America’s peculiar preoccupation with the U.S.-Mexico border as a site for national security threat draws on a deep well of historical precedent, including the strange story of “prayer rugs in the desert.” Though contemporary discourse frames the question of border security around the restriction of irregular immigration by Latin Americans, America’s first attempts at border control targeted Asian and Middle Eastern migrants. This paper examines the development of U.S. federal policies to prohibit and police cross-border mobility of Turkish, Syrian, and Assyrian migrants coming from Mexico, from the Mexican Revolution to the Great Depression. It argues officials targeted Middle Eastern migration specifically on Islamophobic bases, transforming Muslim mobility into a perceived national security threat. By extension, U.S. experiences of combatting irregular border crossings by Middle Eastern migrants shaped America’s first border control policies, imbuing border agencies with institutional perceptions of crossings as culturally threating that later carried over to policing of Mexican migrants. Though America has not remembered the Middle Eastern migrants who once lived in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the legacy of border policing that targeted them continues to shape perceptions of the borderlands today.

In a little hut in the imperial military cemetery of Alexandria, the British caretaker, Mr. Dunn, had coffee, tea, and a glass of arak with an unknown “native” as he cooked dinner in the darkness of night, 6 November 1927. As Mr. Dunn turned to take a pot of macaroni off the stove, his dinner guest knocked him to the ground and proceeded to “throttle” him to death, breaking all of his ribs and causing “amazing” internal injuries. In the immediate aftermath of his murder, the British community in Egypt – including colonial, governmental officials, local Alexandrian consular employees, and members of the Imperial War Graves commission - struggled to determine what lessons they should draw from the brutality of Mr. Dunn’s demise. The investigation into Mr. Dunn’s murder revealed an extensive hashish ring operating out of the foreign-national cemeteries at Shatby, led by indigenous Egyptian caretakers. These hashish dealers had access to the military, Jewish, Free Thinkers, and Protestant cemeteries. Mr. Dunn was deemed to be too friendly with natives, having perhaps invited his own death. These cemeteries, worried British officials, with their temptations of “native” associations and their link to a criminal network, were too dangerous for Englishmen to stay in at night. Possible rectifications included the firing of all Egyptian employees, the posting of police at the entrance of every cemetery, and the arming all British caretakers. This paper takes the murder of Mr. Dunn and the subsequent investigation and negotiations between the British consulate, the Imperial War Graves Commission, the Alexandrian police and government, and the Egyptian national government as its starting point to ask questions of criminality, the classifications of the dead, and the social and physical boundaries built in 1920s Alexandria. It seeks to explore the rhetoric of separation, wherein British officials declared the sanctity of British and military graves and the protection of British life to be in contradistinction to the passive, inherently criminal network of all Egyptians. The foreign-national cemeteries thus served as physical ramifications of the dangers of British/Egyptian association, and the cleansing of all “native” employees was sought as the ideal solution. In an attempt to monitor and protect their countrymen, British officials sought to impose strict social and physical boundaries that would definitively control both the Egyptian living and the foreign dead.

Sultan Abdülhamid II’s (1876-1909) abrogation of the 1876 constitution soon after his installation and in the midst of the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman war plunged the empire into a prolonged “stage of siege,” as Noëmi Levy-Aksu has described it. Constitutional rule would not be reinstituted until the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that stripped Abdülhamid II of his autocratic powers. Censorship, repression of dissent, and violence against perceived enemies of the state quickly became defining characteristics of the Hamidian era. At the same time, the late nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in the numbers of Ottoman subjects traveling abroad to study, find work, or engage in trade. The Hamidian regime viewed overseas migration, especially among non-Muslim, as a threat to the empire’s domestic security. Of particular concern was the migration of Armenians from the empire’s eastern provinces, a phenomenon that Istanbul believed was inextricably linked with the simultaneous rise of Armenian revolutionary politics. Beginning in the mid-1890s, Ottoman diplomats in the United States embarked on an ambitious effort to monitor and surveil Armenian migrants living in the country. Ottoman officials were especially eager to glean information about the ways in which these migrants maintained contact with their home communities in the empire’s eastern provinces, and to monitor the movements of suspected revolutionaries. These surveillance reports contributed to the growing sense among many in the imperial bureaucracy that mobile Armenians posed a grave threat. This paper will discuss the image of the Armenian migrant as a “national security” threat in Ottoman state discourse, particularly within the context of the empire-wide state of siege that defined the Hamidian era. Further, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, anxieties about the return of Armenian migrants from North America spurred the Ottoman state to adopt strategies intended to keep such individuals from reentering the empire that over the course of the twentieth century would become staple practices of modern border security. Thus, far from being a illiberal outlier in an age of more-or-less open borders, the criminalization and vilification Armenian migrants and the increasingly sophisticated efforts that Istanbul employed to stymie their mobility foreshadowed the near universalization of anti-migrant discourses and punitive practices in the twentieth and early twenty-first century worlds.

Since the start of the Syrian war in 2011, over 3 million Syrians have sought protection in Turkey, making it the world’s top refugee hosting country without granting refugee status to any of its asylum applicants. As the conflict persisted, Turkish authorities developed longer-term models of border control and asylum beyond the emergency needs of Syrians. This paper examines the contradictions that emerge from the increasing state involvement in the deployment of these models in Antakya near Turkey’s border with Syria. Turkey’s “Temporary Protection Regime” provides Syrians with differential inclusion in the form of legal access to health, education, and employment, and through a formal discourse of religious kinship and hospitality. Such inclusion, however, works to obscure the Syrians’ removal from the conventional modern state apparatus as non-citizens, and disrupts their day-to-day relations with the locals upon whom they depend for social and economic survival. In Antakya where the largest proportion of Arab citizens of Turkey have resided since the province’s annexation from Syria in 1939, these contradictions are thrown into sharper relief and articulated through state-induced sectarian (Alawi-Sunni) divisions as the Turkish state moves from an open border policy to the construction of a wall along its border with Syria. This paper provides an ethnographic analysis of these divisions and their transgressions based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Antakya between 2010 and 2012 and follow-up visits to the region in the summers of 2015, 2016, and in 2019. Fieldwork included participant observation in social settings such as the marketplaces, religious sites, community events, and households where displaced Syrians of diverse background interact with local citizens. I also draw on official discourses about local refugee resettlement, ethnographic interviews with Syrian and local families, and semi-structured interviews with local authorities, state actors, and civil society actors in Antakya. Through an interpretative analysis of this material, I call for a rethinking of state governance of borders and border-crossers beyond the bureaucratic procedures of status determination in institutional settings. Such governance, I argue, requires attention to the socially configured processes of power and differentiation that situate the governed within everyday relations of hospitality, kinship, and religion at the local level.

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.