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.
