In the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of Muslims migrated from former Ottoman lands, fleeing an encroaching Russian Empire in the North Caucasus and Crimea and nationalist struggles in the Balkans. The financially strapped Ottoman state welcomed these newcomers as part of larger efforts to settle arable land, increase Muslim population density, broaden the tax base, and maintain its legitimacy as the Islamic caliphate. Historians have noted the demographic significance of these mass migrations, suggesting the influx of Muslims was essential in the political and demographic “Islamization” of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Although this demographic shift was an important component within the broader changes of the Ottoman reform era, immigration policies and outcomes of migrant integration remain understudied. The narrative of nineteenth century mass migration into the Ottoman Empire frequently focuses on migrant arrival and settlement, but medium and long-term processes are just as essential to understanding immigrant incorporation. This paper will consider those processes by examining migrants’ requests for religious and educational resources. Education policy in the late Ottoman Empire is frequently read as a social engineering tactic, with the extension state-sponsored education meant to assimilate newcomers into Ottoman state and society. Though new schools and religious institutions did increase migrant interaction with state officials and may have been intended to facilitate loyalty to the Ottoman state, this paper examines the allocation of religious and educational institutions as community-building efforts frequently driven by migrants themselves. This paper will rely on petitions and other evidence of migrant efforts to gain access to existing educational institutions and to fund religious and educational infrastructure in developing communities. Through a migrant-centric narrative, the paper considers how newcomers articulated claims for resources, why they saw the Ottoman state as a provider of those resources, and how they achieved their desired results. This paper offers insight into migrant interactions with the state, the process of migrant community building, and the role of mosques and schools in Ottoman immigrant integration.