Turkey has announced plans to tighten conditions for foreigners to be eligible for residence permits. New rules to be introduced next month will especially affect Syrian refugees and other migrants in certain neighborhoods.
Following increasing public anger against refugees and migrants living in Turkey, the government has unveiled a new set of measures, originally announced in February, stipulating that foreigners, including Syrian nationals, will no longer be allowed to reside in areas where a quarter of the population is already made up of foreign nationals.
The quota has now been adjusted to 20%, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has been quoted as saying by Turkey's state-funded Anadolu news agency. Solyu added that new residence permits would therefore not be issued anymore in about 1,200 neighbourhoods across the country.
In related news, Soylu announced that the Turkish government will not allow Syrian nationals to visit family in Syria for the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which will take place in mid-July. A similar ban had already been applied earlier in the year for the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. Refugees can lose their protection status if they travel back to the country in which they say they suffer persecution.
Turkey is home to one of the world's largest refugee populations, with more than 3.7 million people from neighboring Syria having found refuge there. Interior Minister Soylu said on Twitter that if Turkey had not taken measures such as erecting a border wall, a total of 8 million refugees and migrants would have come into the country. He did not specify, however, on what the figure was based.
