When is a child an immigrant? This paper considers when and why officials, migrants, and other Ottoman subjects invoked immigrant (muhacir) children. The paper explores how portrayals of migrant children in the Ottoman Empire contributed to developing notions of belonging, citizenship, refugeedom, and asylum. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Ottoman statesmen identified the migrant (muhacir) as a key figure in Ottoman reform, hopeful that immigration would increase agricultural productivity in the empire. Due to this economic framing, beginning in 1857, Ottoman immigration regulations implicitly relied on a default understanding of “the muhacir” as an adult, male, and able-bodied head of household ready to take up a productive role in Ottoman society. In subsequent decades, administrators responded to numerous episodes of forced displacement into the empire by developing aid and settlement policies that accounted for impoverished, elderly, infirm, female, and child migrants. Despite such policies, pro-immigrant Ottoman statesmen never relinquished the default male muhacir nor his promise of productivity. Thus, though the Ottoman state developed policies to aid, house, and educate migrant children, for Ottoman officials, the muhacir-as-child remained a figure of exception. That is, for administrators, the fate of the muhacir-as-child revealed limitations in Ottoman migrant settlement efforts rather than challenging the basis of pro-immigrant policies. Historians of Ottoman childhood have demonstrated how migration and refugee crises contributed to the changing meaning of childhood in the late Ottoman Empire. This paper builds on that research by considering how notions of childhood contributed to consolidating meanings of subject/citizen, immigrant, and refugee. Officials, migrants, and other Ottoman subjects relied on the child muhacir to critique Ottoman settlement efforts, to comment on the sources of displacement, to seek aid and resources from the central state, and to assert migrant belonging in Ottoman society. Using official regulations and correspondence, migrant petitions, parliamentary debates, and newspapers, this paper will consider the relationships between children, childhood, migration, and displacement during the Hamidian and Young Turk eras. The era was one of changes in Ottoman legal and political belonging and developing state mechanisms of population control. In that context, muhacir children and depictions of muhacir children became a route for Ottomans to frame their expectations of legal, political, and social belonging and to advocate for rights and privileges within a changing relationship between state and subject.