Chancellor Angela Merkel’s openness toward Syrian refugees has ignited a public backlash against Muslim migrants in Germany. These anxieties have deeper historical roots. This paper uses Turkish and German government documents, media sources, and firsthand accounts to offer a case study of personal and public reactions to official policies aimed at the reduction of Germany’s Muslim population. Amid heated discussions about integration and multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, the West German government provided various forms of cash incentives to persuade primarily Turkish workers to return to their homeland. This analysis of the reactions to these measures, which critics denounced as discriminatory attempts to “kick out” the Turks, illuminates three previously overlooked aspects of the Turkish migrant experience. First, official efforts to encourage Turks to leave soured relations between Turks and Germans on everyday and international levels. As rising anti-foreigner sentiment in West Germany compelled thousands of Turkish migrants to take the cash incentives and return home, the Turkish press and government condemned the perceived mistreatment of their countrymen as reminiscent of Nazism. Thus, at the same time as westerners were citing Turkey’s 1980 anti-democratic turn as evidence of its incompatibility with European culture and supranational institutions, Turkish critics countered that West Germany itself was far from realizing its post-fascist conception as a human rights state. Second, West Germany’s remigration policy fueled European development politics in the Middle East. Surveys of Turkish migrants revealed that the poor economic prospects in their homeland made them reluctant to leave Germany. To assuage this concern, the West German government funneled money into the Turkish economy through low-interest microloans to remigrants establishing businesses in Turkey. While personal accounts demonstrate that these generous measures helped the remigrants build self-sufficient lives in their homeland, they also appeased early iterations of the same anti-foreigner sentiment that has reinvigorated today. Finally, the sources reveal a great irony: although non-migrant Turks lambasted Germans’ mistreatment of their countrymen, they were wary of their return. In everyday life, remigrants’ acquaintances disparaged them as a nouveau-riche class of hybrid Turkish-German Almancilar. In high politics, the Turkish government deemed its floundering economy incapable of sustaining an influx of remigrants, whose remittance payments constituted a crucial source of national income. These difficult experiences integrating in West Germany as well as reintegrating in Turkey shaped Turkish migrants’ identities as undesired and unwelcomed by two places they called home.