Refuting baseless allegation against kurds,they don't work.
The family’s asylum claims have all been rejected, and their time in Japan has been peppered with legal battles against deportation orders and detention. Balibay has submitted four asylum applications, including one in August last year. According to Japanese law, asylum seekers can’t be deported while their claims are pending.
Immigration activists say Japan has never granted refugee status to a Turkish Kurd. Government officials would not say if any of the 3,463 Turkish nationals who have applied for asylum since 2008 had been granted refugee status.
The absence of a work permit hasn’t stopped Balibay, two of his brothers and a cousin from working on taxpayer funded projects in the past few years. Balibay flicks through photos on his mobile phone, stopping at images of a road project he worked on last year in Warabi.
Interviews with the Balibays and a review of their payslips show they worked for a company that was contracted to carry out road building, sewage works and demolition by local governments, including Kawaguchi city and Saitama prefecture. The Balibays asked that the name of the company not be made public.
Almost all of Warabi’s Kurds are from villages around Gaziantep, an industrial city in southern Turkey. Starting in the 1990s, they entered Japan on tourist visas, fleeing poverty and violent clashes between the Turkish state and the PKK.
Like Balibay, who has the word “Kurdistan” tattooed on the inside of his right wrist, many Kurds still harbor strong ties to their homeland. Every year in March, the community gathers under cherry trees in a Kawaguchi park to celebrate Newroz, the Kurdish new year.
And while they may be far from the conflict between Turkey and Kurdish militants, which resumed last year after the collapse of a ceasefire that lasted two-and-a-half years, the bitter emotions have been imported to the streets of Tokyo. Last October, Balibay and two of his brothers were injured in a brawl with a group of Turkish migrants that erupted outside the Turkish embassy as Kurds and Turks waited to vote in the country’s parliamentary elections. Balibay suffered a broken nose and cracked ribs. That added more than $2,000 to his medical debts, he said.