This paper intends to analyze the social and political impact of an intricate underground network in the Ottoman Empire that emerged in the late nineteenth century and helped to facilitate the illegal migration of thousands of people from Eastern Anatolia to North America (for the purpose of the paper defined as the United States and Canada)..From the years 1880-1915, over 75,000 Eastern Anatolian peasants, laborers, craftsmen, and professionals migrated to North America. For many, migration was only meant to be temporary, and during this same period, several thousand of these sojourners returned to their home communities. Until 1908, the Ottoman government actively enforced legal prohibitions on migration from Eastern Anatolia to North America as well as return migration to the Empire. Despite its de jure legalization after 1908, fears of conscription-dodging led to continued attempts by the "Young Turk" regime to curtail migration to North America. Official attempts to limit mobility and curb migration abroad, coupled with the perilous nature of the journey between isolated Eastern Anatolia and North America, fostered the emergence of a geographically expansive underground "migration industry" in the Ottoman Empire. This dense network of village headmen, human smugglers (kacakcilar), foreign shipping agents, government officials, dockworkers and boatmen (kayikcilar) were key to facilitating migration abroad, but this often came at a steep economic and physical cost to potential migrants. By using documents from several catalogues in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, American consular reports, village histories, and letters to unpack and analyze the numerous novel--but frequently exploitative--socio-economic relationships born out of the migration process, this paper seeks to shed new light on the history of migration and mobility in the late Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, this paper aims to place non-elites at the center of analysis by exploring the creative ways these migrants challenged both official state repression and exploitation at the hands of those involved in the migration industry. This paper is part of a broader doctoral dissertation project on the political, social, and economic impacts of migration to North America on sending communities in Eastern Anatolia. It is the aim of the larger project to use the fascinating history of overseas migration from Eastern Anatolia to provide a much-needed glimpse into the still poorly understood and contentious social and political history of Eastern Anatolia at the turn of the twentieth century.