The world is eager for Syrian refugees to go home, and many dream of doing just that. Yet governments who could clear a path for Syrians to return are unwittingly putting new obstacles in their way. Rich nations have done little to revive Syria’s essential services or rebuild its gutted neighborhoods. Instead, they have slashed the humanitarian funds on which the most vulnerable relied for survival; aid agencies, roiled by budget cuts, are failing in their most basic responsibilities, such as informing refugees of conditions in Syria and tracking the fate of those who do return. Syria’s transitional government, which faces multiple challenges with modest means, has shown neither the inclination nor the capacity to play a leading role on returns either.

Current patterns thus satisfy no one. Returnees are far fewer than host states would wish, and yet more than Syria’s ruined economy and dilapidated infrastructure can presently absorb. Contrary to international standards for refugee return, not all journeys home are “safe, voluntary, and dignified.” To be sure, some Syrians—especially those who are younger, better off, civically minded, and free of family constraints—are diving back into Syria with a distinct sense of purpose and personal fulfillment. Many others, however, head back under pressure, after losing their legal status, their job, or their access to life-saving humanitarian services. They don’t always have homes to return to, and thus rent flats they cannot afford or live in tents near the rubble of their destroyed houses. Meanwhile, new waves of violence and forced evictions across Syria have uprooted tens of thousands more.

Such precarious conditions are not lost on Syrians who remain in exile—watching, waiting, weighing carefully their decision to return. They sacrificed much, and risked even more, to reach safety abroad; their greatest fear is to find themselves again uprooted and in limbo. Some have built reasonably stable lives and livelihoods in the places where they sought refuge. Yet even the most settled are often impatient to at least reconnect with the homeland and rebuild a base there. They come from all regions and all backgrounds, and all are needed if Syria is to recover: wealthy diaspora businessmen hoping for a chance to invest; impoverished workers struggling to survive abroad; professionals, activists, and intellectuals who have reinvented themselves overseas, but who want nothing more than to be part of Syria’s future.

What would it take to enable Syrians who earnestly wish to go home? A refugee crisis doesn’t resolve itself: Just as the displacement of millions requires an architecture to host and integrate refugees, their return will take more than wishful rhetoric and half-baked policies. The risk, right now, is to create the opposite of a virtuous circle: a situation in which returnees face so many problems as to discourage others from following suit.

Returns and regrets

I thought coming home to Damascus would be easier than life in Jordan. But it’s even harder. I look for work every day, leaving in the morning and coming back at night. At first, I only asked at barbershops and juice bars. Now, I ask everywhere. Most shops don’t need anyone. I’m living on debt, and sold my phone to survive. 

My family is thinking about returning, but I keep telling them to stay in Jordan. My grandmother returned, and I wish she hadn’t. I’m responsible for her, and must find a job to take care of her. If you’re not financially stable, Syria will break you. I always tell my friends: If you can find even one day of work in Jordan, don’t come back to Syria. There’s nothing for you here.

In the months since Bashar al-Assad’s fall, displaced Syrians have been rediscovering their country. Free from the threat of detention or conscription, countless went home for the first time in years or decades. They reunited with loved ones, met newborn relatives, visited graves, checked on family homes, or stood on the rubble where those homes once stood. Scenes of elation merged with sobering, sometimes shocking encounters with what Syria has become: the neighborhoods and villages turned to ruin; the darkness of streets with no electricity; the gap between soaring prices and paltry wages; the exhaustion etched on the faces of those who never left.

As visitors poured in from near and far, updates on life in Syria flowed out. Too many currently contain a warning: that the moment to return is not now. Syria needs time, goes a common refrain: time to resuscitate the economy, to restore law and order, to rebuild housing and schools and hospitals. The most ardent cautions tend to come from those whose situation in exile was so precarious as to trigger a hasty decision to return for good. “We came back from Jordan only to find our house completely destroyed,” said a mother of three, whose husband was forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime in 2014. Optimistic after Assad’s fall and struggling to feed her family in Jordan, she chose to return to her ruined hometown in the Damascus suburbs. “We moved into my relatives’ house, but there were already four families—40 people—living in just three rooms. I don’t know how people lived like this for 14 years. What I see around me is extreme poverty: People don’t have food, money, or work. Every time I go out, I cry.”

