonging. Mosques, cultural associations, and business networks have become coded spaces where your position on Erdoğan functions as a kind of identity passport.

"I went to a community dinner and someone asked me, very casually, what I thought about the 2016 coup attempt," said one woman who emigrated from Ankara in the early 2000s and now lives in the Chicago suburbs. "There's only one right answer in certain rooms. I've learned which rooms those are."

The inverse experience exists too. Turkish-Americans from more secular or opposition-aligned backgrounds describe feeling excluded from community spaces that have tilted toward AKP-affiliated organizations. Some have effectively self-segregated into different social networks, a fracturing that mirrors the polarization happening in Turkey itself but playing out in American ZIP codes.

What This Means for US-Turkey Relations

American foreign policy analysts have spent considerable energy thinking about Turkey as a geopolitical actor — its role in NATO, its relationship with Russia, its leverage over migration flows into Europe. Considerably less attention has been paid to the domestic American dimension: the way Turkish political dynamics are being reproduced inside the United States and what that means for how Washington understands and engages with Ankara.

Here's the practical problem: when Turkish-American community organizations — some of which have real access to local elected officials, congressional staffers, and State Department personnel — are functioning as extensions of Turkish political factions, the line between community advocacy and foreign political influence gets blurry in ways that matter.

The US government has tools for dealing with formal foreign lobbying — FARA registrations, disclosure requirements. It has considerably less visibility into the informal influence ecosystem: the community dinners, the religious networks, the social media currents that shape how Turkish-Americans think about their homeland and, by extension, how they communicate about Turkey to American political figures.

The Younger Generation Is Watching

Perhaps the most consequential audience in all of this is Turkish-Americans under 35 — people who either emigrated as young adults or were born in the US to Turkish parents. This cohort has a relationship to Turkish politics that's genuinely different from their parents' generation. They're often more fluent in American political culture. They're more likely to see themselves as Americans first. And they're increasingly impatient with being expected to perform loyalty to a political project in a country they may have left precisely because of that project.

Several younger Turkish-Americans described a growing determination to engage with Turkey-related issues on their own terms — supporting Turkish civil society, following opposition media, advocating for press freedom and democratic norms — without being channeled through community organizations that have become factional proxies.

That independent political voice is worth cultivating, both for Turkish democracy advocates and for American policymakers who want a more honest picture of what's actually happening inside Turkey's body politic.

Because here's the thing about diaspora communities: they often know things that official diplomatic channels miss. The cabbie back in Istanbul might tell you the truth. So might his cousin in Paterson, if you ask the right questions in the right room.