This paper examines Middle Eastern migrants who circulated through Central America and the Caribbean Basin in the twentieth century. During this period, numerous Latin American state policies aimed to regulate or stem Middle Eastern migrant mobility (both across and within national borders). We have traditionally conceptualized these types of historical cases of legal exclusion as race-based. In contrast, this study posits that the twentieth century rise of foreign corporations contributed to policies that while outwardly racialized, were in fact intended to target migrants with certain occupations that threatened their monopoly over local economies. This study examines the rise of the United Fruit Company (est. 1899), whose rapid neocolonial expansion into the Caribbean Basin was contemporaneous with the era of rising out-migration from the Ottoman Empire. I argue that Ottoman Syrian occupational tendencies toward entrepreneurship - rather than a simple question of race or ethnicity - likely impacted state stances toward Middle Eastern migrants. At the same time, their position as entrepreneurs often provided these migrants with networks of resources that enabled them to render exclusion policies ineffective. This paper draws together histories of state restriction, exclusion, and confinement policies toward migrants, and the analysis of archives that shed light on the lived social geographies of Middle Eastern migrants.