How did emigration feature into the workings of the Egyptian state’s foreign policy under Gamal Abdel Nasser? More than forty years after Nasser’s death, the logistics behind Egypt’s pre-1967 migration policy have not been the subject of extensive research. Most studies on Egyptian population movements tend to skim the Nasserite period, on which little official data exist, and which is overshadowed by the later migration en masse to the oil-rich states. Only hints of the strategic value that Egypt attached to professionals’ temporary migration through its secondment program (niẓām al-i‘āra li-l-khārij) exist in research ranging from broad overviews on Egypt’s Nasserite era, to works published on the history of Arab states’ development, and from studies on Middle Eastern migration movements to international organisations’ policy reports. Yet, little of substance is known about seconded Egyptians’ actions abroad save from vague references to either ‘Egypt’s pioneering emigrants [who] first offered their skills to the nascent development of neighbouring Arab countries’ (Latowsky, 1984) or, more critically, to their role in ‘the revolutionary, Arab nationalist tide which inundated the Gulf and Arabian peninsula region in the 1950s’ (Naqib, 1990). In fact, by failing to examine this form of migration in depth and to properly contextualise it within Nasser’s political agenda, such studies underestimate the extent to which the policy of secondment constituted a key component of Egypt’s foreign policy. This paper argues that the Egyptian state allowed, and encouraged, seconded professionals’ political activism in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Gulf throughout the 1952-1967 period as the sole notable exception to an overall restrictive state emigration policy. It relies on two sources of data: first, it employs content analysis of the coverage of migration-related issues in the three main Egyptian newspapers (al-Ahram, al-Akhbar, al-Jumhuriya) in order to accurately trace the evolution of Egypt’s emigration policy under Nasser. Second, it analyses newly-declassified material from the British Foreign Office archives and unpublished reports from the Egyptian Ministry of Education in order to provide a detailed reconstruction of migrants’ political activism and regional migration’s importance for Egyptian foreign policy. By presenting a cache of archival material in analytical context, it offers concrete evidence of how migration buttressed Nasser’s regional ambitions at the chagrin of the British and the reticence of other Arab leaders, neither of whom were able to successfully counteract this unique foreign policy instrument.