This paper aims at deciphering the articulation of Cyprus in contemporary migration movements from the Middle East to Europe. The island has historically absorbed ethnically or religiously persecuted groups in the Levant, a phenomenon acquiring new dimensions in the 21st century with EU accession and the increase of forced displacement in the region. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with government officials and three distinct refugee groups (Palestinians from Iraq and Syrian Kurds, both stateless and arriving in the mid-2000s; Syrians arriving after 2011), this paper argues that Middle Eastern refugees in Cyprus move along the intersection of three border conditions, whose logics not only complement but also contradict each other. Despite its proximity, Cyprus has received comparatively few refugees fleeing the wars in Syria and Iraq. This results from efforts by the Greek Cypriot authorities to deter arrivals, by rarely granting refugee status to forcefully displaced individuals. In turn, these measures are linked to the country’s divided status, as the mostly Muslim refugees are often perceived as “Turkish agents” aiming to alter the island’s demography. In addition, EU asylum laws and the lack of EU citizenship, separate the refugees from other subaltern groups, such as eastern European economic migrants. While restricting their mobility to the island, this factor nonetheless functions as an existential incentive for rights-based mobilization. Finally, the status of the Cypriot postcolonial space as a geopolitical borderline between Europe and the Middle East, differentiates the experience of exile from that in other EU countries. The social reality of cultural pluralism as an “Eastern residual” contradicts the dominant ideology of ethnic nationalism, lending subversive qualities to the articulation of a civic identity. By developing feelings of belonging due to perceived cultural similarities, and contesting social and even citizenship rights, refugees participate in negotiating the politically sensitive parameters of Cypriotness. The dialectic of multiple exclusionary borders thus moves beyond the simple reproduction of dualities, by enabling a process of implicit integration, as well as by interrogating self-perceptions among a borderland society. The paper therefore concludes by conceptualizing Cyprus’s ongoing historical role as a social space of exile in the Middle East, contradicting European paradigms on refugee integration through a discerned process of “regionalization through exclusion”, thus urging us to (re-)consider the ways in which the interaction of forced displacement with various border regimes reactivates linkages between the Middle East and peripheral European regions.