In the late 1920s and 1930s, the Muslim “non-exchangees” (gayrimübadiller) were a vocal, well-organized and well-connected pressure group in Turkey. From ca. 1926 until at least 1933, they regularly held congresses, lobbying for the Turkish government to compensate them for their property in Greece, which had been seized by the Greek authorities. “Non-exchangee” (gayrimübadil) referred to those people not subject to the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This included Ottoman Muslims who had left Greece prior to the beginning of the First Balkan War on 18 October 1912. According to Protocol No. IX appended to the Treaty of Lausanne, these Muslims could either continue to enjoy their property rights in Greece (as absentees) or freely dispose of their estates. They could also use the assistance of the Mixed Commission to sell their property, which, de facto, had been seized by the Greek state. Their counterparts were Greek citizens owning property in Turkey. The gayrimübadil society remains severely understudied, probably for two reasons: most of its members were not poor, and they self-organized quite effectively. They thus contradict the widespread prejudice of all immigrants having been poor and without a voice of their own. In this paper, I shall focus on the gayrimübadil congresses that were held in the 1930s through newspaper articles, which have not been studied yet. The aim of the paper is twofold: first, I will analyze how this privileged group made use of the vocabulary of need and compensation actually developed for refugee settlement. I will argue that they used these categories for their own needs. Second, I am interested in the ways in which gayrimübadil positioned themselves vis-à-vis exchangees and other groups of immigrants.