By Barış Soydan

September 22, 2021

The AKP government is signaling a retreat from generous immigration policies, which were never disinterested in the first place. But a heavy responsibility falls also on the main opposition CHP, which has opted to exploit xenophobic sentiments – while remaining silent about the exploitation of the migrant workers. Given Turkey’s troubled past of ethnic violence the growing hostility to the Syrian and Afghan refugees, and the political accommodation from left to right of this hostility, is of deep concern. Turkey’s past should have taught the country’s rulers, and those leaders who aspire to rule it, that conjuring an “internal enemy,” against which the nation must defend itself, is a recipe for disaster.