Azraq's very name rings with cruel irony

Regrets are not confined to those living in destitution. They also reach more middle-class returnees, like those who owned modest businesses in exile and bet on reinvesting in Syria. “Many small traders have returned from Türkiye and been shocked by how hard it is to survive,” said a garment trader in Aleppo. “These are people with limited capital, who are not used to doing business here. Many lament their decision; some pick up and leave again. Others don’t have the option to do so, and must find ways to manage—sometimes by changing their business entirely.” Their struggles, he noted, are a powerful deterrent to other businessmen, especially those with serious capital.

Repentant returnees are split between those stranded in Syria and those with the option to emigrate once more. The latter include returnees from Lebanon, whose border with Syria remains uniquely porous. A man from a ruined village in the Aleppo countryside shared his aborted attempt to return from Lebanon:

I brought my family back to Syria after the regime fell. I was excited to return after all these years, especially since we were exhausted in Lebanon. But when we reached our village, it was a ghost town: no services, destroyed houses, and very high prices. I tried to find work in my field, as a brickmaker, but the country needs time to start rebuilding. So, we came back to Lebanon via a smuggling route. It was very easy, like going from Sur [in southern Lebanon] to Beirut.

In dozens of interviews with actual and prospective returnees, such grinding economic hardship was the most common concern—but not the only one. Bouts of intercommunal violence have sown terror among Alawis, Druze, and other minority groups. Since Assad’s departure, Syrians have been exposed to new rounds of violence, which has in turn spawned a flood of gruesome images: women and children lying dead, men humiliated on camera before being put to death. Large-scale crimes mix with more individual, unquantifiable tales: kidnapping for ransom, arbitrary detention, local score-settling. For secular-minded Syrians abroad, the new leadership’s jihadi pedigree nourishes fears of a turn toward repressive religious governance. A Syrian researcher in Berlin noted how this cocktail of anxieties permeates her community: “Many people I know who have visited from Germany say they will never live in Syria again. Economically, there’s simply nothing to do, no work. But some also feel unsafe, and say they could never bring their daughters to live in such a country.”

Of course, there are those for whom return to Syria was the right decision. Some had the means to restart a relatively stable life: an intact family home, a pool of savings, remote work paid in foreign currency, and the holy grail—a second citizenship that gives them the option to leave if conditions deteriorate. Others suffered such dismal conditions in exile that even minimal resources in Syria are an improvement. But their success stories aren’t reaching the critical mass that would persuade others to follow suit in larger numbers.

In fact, even the more fortunate returnees often share stories of extreme hardship, as likely to discourage additional repatriations as to encourage them. “Returning from Jordan was really expensive,” said a young woman who now lives with her husband in a heavily damaged neighborhood of Homs city. “We paid 350 dinars [490 dollars] to move our furniture, and another 100 for customs. Our neighborhood has a supermarket and a pharmacy, but everything else is far away—including healthcare. There’s no public transportation, and the schools are not fit for learning.” While she doesn’t regret her decision, the obstacles she faces would deter plenty of others: The neediest Syrians could never afford what she paid to move her furniture; the better off would hesitate to rent in a ruined neighborhood devoid of essential services, which is often the only option given soaring rent prices in more functional areas. Understanding such calculations is key to supporting those who indeed wish to go back.

Weighing impossible odds

In 2012, my husband and twelve of my relatives were killed in a massacre in Homs. I came to Jordan, and for years I avoided reading the news in Syria. I didn’t want to be reminded of what happened to us. But after the fall of the Assad regime, I started following a Facebook group with other women who discuss conditions in Syria. Many of those who returned now regret it due to high prices, water and electricity shortages, and stories of kidnapping.

