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Notes -
The Turkish government really gets screwed in many ways by the rest of NATO. Turkey maintains one of the most powerful conventional forces in NATO, it hosts millions of refugees that otherwise the EU would be faced with hosting, its supposed ally the United States openly supports militant groups that are allied with militant groups that seek to secede from Turkey, and many Europeans seem to regard Turkey with a contempt that has noticeable racial undertones even though I am sure that most such Europeans would deny it in polite company. Sometimes I wonder what the Turks are getting out of all this that makes it worth it. Advanced technology from the US? Something else?
They don’t lose much either, and the US largely allows Turkey to conduct its own foreign policy in the region that while not mostly hostile to the U.S. is more ‘adjacent’ than fully-aligned. The large military is a reality of the neighborhood. Refugees are a choice and, as the OP said, Erdogan doesn’t particularly want them to go home. US and Israeli support for Kurds is relatively timid and largely limited to support (in America’s case) for Iraqi Kurdistan, which Erdogan himself appears to have mixed feelings about and which Turkey has long attempted to improve relations with.
The main hostility from the West is from the usual civil liberties groups who whine about every conservative leader from Budapest to Jerusalem. Inside Europe it’s from Germans and Austrians who host large populations of Anatolian peasants that have in many cases become the backbone (along with Albanians) of their countries’ criminal underworlds. It’s unclear whether this means much to Erdogan.
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Work visas they can convert into chain migration into Germany.
It's not quite EU-membership total freedom of movement, but it's close.
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