Throughout the 2010s, foreign migrants and asylum seekers settled in Istanbul in large numbers—some fleeing civil war in Syria, others economic and political instability further afield. Lacking formal work permission, many found employment in Istanbul's vast under-regulated recycling economy. While providing essential income for migrants, the urban recycling sector also created a highly visible space for Turkish citizens to debate what counts as legitimate work and rightful profit, and to justify the exclusion of migrant workers from national social life.

  Nativism at Work demonstrates how nativism is enacted, experienced, and justified in everyday economic life. Anthropologist Kevin Yildirim develops the concept of moral authority—a form of social relations in which one group claims a right to assert how society ought to be organized—to reveal how nativist claims can result not only in acts of outright exclusion, but also in forms of conditional inclusion and humanitarian initiatives. Treating waste work as a site of moral evaluation rather than an environmental or infrastructural problem, Yildirim provides new perspectives on migrant labor, citizenship, and moral life under capitalism. In contexts of precarity and rising nationalism, this book illuminates how the moral evaluation of work and belonging reproduces social and political hierarchies, even far beyond Istanbul.