Even so, today I feel pressured to return. The UN has cut the assistance that was helping us survive in Jordan. But where would I take my children? The only place we could go is my family home in Homs, but everyone in that house was killed. I can’t imagine even visiting it, let alone living in it. But staying here is also harder and harder. I feel lost.

For Syrians considering return, warnings from home feed into a messy, ever-changing calculus. Their complex, well-informed analyses contrast starkly with the simplistic equation that seems to drive policy in foreign capitals: The war is over, Assad is gone, Syrians can and will return. While politicians posture, Syrians probe. They tabulate a mix of practical factors—rent and food prices, wages for day labor, access to aid and essential services—with more nebulous ones: How to weigh the fear of your children being harassed, or even kidnapped, against the specter of increasingly violent xenophobia in exile? The stakes of deciding could not be higher: life-altering for anyone, life and death for some.

"The fines cost less than letting my crops die."

Prospective returnees thus draw information wherever they can get it. They comb social media and poll relatives who have gone to visit or returned for good. When they have the financial and logistical ability to do so, they go and scout conditions for themselves. A Syrian worker in Beirut summed up his assessment after a first visit home: “You cannot live as a laborer in Syria; wages are too low, prices too high. People who try fail and come back to Lebanon. The ones who make it are those with capital to open a business. I would need about 25,000 dollars to open my own car wash on rented land—50,000 if I were to buy it.” For now, those sums are far beyond his means. So he waits.

Syrians from all walks of life face calculations of their own. Occasionally, the decision is straightforward: An intact family home in a safe neighborhood might easily beat paying rent abroad. Conversely, if your home has been flattened and you lack savings or support to restart, staying put may be the obvious choice—no matter how dire your circumstances. A mother of five explained her choice to keep scraping by in Jordan rather than risk return:

Our life in Jordan is hard, but it’s better than going back to our destroyed house in the Aleppo countryside. The people in our village are living in tents. Some of my relatives have returned, but they regretted it. Here we live day by day, but at least we are physically safe.

My husband has a heart condition and brain cancer, so he can’t work. As a family, we rely on me and my kids working. My two young daughters are still in school. The boys—ages 11, 12, and 14—work on the street, selling water or helping customers carry purchases from the market. Whatever they earn is helpful, usually around three dinars [four dollars] each per day. Sometimes the police arrest them for begging, and they can be kept in jail for two weeks or even a month.

Many situations are less clearcut. In Syria and abroad, shifting economic conditions make it harder to project into the future. As displaced people trickle back to their home areas, rent prices have soared, to the point where an appraisal made one month might be obsolete the next. In neighboring Lebanon and Jordan, refugees face deep, unpredictable cuts to humanitarian aid, alongside growing hurdles to legal work. Household budgets that were precariously stable for years now threaten to capsize, whether Syrians stay in exile or return.

And the decision is not just about securing food and shelter from day to day. It’s also about building a future after years in limbo. That calls for more than bricks and mortar. Parents look anxiously at a country where thousands of schools have been damaged or destroyed; those in operation are of infamously low quality. “I could never send my daughters to university in Syria,” lamented a Syrian father in Lebanon, after visiting his own university during a recent trip home. “I was shocked by the level of decay: piles of worn-out paper records, decaying buildings, and unqualified staff.”

Buffeted by competing pressures, many settle on temporary arrangements rather than a final decision to stay or go. To minimize expenses and maximize income, families split up. A male breadwinner might keep working in exile while his wife and children return to live, rent-free, with family in Syria. Or a mother and kids might remain outside Syria to continue with a school they like, while the father returns to scout the feasibility of resettling the whole family. A Homsi man in Istanbul noted that he will stay with his family in Syria and look for a suitable home, while his pregnant wife finishes her master’s degree in Türkiye. Most of his friends, though, do the opposite: “Their wives return to Syria and live with family, while the men move out of their [Turkish] rental apartments and into shared housing. Their goal is to save up money and eventually return to Syria, with the resources to start over.”

