Labor Migrants or Refugees? Armenian Mobility Between Two Empires

Following the Emergency Quota Act of May 19, 1921, thousands of petitions arrived at the Bureau of Immigration in the US regarding Armenian immigrants, specifically a group of women and children detained in Ellis Island. While the Near East Relief urged the US government to accept more Armenians, the assistant secretary of Labor, Robe Carl White, claimed that “the aliens coming from the Near East are not, to any great extent, of the producing class” and they could not put those women and children to agricultural work, among people whose language they do not speak. According to him, Armenians arriving after WWI differed from those who came in the 1890s, who typically worked as peasants or in blue-collar jobs.

Armenian transatlantic mobility indeed began as a labor migration at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the government of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1908) quickly turned a sojourn into refuge with an imperial decree which encouraged Armenians to emigrate under the condition that they renounce their Ottoman subjecthood and sign documents attesting that they would never return. This decree also prevented Armenians who migrated before 1896 from coming back. While the United States initially supported Armenian migration, the government's stance on Armenian mobility shifted significantly during the 1920s, with the change in first, the demographics of the incoming Armenian community and second, the immigration policies in the wake of World War I.

White’s quote highlights the interwar ethos of assimilating refugees into labor systems, reflecting the era's blurred distinction between refugees and economic migrants. Despite suffering persecution in the Ottoman Empire, Armenian's plight was seen as economic. Offering to examine Armenians as refugees, this paper analyzes how the Ottoman imperial policies, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the quota acts of the US contributed to leaving Armenians in limbo.