BERLIN (AP) â€" Ali-Duran Duvarci's parents brought him to Germany from Turkey as a baby â€" and he went on to win German citizenship, study business technology and work for a variety of companies.
Then he hit a glass ceiling.
"I sent out several applications for higher paying jobs that would have matched my qualification perfectly," said Duvarci, 40, who is married and has two children. "But I only got back letters of refusal â€" I think employers often throw away my applications the moment they read that Turkish name."
So Duvarci is doing what thousands of other highly skilled workers of Turkish origin have been doing even as Germany faces a severe shortage of skilled labor and a shrinking population: returning to the ancestral homeland.
Turks came in the millions to Germany in the 1960s â€" unskilled laborers who were part of a so-called "guest worker" program aimed at rebuilding the country from the ruins of postwar Germany. Their children were born here, grew up here, and were educated here. Many have German citizenship.
Now they are heading back in droves, saying they are still treated as outsiders in Germany and can't land the high-paying jobs that match their skills and training. Other ethnic groups express similar frustrations, but Turks are by far the biggest group.
"They no longer want to put up with daily racism, job discrimination and the fact that most German employers judge their bicultural background as a liability, not as an asset," said Ediz Bokli, who runs a job-placement agency in the northern German city of Osnabrueck that specializes in helping German professionals of Turkish descent.
Some say Germany can ill afford such an exodus of skilled labor.
The head of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce, DIHK, has repeatedly warned that Germany needs to change the way it integrates its immigrants, if it doesn't want to end up with a labor shortage of five million within the next 15 years â€" which would also mean a shortfall of millions of people paying taxes or investing in the country's pension funds.
"We now have a lack of 400,000 engineers, master craftsmen and skilled workers," Hans Heinrich Driftmann of the DIHK said. "This way we're already losing one percent of our economic growth and in the future this shortage will only get worse."
The government recently announced plans to make it easier for up to 300,000 immigrants to use their skills in Germany by pushing through legislation to speed up recognition of their foreign qualifications. But it has not come up with any initiatives to help qualified second- or third-generation immigrants who were raised here.
Bokli, the 37-year-old son of Turkish immigrants, said he is getting several phone calls a day from young, frustrated university graduates of Turkish ancestry who want to move to Turkey because they hope to find better jobs there.
"The numbers of German-Turkish engineers, doctors or businessmen who want to leave this country are constantly going up," Bokli said.
Bokli's agency was so overwhelmed with requests for jobs in Turkey that half a year ago he launched Turkvita, an Internet platform for professionals searching for jobs there. Some 900 applicants have registered so far.
More than one-third of Germany's ethnic Turkish professionals and university students, many German citizens, are thinking of returning to their parents' homeland, according to a 2010 poll by Futurorg Institute in Dortmund.
The children of naturalized citizens automatically are entitled to German passports, but neither they nor their parents can keep Turkish ones. Those born to long-term immigrants who retain Turkish citizenship get Turkish and German nationality until age 23, when they have to pick one.
There are some 3 million people of Turkish origin in this country of 82 million. Around 700,000 of them carry a German passport. After steady growth for decades, the numbers dropped for the first time in 2008 â€" by 2,200.
It is not clear exactly how many German-born professionals of Turkish origin have left the country in recent, because those with German passports don't get counted in the statistics, but experts estimate that several thousand have moved to Turkey.
It's easier to track the exodus of Turkish citizens.
In 2009, their ranks went down by more than 8,000, with some 35,400 Turkish citizens leaving Germany for good, and 27,000 moving here, according to the Federal Statistical Office.
The job frustrations expressed by Duvarci and others of Turkish origin are backed up by statistical evidence.
A recent study by the University of Konstanz shows that Turkish job applicants are 14 percent less likely to get a job than their German counterparts who are equally well qualified. At smaller companies the chances of getting invited for a job interview are even 24 percent less likely if the application comes from someone with a Turkish name.
Duvarci grew frustrated over getting several rejections and eventually contacted Bokli, who is now helping him find a job in Turkey.
"It is kind of sad, I feel at home in Germany and know Turkey only from vacation time, but if I get a job there, I'll move right away."
The country's state minister for integration announced a few weeks ago that "using the potentials of immigrants is a top priority for us."
"Given the shortage of skilled labor, our country cannot afford to lose the knowledge and qualifications of skilled immigrants," Maria Boehmer said.
However, many of the well-qualified Turkish immigrants that the government seems to have finally discovered as an asset for the country have lost patience.
Lale Erdem, who grew up near Cologne, said it was only after she moved to Turkey that people made her feel her binational heritage was an advantage.
As a child growing up in Germany, she experienced so much prejudice, that she wanted to get out of the country the moment she finished high school.
"My class mates told me I smelled because I didn't take enough showers and ostracized me in so many other possible ways â€" it was really bad," Erdem recalled. "I was so unhappy that my parents eventually had to send me to a different school."
The 28-year-old studied media sciences in Ankara and now works as the head of an agency in Istanbul that arranges for international, well-known figures to lecture at conferences or appear on TV shows in Turkey.
"Sometimes I still feel homesick for Germany," Erdem said in a telephone interview. "Things are done differently in Turkey and my friends here will sometimes tell me that I'm behaving like a German."
However, Erdem thinks it was the right decision to move to Turkey.
"People here understand that I have more to offer than most others because of my German and Turkish backgrounds," she said. "I just hope that Germany will also understand how much potential we have â€" before all of us have left the country for good."
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