In Jordan, unpaid debts can land you in prison

Many other Syrians are unable to save money, no matter how hard they work or what they sacrifice. For those consumed by day-to-day survival, the future is not something you plan for: It’s something you wait on. Maybe conditions in Syria will improve, so that return becomes a bit less threatening. Or maybe exile will get so bad you see no choice but to accept the risk of going home—or smuggling yourself to Europe. “I don’t know what to do,” said a Syrian father who has been in Beirut for a decade. He works illegally, as a barber, because his profession is not among the few which Syrians can legally occupy. His two daughters are out of school: He can’t afford private tuition, while public options are hard to access and of dismal quality. He hopes, against all odds, that Lebanon might legalize his profession so that he can provide for his family. “I will wait and see. Maybe next year the situation will improve, either in Syria or Lebanon.” Sorely missing from these ad hoc appraisals are clearer, more constructive policies on the part of host states.

Self-destructive obstruction

I was detained by the Turkish police in September, due to a problem with my official documents. They took me and three others to a detention center housing other migrants. They asked if we wanted to stay in detention or go back to Syria. Staying would require paying for a lawyer, so we said we would go to Syria. They took us to the Syrian border and made each of us stand in front of a video camera. They asked if we want to return to Syria as part of a voluntary return program. If someone didn’t answer “yes,” they recorded the video again.

I’ll return to Türkiye via a smuggling route. It costs about 500 dollars, but I don’t see any other choice: My family has fourteen members and relies on my work. My monthly salary on the farm in Türkiye was 900 dollars per month; my brothers in Syria earn less than a hundred dollars between them.

There are commonsense ways to help refugees go home, from reviving Syria’s economy to systematically assisting those ready to go back. The mystery is that almost no government is doing any of them. Overall, support for Syria’s economy has been stingy, disjointed, and divorced from any overarching vision. Western governments have mostly acted to lift economic sanctions, rather than provide new resources, for which they count on others such as the Gulf monarchies. Qatar indeed has slightly helped improve electricity production, and partnered with Saudi Arabia to settle Syria’s modest debt to the World Bank.

Support is stingy, disjointed, and divorced from any overarching vision

But if any “reconstruction” is happening, it isn’t the ambitious, coordinated program for recovery that the term implies. What exists today is a scattered array of household- or neighborhood-level initiatives. These are overwhelmingly funded and implemented by Syria’s communities themselves. They unfold without any meaningful support from any institutional actor: whether Syria’s cash-strapped interim government or wealthy states in the Gulf and the West, some of whom helped destroy Syria through airstrikes and proxy wars.

Nor is there any sense of urgency to articulate such a vision. “There is no development plan, no investment plan,” said a veteran of the Syria response, speaking in September 2025. By contrast with this inertia, rich nations have moved fast to ratchet up political pressure for refugees to return. Within 48 hours of Bashar al-Assad’s fall, diverse European states froze Syrian asylum claims. (Some governments have recently restarted the asylum process, while publicly stating their goal to forcibly repatriate those whose claims are denied.) A European donor noted the dissonance that arises from this posture, whereby officials tout plans to repatriate Syrians to a ruined country they are doing so little to make livable:

Right now, there is no policy for anything on Syria. There is no plan, no functioning coordination mechanism, and the pot of money available for Syria is shrinking. European countries try to convince themselves that everything is working the way they want. They’ll point to a voluntary repatriation flight with maybe 300 people on it, and call that a success. But of course, almost nobody will voluntarily return to Syria from Europe under these circumstances.

Short of revitalizing Syria’s economy, states could at least develop a proper system for supporting those individuals who choose to go home: furnishing them with information before they leave, cash to help them restart, and follow-up services such as legal aid upon their return, which is often needed to reclaim property. There is little such help on offer, and what exists is so haphazard as to have virtually no impact.

