In the wake of the Egyptian Nationality Law of 1926, the Alexandria Police Department increased its expulsion of non-Egyptian ‘undesirables’ involved in the commercial sex industry. In 1930, the growing frequency of expulsions led to the establishment of a separate foreign criminal branch of the Alexandria Police Department, and the category of ‘undesirables’ was expanded to include those who had a history of drug use. According to French consular records from Alexandria, the majority of these ‘undesirables’ were migrant workers, yet at least some protested their expulsion on the basis that they had been born and raised in Alexandria and knew nothing about the alleged homeland to which they were being expelled. These expulsions speak not only to the transnational character of Alexandria’s working class at this time, but also to the transnational conceptions of criminality which were fundamental to the regulation of subaltern mobility and the establishment of a global nation-state system. As the spread of middle-class modernity produced new understandings of the criminal rooted in gender and sexual deviance, illegal vice became the face of a new interwar criminality that grasped the attention of both Egyptian middle-class nationalists and the League of Nations. Although historians often trace the Egyptianization of Alexandria to the nationalization policies of Gamal Abdel Nasser, consular records documenting the expulsion of ‘undesirables’ in the interwar period suggests that the Egyptianization of Alexandria began decades before the Nasser period through nationalist control of subaltern bodies rather than elite property. Policing gender and sexual performances in Alexandria became integral to the nationalist project of constructing and policing territorial borders. At the same time, the transnational conceptions of criminality that gave rise to these policies challenges the juxtaposition of the national and the global, highlighting the way in which the nationalization of working-class bodies through the imposition of anti-vice measures was central to both the Egyptian nationalist project as well as the making of an international political order.