Syrian Smuggling between the Local and the Global

Starting from the mid-1890s, a robust underground migration economy flourished among Arab Christians in Greater Syria binding North America to Europe to Asia. Local men of prestige and capital set up expansive, closely-knit smuggling conduits formed through bonds of compatriotism, religion, language, and kinship. They came to control each step of the migration process in countries of departure and arrival, as well as in transit: the sale of steamship tickets, transporting migrants from land to sea, and en route lodging. The large scale migration and the lucrative nature of the business made migrant smuggling a desirable profession among the region’s Arab Christians for promising enormous cash returns. The smuggling rings attracted a huge workforce from across the board including boatmen, steamship runners, interpreters, merchants, and innkeepers all with connections to each other and responsible for cross-Atlantic journeys from Beirut to New York (Razek Reference Razek2018, 114). Smugglers’ services became indispensable in the era of modern border regimes that curtailed the freedom of movement for many in the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and around the world (Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 108, 119-120; Razek Reference Razek2018, 114).

The Sublime Porte’s adoption of new restrictive passport technologies increased the popularity of informal immigration brokers among Ottoman Arab migrants as early as the 1890s. Under the Internal Passport Regulation of 1887, migration became a privilege only for a few in the upper echelons of Ottoman society such as diplomats and tradesmen. By adopting this law, the Ottoman state instituted a new system of travel permits to control domestic and international travel from and to the empire. Its objective was to limit the mobility of “unwanted [Ottoman] elements” who were perceived as a threat to the empire’s national security after major Ottoman territorial losses in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Istanbul aimed to block the passage of seditious ideas from one region to another for potentially upsetting the Ottoman public order. The requirement for obtaining an Ottoman passport before any kind of travel was a step towards migrant filtering to stop the exit and reentry of certain groups of people into Ottoman dominions (Akarli Reference Akarli, Hourani and Shehadi1992, 110-122, 123-125; Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 114; Gutman Reference Gutman2019, 4; Naff Reference Naff1985, 92-94; Razek Reference Razek2018, 114; Yilmaz Reference Yılmaz2023, 4, 6-10, 146, 161-162, 166).

The demand for travel permits for Ottoman international travel however backfired, covertly legitimizing what states believe to be illicit forms of migration. As Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi argue “outlaw practices and smuggling are immanent features of modern nation-states.” They are “both a consequence and constitutive of borders and bordering practices” (Keshavarz and Khosravi Reference Keshavarz, Khosravi, Keshavarz and Khosravi2022, 2, 4). Reports stored in the Ottoman archives indicate that migrants from Mount Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria applied to smugglers for help to find ways out of the empire. This resulted in a scandalous abuse of the Ottoman internal passport system much to the dismay of Ottoman state elites who were successfully deceived by Arab migrant smugglers. On behalf of Syrian émigrés, underground immigration professionals obtained internal travel permits under the false pretenses of domestic travel within the empire. But, in reality, migrants were taken either to Egypt or Cyprus – both nominal Ottoman territories – only later to board transatlantic steamships bound to Marseille. Others travelled without proper legal documentation. As prominent Ottomanist Engin Akarli argues, “smuggling had become a way of life in and around Beirut and was viewed as natural and perfectly legitimate activity” in the early twentieth century (Akarli Reference Akarli, Hourani and Shehadi1992, 128). For many impoverished Ottoman Arab villagers, smugglers provided an escape from abysmal economic conditions and government surveillance (Akarli Reference Akarli, Hourani and Shehadi1992, 110-122, 123-125; Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 114-117, 130, 143; Naff Reference Naff1985, 92-94; Razek Reference Razek2018, 114; Yilmaz Reference Yılmaz2023, 182-183).

Washington’s unilateral immigration restrictions complementing Ottoman restrictions from behind the seas created greater parity that further empowered Arab migrant smugglers. The major immigration reforms of the US federal government between 1882 and 1917 allowed underground immigration professionals to accumulate extensive influence on migrants and high-ranking state officials across continents. The US Immigration Act of 1882 broadened the category of the excludable migrant significantly: denials of migrants under the new LPC category, or those individuals found to have “loathsome and contagious diseases”, spiked overdependence on smugglers. “And the foreigner has to be in good shape because the eyes are watching him when he came and where he left, especially at the Immigration Service,” wrote Hulwah (Reference Hulwah1909, 50). Most first-time Syrian migrants unaccustomed to the laws of transcontinental migration entrusted travel intermediaries of their flesh and blood because they were afraid of racial profiling by immigration inspectors at Ellis Island (Razek Reference Razek2018, 105-106, 111).

A panoramic overview of the mechanisms of travel among neighboring nations and empires reveals that Syrians were one among many groups relying on the services of smugglers. Armenian migrants from the Ottoman Empire also took the back channels of migration to arrive in the United States in the early twentieth century when Istanbul criminalized their movement abroad. Resorting to the help of transnational Armenian smuggling networks became an alternative to circumvent the Ottoman government’s discriminatory policies that regarded every Armenian migrant to North America as a “potential revolutionary” and “conspirator” against the Ottoman state. Unauthorized migration helped Armenians retain the right of return to ancestral lands in easternmost Anatolia because legal migration entailed revoking the Ottoman nationality out of perceived threat to the empire’s security. “Illegal” migration routes similarly catered to non-Slavic communities such as Germans and Jews in the bordering Russian Empire. St. Petersburg’s travel bans on German and Jewish repatriation from the United States parallelly consolidated a migrant smuggling economy around the same time for targeted Russian minorities (Gutman Reference Gutman2019, 4-8; Lohr Reference Lohr2012, 106-107; Gürsel Reference Gürsel2023, 8; Yilmaz Reference Yılmaz2023, 4).