For now, support centers on one-time cash grants and transportation for individual returnees. These mostly miss the point, as much in Europe as along Syria’s borders. The government of Austria, which has loudly called for mass returns, offers just a thousand euros to each Syrian who agrees to permanently repatriate: a seemingly significant sum for low-income refugees, but a tiny fraction of what they actually need to restart. The Netherlands offers a more generous package—2,800 euros per adult returnee, 1,650 per minor—which had drawn just 720 takers as of October. In Lebanon and Jordan, conditions are worse still: As of November, returnees are offered just one hundred dollars per person or up to six hundred dollars for a whole family. The figures are so meager that they could only tempt the truly destitute, who are also those most likely to struggle to survive in Syria and be forced to flee anew.

The most vulnerable confront another problem: a near total breakdown in communication from the aid agencies tasked with helping them. Even before recent budget cuts, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had earned a reputation for being unresponsive; for years, its Lebanese branch was known among Syrians for leaving its emergency hotline understaffed. Some now find themselves unable to reach UNHCR even to register for the voluntary returns program, which the agency has proudly advertised. The program itself is shrouded in confusion, confounding even some of the agency’s own volunteers: “We don’t know who is eligible for the hundred dollars,” said a Syrian UNHCR volunteer in northern Lebanon. “Refugees are navigating a minefield full of fog—fog which UNHCR itself is spreading.”

The haze only deepens when people reach Syria. In principle, the countries pushing for Syrians to return to a broken country should establish a countrywide mechanism to support returnees as they restart their lives. There is no such structure in place, nor any sign that one is forthcoming. Nor, indeed, is there a functioning system to collect even the most elemental data on where returnees go and what conditions they face. In October 2025, UNHCR announced that more than one million refugees had returned to Syria since December—almost doubling the estimate from the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), and therefore bringing both numbers into question. A veteran aid worker noted that she has seen no progress toward closing this enormous gap in that most basic figure: “Both agencies seem to see no problem showing up to the same coordination meetings and presenting completely different sets of data, without explaining the discrepancy.”

While rich nations and international organizations bear much responsibility for the impasse, Syria’s neighbors are far from blameless. In Türkiye, Lebanon, and Jordan—which together host about seven of every ten registered Syrian refugees globally—governments are understandably keen to foster sustained, large-scale repatriation. But their current policies come down to pressuring refugees to return before they can afford to do so, which mostly makes them even poorer and more invisible than they were before. In Lebanon and Jordan, governments are squeezing Syrians out of jobs and essential services—compounding the pain inflicted by Western funding cuts. In Türkiye, authorities have not so much ramped up pressure as sustained it: continuing their years-old practice of forcibly deporting refugees charged with minor legal or administrative infractions. Such is the duress that Syrians, in all three countries, ruefully note that they see nothing voluntary about the “voluntary returns” discussed by the UN and refugee hosting states.

Host governments aren’t just pushing people back too soon: They’re also neglecting basic steps that could enable those Syrians who are truly ready to go back. In Jordan, many refugees mention that the one thing keeping them from return is a chronic medical condition for which they could not obtain treatment in Syria. This would be easily fixed by granting such cases the right to commute back to Jordan for medical care. Others are trapped in Jordan by debt which they will never be able to pay back, but which must be settled before they can cross the border into Syria. Such dues includes a backlog of exorbitant fees levied by the Jordanian state, which has every reason to forgive such debt. A Syrian mother in Irbid, who earns six dinars (less than nine dollars) per day from under-the-table work at a women’s spa, summed up her Kafkaesque predicament:

I borrowed 600 dinars [from a microfinance program] to help my son repay his own debts. Soon I owed 1,200 dinars [1,700 dollars]. I hadn’t realized the amount would increase like that. It was very easy to get the loan, but in the process I signed papers I didn’t understand. I’m also in debt to my previous landlord, who nonetheless forced me out when I couldn’t keep up with rent. I owe another 781 dinars to the Ministry of Labor, in back fees because I didn’t cancel my work permit. I only had the work permit as part of an NGO training on chocolate making, which got us the document so that we could receive a stipend for the course. They never gave us the stipend.

