My paper will be on Ottoman state regulations towards Armenian circular mobility between the Ottoman Empire and the United States between 1896-1908. By 1896 the government of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) encouraged Armenians to emigrate but required them to denaturalize and sign documents attesting that they would never return. As part of this process, Armenians – who had become undesirable subjects – were required to submit two identity photographs. My paper examines how the production, distribution and archiving of photographs and denaturalization records contributed to engineering a new kind of emigration database to keep Armenians from reclaiming their subjecthood or returning to the empire. Creating an emigration database and requiring Armenian migrants to denaturalize, I argue, were complementary techniques of bureaucratization and border-building. My paper analyzes denaturalization and the still understudied ways in which the government eliminated its Armenian population – that is, not only through pogroms but also through bureaucratic channels. When Armenian migrants submitted their paperwork to the Ottoman state and were denationalized, their Ottoman identity cards were taken from them and invalidated, and their names were erased from the population registers. They no longer existed in the Ottoman Empire as subjects, but as criminals who should be kept outside of the Ottoman realm. I aim to show that expatriation was not some stop-gap fiscal measure to limit the number of Armenians who were protected by the American government. Rather than being related to the Ottoman fears of extraterritoriality and consular protection, denationalization was a wholesale policy targeting one particular ethnoreligious community. The Hamidian government denied Armenians subjecthood because it saw them as problem subjects who had been disloyal to the empire. My paper, therefore, contributes to Ottoman nationality studies by drawing on attempts to decenter the field from European states who seek capitulatory privileges and their non-Muslim protégés (Can and Low, 2020) by exploring state responses to Armenian emigration as a population management project. Through this paper, I aim to highlight continuities between Hamidian practices of denaturalization as a border-building attempt and what I term the “social death” of Ottoman Armenians, and the forced nationalist homogenization, assimilation, deportation, and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Committee of Union and Progress between 1913-1918.