Over the course of the interwar and immediate post-Second World War years in the Middle East, an individual migrant’s struggles with mental health, as well as their potentially having any one of list of physical and bodily ailments, became a potential disability that marked them as unfit for entry across post-Ottoman borders. Using personal documentary narratives of migrants (and/or their families and interlocutors) singled out for perceived mental and physical illnesses and conditions, and the correspondence by doctors, immigration officers, and health inspectors, this paper considers the development of the medico-legal border in both British-mandate Palestine and Egypt under the British-supported monarchy, focusing on the late 1930s through the 1940s. The paper is concerned with the experiences of transregional migrants whose health flagged them as undesirable to enter Palestine and Egypt. By assembling archival documents together as micronarratives, the paper seeks to establish the ways more precarious migrants made sense of borders and of their own illnesses, and the connection between the two when faced with immigration control regimes. Most, but not all, of the micronarratives explored here are focused on laborers or working-class migrants: individuals who likely crossed borders frequently, or who were drawn to Palestine or Egypt by the rapid pace of industrialization alongside regional and local economic downtowns. Finally, the paper will move historiography away from a sole focus on the border as the tangible geographical site of immigration control and public health: rather, it demonstrates the medico-legal border could be found at the hospital, the working-man’s café or hostel, or within the urban street. These transregional migrants are crucial to the history of the medico-legal border, in large part because their movements were ordinary and mundane, and because unlike European immigrants and travellers, they could more easily be deported out of Palestine and Egypt without recourse to consuls or courts. Their experiences also add to social histories of the Middle East, incorporating testimonies about illnesses and ailments that may have come from individual migrants, but which would have been influenced and shaped by social and cultural understandings of mobility control and mental and physical health. The research questions and methodology borrow from and build upon existing historiography on immigration restrictions and physical and mental health across imperial, colonial, and settler colonial sites, and place the mashriq and maghrib into conversation with global processes and phenomenon regarding the enforcement of the imperial and post-colonial medico-legal border.