Remigration works: In Turkey and the Middle East, people who can go home are going home

In Europe, the debate about “remigration” is mostly semantic and moralistic, while in other nations the concept is already part of active policy. Germany now hosts the second-largest refugee population in the world, behind only Colombia and the Venezuelans it shelters from the neighbouring country. These figures do not come from some right-wing outlet, but from the often notoriously pro-migration UN. Based on the latest Global Trends report of the UNHCR, Colombia hosts around 2.8 million refugees, followed by Germany with approximately 2.7 million, making the government in Berlin take over countries that topped the ranking in the past, especially Iran, Turkey and Lebanon. As an interesting – and typical – aside, Germany would stand at the very top of that table were it not for a bureaucratic mechanism that keeps the number artificially lower than it would otherwise be: The moment a refugee is naturalised, he disappears from the count, because the UNHCR stops classifying someone as a refugee once they hold a German passport, and until very recently not many countries handed out passports as freely as the Germans. In 2025, Germany recorded a remarkable 332,500 naturalisations, the fifth record year in a row and the first time the figure has ever crossed 300,000, with Syrians accounting for one in five new citizens.

As the UN report shows, global displacement has fallen for the first time in a decade, and the reason is that the people who can go home are going home – or, to use the supposedly most dangerous word in the current debate, they are “remigrating”. Since the fall of Assad in December 2024, the UN records more than 1.6 million Syrians returning: Roughly 640,000 from Turkey, 630,000 from Lebanon, 285,000 from Jordan. Turkey’s Syrian population has dropped from 2.9 million to about 2.3 million. Iran, for decades the largest host country in the world, sent home more than 1.7 million Afghans in 2025 alone, and its refugee population roughly halved. Although Turkey is still having about twice as many Syrian refugees as Germany (two million vs. one million), the fact that Ankara began suspending health services to the migrant population in January of this year, remigration pressure will certainly increase.

While most of the media in the West debated whether the word “remigration” is either a far-right battle cry or an unspeakable taboo, Beirut, Ankara and Tehran are simply carrying it out. Surprisingly, neither of these countries seems to be particularly worried about the question whether the home countries will take back their citizens. It is expected, and as far as the evidence goes, this expectation is being met. When the new Syrian president told German chancellor Merz that he will not be accepting returning Syrians, he probably (correctly) assumed that Berlin will not do anything about it, and the ISIS-beheader-turned-president also knows that remittances from Syrians in Germany surpass official aid from Germany. 

Over a million Syrians now live in Germany, more than four per cent of all Syrians on earth, against 60,000 as recently as 2013. And they are not returning but being naturalised and often granted dual citizenship. It will be interesting to see how German democracy will handle a Syrian voting block in upcoming elections. One might answer, so much the better, they have become Germans, and the matter is settled. But as I explained in a previous column, a passport alone does not make a citizen. Belonging to a country and community is more than a piece of paper, and citizenship should be the conclusion of a process of assimilation, not its beginning. As I wrote, citizenship in the deeper sense is not an administrative status but an emotional one: A sense of belonging, of loyalty, of pride in something one experiences as one’s own and therefore wants to maintain. Rome learned this the hard way. As long as civis Romanus sum was a privilege men were proud of, citizens defended the empire. Once citizenship became a mere formality, the legions were filled with mercenaries who felt no attachment to what they guarded, and by 800 AD even the descendants of Romans carried Germanic names. The first Emperor Augustus for that very reason restricted the franchise precisely in order to preserve its worth.

The distinction between just living in a country and belonging to it is one no integration test can close. I live in Vienna, and the city should be an early warning to the rest of Europe. Islam is now the largest denomination in its primary schools at 35 per cent, and reaches 46 per cent, half of the cohort, in the lower-track middle schools. For the first time, a majority of first-graders, 50.9 per cent, lack adequate German, and in the middle schools more than three-quarters of pupils speak no German at home. Under these conditions assimilation becomes impossible: Think of a child of recent immigrants entering a class that is ninety per cent Arab-Muslim. Such classes do exist: In primary school classes in Vienna and also whole schools like the Carl-Bolle primary in Berlin run at 95 per cent migration background, even though in the latter case not all Arab-Muslim. That being said, a significant part of the daily socialisation will resemble Damascus more than Dresden, and the culture of daily life will be Arab and Muslim, but not Austrian or German. How is that child ever to become culturally and thereby truly Austrian or German? From the schoolyard to the family table he has almost no contact with the native population. He knows there is a country called Austria, but he will never experience it. Sure, he will also get an Austrian passport at some point, making him the citizen of country he has no or only little affection for. 

Anyone tempted to call this alarmism should read the study by the sociologist Kenan Güngör, commissioned by the City of Vienna, which surveyed 1,221 young people. Forty-one per cent of the Muslim youths hold that religious rules should stand above Austrian law, and among the young Syrians and Afghans a majority agreed that “the Jews” have too much power and control the world. Güngör, who warns explicitly against blanket judgements and stresses that many of these youngsters are democratic and tolerant, identifies digital radicalisation as the central driver. The most revealing figure, however, is a different one: 30 per cent of the Muslim youths themselves say there are already too many Muslims in Austria. When a third of Muslim Viennese youth feels that way, it shows you that even a growing percentage of the migrant population fears that Austria will no longer be Austrian.

The Canadian author Mark Steyn described this mechanism years ago, through its saddest example. Salman Abedi held a British passport. Manchester-born, the son of Libyan refugees, a child of the West on paper, he repaid the country that took his family in by murdering twenty-two people in May 2017, half of them children, at a pop concert. On paper, Mr. Abedi was an “Englishman,” but in reality he never arrived in the country that was supposed to be his home. In the future, I fear, we will have more of these cases.