President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who enjoys surprising the Turkish public, dropped a bombshell earlier this month by proposing citizenship for Syrian refugees in Turkey.

The instant reaction was a rising bias among Turks, who are paying for the country's Syria policy. Some reactions to Erdogan’s proposal were outright racist. Hate speech peaked on social media. Many asked why Erdogan — who recently blackmailed Europe by declaring, “We are not dumb. We will put the refugees in buses and ship them to Europe” — suddenly decided to grant citizenship to millions of refugees.

Others wanted to know why the government, which earlier declined to offer citizenship to Turkish kin from the Caucasus and Balkans, now decided to give the green light to a much larger group.

The best offer for the refugees would be to grant them refugee status. When Turkey signed the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, it put in a clause that said it would not be granting refugee status to people coming from non-European countries. This is why today Ankara offers only "temporary protection" to those coming from elsewhere.