* * *

How to explain such obviously self-defeating policies from states that continue to publicly advocate for mass refugee return? Perhaps the simplest answer is that these are not policies at all. They are, rather, a mishmash of arbitrary measures informed by populist politics rather than well-defined national interests—let alone the legal rights of Syrian refugees themselves.

Of course, this triumph of narrative over policy is not confined to Syria. Globally, migration policies appear increasingly unmoored from any logic beyond that of racist scapegoating. In rich Western countries, elites fret about aging populations, falling birthrates, and stagnating economies—only to stoke popular hatred against the migrants who quietly care for their elderly, tend to their children, and prop up entire sectors through underpaid work. To the extent Europe and the United States have a migration policy, it consists in dismantling the legal scaffolding which they built after World War II to formalize and protect the rights of foreign workers and asylum seekers. Syrians are not alone in facing this shift, though they are particularly vulnerable to it: In 2015, European xenophobia surged in parallel to an uptick in Syrian refugee arrivals; ten years later, those same refugees remain a favorite rhetorical target for emboldened European nativists.

Importantly, though, it’s not just the far-right taking aim at vulnerable refugees. Positions once considered extreme have moved to the middle, as centrist and center-left leaders scramble to keep pace with nativist rivals. Today there is no meaningful political pushback against Europe leaving migrants to drown in the Mediterranean or be tortured in Turkish prisons built with European taxpayer dollars. Likewise, few American politicians bother to mention the countless migrants who die of thirst in the Sonoran Desert while seeking to evade border patrol. Little surprise, then, that the world would be so ready to push Syrians back to a country unfit to receive them.

This shallow, short-sighted posture comes at a cost to those pushing it. That includes centrist Western politicians who, by aping their far-right competitors, render themselves both complicit and irrelevant. It includes the United Nations, its donor states, and the broader system of humanitarian and development aid: Faced with an existential crisis of both funding and legitimacy, leaders in this sector are pursuing an approach to Syria that everyone can see is failing.

And, increasingly, it includes the rest of us. The worldwide assault on migrants—Syrian and otherwise—goes hand-in-hand with an assault on the most vulnerable within our own societies. In rich Western countries, flamboyant displays of xenophobia conceal a quieter drive to shred our social safety nets. The same holds true closer to Syria: from Tunis to Beirut, Amman to Cairo, anti-migrant scapegoating distracts from shriveling states, rotten regimes, vanishing middle classes, a forsaken youth, and swelling destitution.

As we expel migrants beyond our borders, we expel fellow citizens from the land of living wages, dignified shelter, and functioning public services. Some elites follow this logic to its absurd conclusion: a world where the rich swap workers for robots and retreat into walled compounds, virtual reality, or Mars. Such fantasies make as much sense as the belief that Syrians, today, would hasten home to their ravaged country. All pose a version of the same question: How to reinvent our societies as places that lift up those who need our help, rather than seeking endlessly to cast them out?

17 November 2025

Alex Simon is Synaps research director. Hajar Srour and Anas Hennawi are Synaps researchers.

Methodology and sources

This essay draws on roughly 130 interviews conducted between December 2024 and October 2025. These include about 50 in-person interviews in Jordan, 40 in Syria, 20 in Lebanon, and the remainder in Germany or (remotely) in Turkey. Interviewees include Syrians who returned to Syria, or are considering doing so; refugees who returned to Syria then crossed back to Lebanon; aid sector professionals; and Western donors to the refugee response.

Illustration credit: Author's own photographs of a desert reservoir; Amman's skyline; wheat outside Irbid; sheep crossing the road; a struggling sheep farm; a walled-off electrical station outside Tafilah; fresh laban in Irbid; an unhelpful sign at the Tannour Dam; a nursery near Jordan's border with Israel.