President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday scolded Western powers for failing in migration management “despite being the ones to cause it.”
Speaking at a “Türkiye’s Migration Model in the Century of Türkiye” program in Istanbul, Erdoğan said Western powers tend to “disappear when it comes to sharing responsibility despite being the ones whose policies force people to migrate.”
“It’s not wealthy states but low and medium-income countries that host 75 out of every 100 migrants in the world,” Erdoğan said.
From Syria to Sudan, Myanmar to Central Africa, civil wars, internal conflicts and massacres have displaced millions of people, he said.
“While countries with limited resources take on burdens far beyond their capacity, Western countries either flare up or use the humanitarian tragedies they accept with the few hundred refugees they accept as advertising material,” he said.
EU members Greece and Italy most often make headlines with their pushback policies and migrant boats that sink near their coastlines in the Mediterranean Sea, where at least 2,452 migrants died in 2024, according to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
European human rights watchdogs also say migrants employed in European countries often risk abuse, exploitation of labor and trafficking.
Turning to domestic migration management, Erdoğan pointed out the “direct impact” on Türkiye of instabilities in its immediate vicinity.
“Although we have been intensely confronting the issue of migration and immigrants in recent years, we are no stranger to this issue,” he said, boasting that Anatolia has been a “safe haven for the downtrodden facing tyranny, oppression and violence in their homelands throughout history.”
“From Jews fleeing the inquisition, the Nazis and Christians in Eastern Europe, to Muslims in the Caucasus and the Balkans, everyone has knocked on our doors,” Erdoğan said.
“Similarly, today, anyone who is in trouble turns to Türkiye, about which, plainly speaking, we do not complain,” he stressed. “To the contrary, we consider it a duty of humanity to help those in need.”
Erdoğan also berated his opposition for frequently “exploiting the migrant issue with exaggerated numbers.”
“Türkiye does not and has never had a migrant population at levels claimed by certain anti-humanist fascist circles,” he said.
Türkiye once hosted two-thirds of the world's total Syrian refugee population. At its peak, there were more than 3.8 million Syrian refugees in Türkiye.
The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) campaigned heavily around repatriating Syrian refugees ahead of general and local elections in 2023 and 2024.
Moreover, several parties like the far-right Victory Party (ZP) steadily stoked anti-Syrian and anti-refugee sentiments in the past four years, which eventually erupted into violent riots in central Türkiye last summer. Angry mobs burned down homes and businesses of Syrian refugees over the sexual assault of a Syrian girl by a refugee.
Erdoğan had blamed the “poisonous rhetoric” of the opposition as “one of the reasons” for the violence, which he said was “unacceptable.”
Hosting the teacher and classmates of a Syrian boy named Mohammed Aiman, who is now back home in Syria, onstage with him, Erdoğan on Monday recalled the promises of the then-opposition leader in 2011 to send Syrians back.
“We said we never would because we have a different perspective. These little muhajirs (Muslim immigrants) you see on the stage are our children. Their teachers brought them up to this day. That’s the beauty of being ansar,” he said, using the Arabic term for “helper.”
Since the current rulers of Syria toppled the Baathist regime, more than 200,000 Syrians returned to their homeland from Türkiye alone, Erdoğan said.
Erdoğan has repeatedly said no one would be forced to return to Syria and that Türkiye would continue hosting those wishing to stay.
The total number of voluntary, safe and dignified returns from Türkiye has reached 931,450 people, he continued.
He also assured Türkiye would continue combating irregular migration and migrant smuggling.
A total of 270,000 irregular migrants were intercepted at Turkish borders; 263,000 who arrived illegally were deported and some 23,780 suspected smugglers were detained in the past two years, according to the president.
Erdoğan said Türkiye would not allow hate speech, lumpen fascism and racist vandalism, provocations.
“We are determined not to give an opportunity to inhumane behaviors such as mistreatment of migrants we frequently see in Western countries,” he said.
