‘Xenophobia’ is seldom discussed in historical contexts preceding the 1930s. However, the term was used to describe certain ‘tendencies’ and ‘attitudes’ in former Ottoman domains in the 1920s, and there were crucial socio-economic contexts to these descriptions. In the memoranda they sent to their capitals, European (mainly French and British) statesmen attached the label ‘xenophobic’ to the employment-related measures taken by the Ankara government in particular, while Turkish authorities considered these administrative and legal measures necessary for Turks to ‘enter within the closed doors of foreign firms’ in Turkey. Similar tensions unfolded in the League of Nations Mandates in present-day Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, albeit in the context of different power relations between European statesmen and Arab authorities. This paper offers a comparative analysis of these tensions and the public debates relevant to them. It focuses on politics of employment as a particularly useful lens to examine ‘xenophobia’ at the intersections of broader questions about governance and post-war economic revival in the Middle East in the 1920s. The discussion relies primarily on state correspondence (internal and diplomatic; located in archives in Nantes, Paris, London, Ankara and Istanbul) and publications in the press (mainly in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic). It examines the creation of new credentials for employment in state institutions as well as employment-related expectations of states from foreign firms. It discusses official and informal credentials for employment, by analyzing laws, regulations and cadre commissions as well as strategies former Ottomans used in their petitions to secure employment under new regimes. The paper stresses that while it is not difficult to find evidence for prejudicial discrimination in former Ottoman lands in the 1920s, European descriptions of ‘xenophobia’ also reflected frustration with ‘obstacles’ to capitalist penetration of ‘backward, irrational’ economies by ‘the civilized West.’ Attention is drawn to links between specific practices of social engineering and how the memory of Capitulations (often defined as legal and commercial ‘privileges to foreigners’) operated in different post-Ottoman regimes. By examining politics of employment in post-Ottoman Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, the paper sheds new light on conditions of access to modern military, bureaucratic and economic institutions in these countries in the 1920s. It argues that a nuanced understanding of these conditions is key to developing meaningful responses to the question of what distinguished an ‘independent’ country from those placed under European trusteeship after World War I.