In March 1905, the ‘Amara seniye lands commission accused Ghadban al-Bunyan, shaykh of the Bani Lam, of trying to illicitly acquire the Chahala tax farm by means of a “borrowed name” contract. Claims – by both officials and shaykhs – that others were using “borrowed names” to illegally bid on tax farm contracts proliferated in late Ottoman ‘Amara, often alongside accusations of “banditry.” This paper will explore how a suite of illicit behaviors centered on banditry and borrowed names came to define the edge of the Ottoman community in ‘Amara, and will argue that these behaviors were increasingly spatialized through association with the practice of border-crossing, ultimately confining Ottoman identity both discursively and spatially. In a context of fierce competition over scarce tax farms in the rice lands on the Tigris, officials used accusations of borrowed-name contracts primarily to explain the difficulty of locating tax farmers who were both “neutral” and “local,” characteristics at the intersection of multiple reform projects. Shaykhs, though, buttressed their bids for tax farms by contrasting accusations of banditry and borrowed names with claims to officially-recognized goods like “subjecthood” and “honesty.” Linking these to an assertion of the right to “not fall into obscurity” through access to “refuge and homeland,” shaykhs claimed simultaneous local and Ottoman identities, arguing that (former) bandits could be Ottoman on the same terms as anyone else. However, through the competition over tax farms, groups living in the trans-border marshes on the frontier with Iran often used the border as a tool in their negotiations with Ottoman authorities. Border-crossing was part of a toolkit that allowed shaykhs to jockey for position within the Ottoman system. But both it and the marshes became increasingly associated with banditry and borrowed names, as tribes who were temporarily resident in Iran were forced to rely on these strategies to access land – but also as shaykhs whipped up fears that rivals would allow thousands of armed Qajar subjects across the border to cause violence and unrest. So, the use of the border as a political resource led to an increasingly spatialized understanding of banditry, and of Ottoman identity, ultimately making it more and more difficult for shaykhs to cross back. Squeezed both discursively and spatially, they found themselves increasingly counted out of the Ottoman political community and denied access to land, as their vision of the possibility of overlapping Ottoman and tribal belonging receded.