There is a strong tendency in Turkish historiography to approach the Kemalist policies as purely domestic affairs that emanate from the center in a top-down manner, reflecting the clear ideological position of Ankara. The existing scholarship on the Settlement Law (1934), too, has read the development of demographic policies in ideological terms, framing them in top-down modernist trajectories that were long in the making since the late Ottoman times. As Peter Gatrell recently noted, however, nation-states not only make refugees, but refugees also make nation-states. Such an interactive approach to nation-formation could also help rethink the complex politics around the Settlement Law, which not only regulated the Muslim immigration from the Balkans, but also the manners of their resettlement at home. While the exodus of these immigrants from the Balkans was not rooted in the ideological appeal of Turkish nationalism, the necessity to regulate their arrival in legal terms created opportunities for the ruling elites to formulate anew the ideological imperatives of Turkish nationalism and define the parameters of inclusion and exclusions. The existing literature under-appreciates this interactive aspect by continuing to read the Settlement Law through a singular and nation-centered approach. In this latter perspective, the formulation of demographic policies and their application come across as seamless affairs, where ideologically driven ruling elites act on the population, with a view to engineer a productive, docile, and loyal polity. As such, the processes of demographic engineering are framed as devoid of historical conjuncture and immune from unintended consequences or the constraints presented by state capacity. In this paper, I seek to overcome such limitations by situating the Settlement Law within its due transnational context of heightened interstate rivalries since the 1930s. Unfolding in myriad ways across the borderlands of Eastern Europe, the complex dynamics of interstate competition created the necessary push and pull factors that started dislodging the Balkan Muslims from those areas coveted by various territorially revisionist states in the region. The demographic engineering their arrival triggered in Turkey, I argue, was therefore as much national as international.