Speaking at an international gathering on migration last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had spent over $37 billion in “national resources” on Syrian refugees, who numbered more than 3.6 million in the country in January.

How the $37 billion sum is calculated remains unknown. Figures available in the budget and annual programs are not even close to Erdogan’s expenditure tally. Opposition parties claim that Ankara exaggerates its assistance, arguing that a significant part of the refugees earn a living as cheap workers, without government help. What is the true scale of assistance and to what extent do Syrians sustain themselves by working?

After the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, Ankara adopted an open-door policy for Syrians fleeing to Turkey. Ankara granted them education, health care, welfare assistance rights and access to the labor market under a “temporary protection” regime. It remains unclear how much of the money spent on the refugees originated from Turkey’s own budget and how much came from foreign assistance funds.

Most recently, the presidency’s 2019 program offers the following information: “Turkey’s official development assistance (ODA) increased by 25.5% to $8.1 billion in 2017 from $6.5 billion in 2016. … Humanitarian aid in the form of ODA rose to $7.3 billion in 2017 from $5.9 billion in 2016. The total sum of humanitarian assistance for Syrians in our country, meanwhile, was $7.2 billion in 2017.”