Between 1888-1915, thousands of Armenians, as well as Lebanese and Syrian Christian, and Muslim laborers of the Ottoman Empire left their home for the Americas to the maintain their families which they left behind. Armenians often did not intend to remain in North America and therefore searched for ways of return to the Ottoman Empire. Although the scholarship on Armenian migration has not concentrated on return, the archival records of the Ottoman Empire demonstrate that there was a considerable number of Armenians who tried to come back and this caused a serious problem for the Ottoman state. While concentrating on return, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on social mobility at the turn of the twentieth century and the state’s concerns over who entered and exited its borders. It will go on to demonstrate the relationship between the state and its mobile subjects. More specifically it will discuss the process that allowed Ottoman Armenians to emigrate if only they fulfilled the conditions that they give up their subjecthood, sign a document attesting that they would not come back, and abandon their property. This paper will demonstrate how the policies that encouraged Armenian emigration on the condition of no return went hand in hand with the elimination of the number of Armenians living within the empire through pogroms by the mid-1890s. Apart from the requirements mentioned above, Armenians also had to deliver two identifying photographs to the Ottoman state. Denaturalization of targeted populations and methods devised to control their movements such as photo registers remains a little-studied subject. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by analyzing the official migration photographs obtained from the Ottoman state archives and the state documents, indicating the no return policy of the Ottoman state and the treatment of Armenian returnees. I argue that this requirement was devised to keep a visual record of those banned from coming back, to check against lists of denaturalized subjects and the properties they abandoned. Ottoman Armenian migration occupies a space between forced expulsion and voluntary migration and Armenians’ agencies shifted between the conditions forced them to migrate and their own wills in choosing this journey. Due to the migration policies of the Ottoman government, Armenians found themselves in legal limbo, and they had to negotiate their identities between Ottoman subjecthood and statelessness.