Muslim Bans Past: Immobilizing Ottoman Migrants in Wartime America, 1917–20

In July 1919, the United States federal Bureau of Investigation discovered a group of Turkish-speaking Kurds boarding a steamship destined for Diyarbakir. The men’s passports listed them as Syrians travelling under the protection of the French Consulate, but when a port agent greeted them in Arabic they spat at him, “we are not Arabs, but Turks!” Their documents turned out to be fraudulent and in violation of U.S. laws forbidding the departure of all (non-Syrian) Ottoman subjects until the conclusion of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Police arrested a network of Greek, Turkish, and Belgian nationals working under James Fay, a man who profited enormously from the production of fake passports pronouncing Turks and Kurds as “Syrians” for purposes of repatriation to Anatolia.

This paper examines the history of the Syrian exemption from laws governing the travel rights of Ottoman nationals living in America after 1918. “Syrian” emerged as a legal category in U.S. law as a result of civilian court cases in 1915 and the 1917 military draft order, strongly connoted with “white” Arabic-speaking Christians. But federal investigations into passport fraud demonstrate that “Syrian” had taken further national-origins characteristics linked to American understandings of Middle Eastern geography following the 1918 armistice. U.S. law maintained a hierarchy dictating which Ottoman subjects were free to travel: Syrians were permitted but Turks, Kurds, and other Muslim Ottomans were not. These standards emerged before the actual territories delineating who was “Turkish” and who was “Syrian” were formally settled. The 1919 Fay case illustrates the power of documentary regimes to impose nationality on migrants, and migrants’ struggle to recognize themselves in a system which conflated language, race, and geography in incoherent ways.