How do the historical legacies of forced migration shape contemporary responses to refugee crises? This paper compares the response of Turkey and its governing AK Party to the Syrian refugee crisis to those of Jordan and Lebanon. Examining how the reception of refugees shaped state-building over the past century, it argues that previous episodes of forced migration have created repertoires of refuge, political scripts governing appropriate state responses to forced migration. Drawing on printed texts in Turkish and Arabic from 1940s-today as well as interviews with NGOs and civil society groups in Turkey and Jordan, this paper demonstrates how previous refugee influxes created political discourses of nationhood, inclusion, and exclusion that have been redeployed in response to the current crisis today. Turkey, at first sight, seems to be an unlikely country to attempt a financially and politically costly program to host refugees. Although one of the initial signatories of the 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, it has only legally committed itself to admitting refugees from Europe. There is little in its domestic or international legal commitments that suggest it would respond generously to an influx of refugees. And yet, Turkey has responded to the Syrian refugee crisis with both costly state service provision as well as a generally permissive approach to informal settlement and work. This contrasts with the highly securitized approach to refugees displayed by Jordan and Lebanon, where states have made great efforts to segregate the refugees from the population and minimize chances of integration or the development of sustainable livelihoods. At the root of these divergent responses are two very different experiences of immigration and forced migration. While Jordanian and Lebanese history has been marked by violent conflicts that followed Palestinian refugee inflows after the wars of 1948 and 1967, Turkey/Ottoman Anatolia has been the site of immigration and assimilation of Muslim refugees, from the Circassian immigrations of the 19th century up to the influx of Turks from Bulgaria in 1989. Taking a longue durée approach to refugee policy, this paper explores how political identities are forged at critical junctures in forced migration, and seeks to explain why a country characterized by a recurrent history of strident ethnonationalism attempted to welcome a large influx of non-Turks, even while resorting to violence to deal with Kurdish nationalism.