The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent division of the Arab East into “mandate” territories administered by Britain and France had enormous implications for the region’s inhabitants. Intentionally or not, the League of Nations opened up a new discursive space in which the Ottoman Empire’s former subjects sought to assert themselves and their interests on a global stage. An exciting new vein of scholarship has begun to explore the ways in which Syro-Lebanese migrants living abroad advanced visions of nationalism and identity through vibrant cultural and intellectual production. Some scholars have also recognized the important role played by the mahjar (diaspora) in anti-colonial nationalist movements during the interwar period, as immigrants leveraged their hybrid positions and transnational networks to advocate on behalf of their rapidly-changing homeland. This paper examines French attempts to regulate and police the Syro-Lebanese diaspora community in the 1920s and 30s, arguing that France viewed these diaspora communities as extensions of its “mandate” in Syria and Lebanon. Drawing on French intelligence reports from the High Commission in Beirut, French consular files from around the world, international newspapers, and rare collections of personal correspondence, this study begins by demonstrating French anxieties about activists working outside the borders of Syria and Lebanon and highlights efforts to monitor emigration. It then advances a comparative analysis of French efforts to surveil diaspora communities in several countries including Brazil and Argentina and extend its disciplinary reach beyond its immediate jurisdiction. Tactics included employing consular dragomans as informants embedded in diaspora communities, planting articles in diaspora newspapers, and nurturing personal ties with mahjar luminaries. In explaining why French efforts to influence the Syro-Lebanese diaspora were more successful in some areas than in others, this paper insists on the agency and heterogeneity of the diaspora to both undermine and facilitate state disciplinary structures. Mindful of important new studies on the policing of immigrant communities in the present day, this paper offers a historical perspective which calls for a broader and more globalized understanding of how immigrant communities from the Middle East are monitored and “managed.”