Between 1914 and 1916, Zeinab Ameen was rejected four times from entering into the United States: once at Ellis island, once at El Paso, and twice at Laredo. At each port of entry, officers not only rejected her, but accused her of infection, prostitution, and perjury. Before these accusations and her consequent refusal, Zeinab Ameen had already been checked, categorized, and recorded at harbors in Beirut, Marseille (twice), Halifax, Liverpool and Vera Cruz. Zeinab had left Syria in 1913 with her new husband and plans to start a business in the United States; the transhemispheric journey itself had transformed her into an undesirable migrant in the eyes of the state. In my paper I explore the material conditions of Syrian emigrant mobility in the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on Marseille as an key node in their journey. Business and government leaders saw Syrians as both commodity and contagion: their migration helped build the French emigration industry, but French officials detested Syrians traveling through Marseille. Using police, shipping, and public health records from municipal archives in Marseille, I track how compromises between public officials and leaders of the shipping industry resulted in a racial regime which policed and stigmatized Syrians as corrupt and diseased, while actively obscuring these leaders' implication in those terms. In this way, I show how the political economy of Marseille racialized the Syrians that passed through, and affected not only where they ended up in the Americas, but also how they were seen once they arrived. Through this paper I posit the use of ‘infrastructures of migration’ as an analytic in studying racialization of migrants in the United States.