Muhacir

Thereafter, with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a large influx of Turks, as well as other Muslims, from the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, the Sanjak of Alexandretta (İskenderun), the Middle East, and the Soviet Union continued to arrive in the region, most of which settled in urban north-western Anatolia.

After 1925, Turkey continued to accept Turkic-speaking Muslims as immigrants and did not discourage the emigration of members of non-Turkic minorities.

[5] More recently, Meskhetian Turks have emigrated to Turkey from the former Soviet Union states (particularly in Ukraine - after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014), and many Iraqi Turkmen and Syrian Turkmen have taken refuge in Turkey due to the recent Iraq War (2003–2011) and Syrian Civil War (2011–present).

[18] Communist rule after the Second World War ended most emigration from Bulgaria, but further bilateral agreements were negotiated in the early 1950s and late 1960s to regulate the outflow of Bulgarian Turks.

In August 1950 the Bulgarian government announced that 250,000 ethnic Turks had made applications to emigrate and pressured Turkey to accept them within three months.

[20] However, the Turkish authorities declared that the country could not accept these numbers in such a short time and closed its borders over the following year.

Most had abandoned their property or sold it at well below its value; most of these emigrants settled successfully primarily in the Marmara and Aegean regions, helped by the distribution of land and the provision of housing.

[20][22] The latest wave of Turkish emigration began with an exodus in 1989, known as the "big excursion", when the Bulgarian Turks fled to Turkey in order to escape a campaign of forced assimilation.

It was estimated that about 360,000 ethnic Turks had left for Turkey, though more than a third subsequently returned to Bulgaria once the ban on Turkish names had been revoked in December 1989.

The subsequent emigration wave was prompted by continuously deteriorating economic conditions; furthermore, the first democratic elections in 1990 won by the renamed communist party resulted in 88,000 people leaving the country, once again, most of them being Bulgarian Turks.

[24] According to the 1992 census, some 344,849 Bulgarians of Turkish origin had migrated to Turkey between 1989 and 1992, which resulted in significant demographic decline in southern Bulgaria.

[24] The events of the Circassian Genocide, namely the ethnic cleansing, killing, forced migration, and expulsion of the majority of the Circassians from their historical homeland in the Caucasus,[25] resulted in the death of approximately at least 600,000 Caucasian natives[26] up to 1,500,000[27] deaths, and the successful migration of the remaining of 900,000 - 1,500,000 Caucasians which immigrated to Ottoman Empire due to intermittent Russian attacks from 1768 to 1917.

In the 1860s and the 1870s, the Ottoman government settled Circassians in territories of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Greece, Cyprus, and North Macedonia.

[31] The first wave of immigration from Cyprus occurred in 1878 when the Ottomans were obliged to lease the island to Great Britain; at that time, 15,000 Turkish Cypriots moved to Anatolia.

Economic motives played an important part in the Turkish Cypriot migration wave as conditions for the poor in Cyprus during the 1920s were especially harsh.

From a base of 45,000 in 1881, emigration of anything like 27,000 persons seems huge, but after subtracting the known 5,000 of the 1920s, the balance represents an average annual outflow of some 500 – not enough, probably, to concern the community’s leaders, evoke official comment, or be documented in any way which survives today".

[42] An article published in The Times on December 5, 1923, stated that: "…This transfer of populations is made especially difficult by the fact that few if any of the Turks in Greece desire to leave and most of them will resort to every possible expedient to avoid being sent away.

A thousand Turks who voluntarily emigrated from Crete to Smyrna have sent several deputations to the Greek government asking to be allowed to return.

[46] Immigration from Romania to Anatolia dates back to the early 1800s when the Russian armies made advances into the region.

[47] By the 1960s, inhabitants living in the Turkish exclave of Ada Kaleh were forced to leave the island when it was destroyed in order to build the Iron Gate I Hydroelectric Power Station, which caused the extinction of the local community through the migration of all individuals to different parts of Romania and Turkey.