Worldwide, growing numbers of refugees are pushed from their homes. At the same time, fewer and fewer are able to access so-called “durable solutions” to their displacement. This has prompted a flurry of efforts to repair the foundering refugee regime. Many such efforts attempt, implicitly or explicitly, to resolve tensions between legal principles, moral duties, and national interests surrounding refugees. As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay questions the drive toward oversimplification that has characterized these debates, recognizing that some such tensions are “baked into” the problem of refugeehood. While debates have typically focused on the obligation to admit refugees, and on “responsibility sharing,” I advance the conversation by exploring how law, morality, and national interests are entangled in efforts to support durable solutions for refugees, focusing on voluntary repatriation. What does recognition of the intrinsic and in some senses irreconcilable tensions in the refugee regime mean for efforts to support solutions? I argue that advancing durable solutions, however imperfect, for refugees does not mean definitively overcoming these tensions, but rather navigating them to identify context-specific opportunities to reposition refugees as full and equal citizens as a critical step toward reducing their precarity.

In the context of the series of civil wars that have struck the Middle East since the 1980s, the politico-economic changes in the post-Soviet geography of Eastern Europe and the Russian states, and the continuous turmoil in those parts of Africa and Asia where access to Turkish soil has been possible, Turkey emerged as a regional hub for receiving continuous flows of forced migration. As suggested by ample evidence in recent work on migration flows into Turkey, many of these “irregular migrants,” “stateless peoples,” or “asylum seekers” eventually become continuously employed under very unstable circumstances, thus fitting into the definition of the “precariat” or precarious proletariat. This paper examines the context within which such pervasive precarity takes root, directly affecting vulnerable groups such as the Syrian forced migrants arriving in Turkey in successive waves. The marked qualities of the Syrian case in terms of social precarity, combined with the degrees of disenfranchisement and economically precarious conditions for survival, indicates an institutionalized paradigm shift in the Turkish state’s management of irregular migration.