In the aftermath of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, nationals from China again found unauthorized travel as the sole option to cross into the United States. Smugglers facilitated the transfer of so-called undesirable migrants victimized by blatantly discriminatory immigration bans prohibiting the arrival of particular ethno-racial groups from countries blacklisted by the US government. As national immigration bureaucracies expanded to control transcontinental travel in the age of the steamship, underground travel corridors emerged to disrupt them, subverting state-led efforts to achieve demographic engineering through selective immigration (Benton-Cohen Reference Benton-Cohen2018, 16; McKeown Reference McKeown2008, 2-6, 11-12, 140, 270; Lohr Reference Lohr2012, 95-96; Gutman Reference Gutman2019, 4; Lew-Williams Reference Lew-Williams2018, 70-7).

At the same time, by facilitating the transit and arrival of migrants, smugglers got addicted to the taste of corruption and bullying (Razek Reference Razek2018, 113-114; Akarli Reference Akarli, Hourani and Shehadi1992, 126). In narrating their experiences, outbound Syrian migrants began not with the indignities of Ellis Island, but the cruelties of the Ottoman coastlines, where Syrian smugglers charted the exit of their clients from the empire to foreign destinations. For example, one US-bound Syrian migrant recalled in an oral history how her family was stranded on the Batrun seaside in northern Lebanon for almost a week by the agent arranging for their departure. Not only did he purposefully delay their parting because of being lured to extracting more cash from his clients, but he also overinflated the price of the boat fare from the coast to the foreign steamer waiting offshore. The woman witnessed her father’s acquiescence to ongoing harassment by smugglers because he was under duress to evade government arrest. She states that when her father objected to the added rate, he was warned “that the others had been caught and the authorities were on the lookout for emigrants, that he had better get in” (Naff Reference Naff1985, 95). Arab smugglers routinely preyed on the desperation of Syrian migrants en route to the United States subjecting them to “severe” and “inhuman” treatment,” as described in Ottoman state records (Akarli Reference Akarli, Hourani and Shehadi1992, 126; Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 123-124; Razek Reference Razek2018, 113-114).

The level of ruthlessness of smuggling agents however became unfathomable as soon as Syrian migrants left the Ottoman shores. Marseille was among the most notorious European way stations where smugglers bet their fortune on ordinary migrant sojourners, and openly tortured them as they awaited steamships bound to the United States. “Emigrants found themselves caught deeper in the claws of the [smuggling] network” in Marseille, and the immigration port was generally described as a living “hell for migrants” in New York’s Arabic-language press (“Marsilya, al-suriyyun wa trachoma,” al-Huda, August 15, 1913, 4; Akarli Reference Akarli, Hourani and Shehadi1992, 112; Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 126). As Hulwah outlines in his manual, smugglers would swiftly approach docking migrants, pretending to be the runners sent to receive them only to lure them into their fraudulent schemes. A common tactic involved asking “who are you coming to?” The migrant responded Zeyd, and the smuggler answers I am sent by Zeyd to meet you – come with me” alerted Hulwah (Reference Hulwah1909, 55). Due to their inability to fend for themselves because of language limitations and lack of travel experience, Syrian migrants easily fell prey to the whims of smugglers in transit.

Syrian smugglers prolonged migrant stays in the transit port, taking their wealth and occasionally ripping them off. Steamship runners and hotel keepers overcharged their clients, others kept migrants in unsanitary conditions or intentionally stretched their departure for weeks and sometimes even for months. Many lost their hard-earned money initially saved for travel and lodging, finding themselves stuck in European port cities incapable of moving ahead with their journeys or returning to the places from where they came (Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 124, 143). They also contracted contagious diseases such as trachoma that set the pretext for migrant expulsion by US border enforcers. As Rana Razek (Reference Razek2018, 106-107, 111, 120) contends, Syrian smugglers created the circumstances of migrant racialization in transit before arrival to the gates of America at Ellis Island. The unwanted qualities that US immigration inspectors attributed to Syrians were primarily produced on the route, narrowing their eligibility of entry into the country as non-European migrants at the peak of Asian racial exclusion.

“Patriotic” and “Unpatriotic” Smugglers?

Arab editors and columnists in the United States closely monitored the transactions of what Naff calls Syrian smuggler “port colonies” in Marseille at the turn of the twentieth century (Naff Reference Naff1985, 92). Worried about the fate of Syrian migrants embarking on transatlantic journeys, they established new rules of respectability for Arab Christian migrant smugglers from the Ottoman Empire. Patriotism or devotion to the national honor of Syrian migrants in transit served as the main moral benchmark of rightness defining the Syrian smuggling profession. Syrian underground immigration professionals were expected to provide protection to the weak and vulnerable Syrian migrants out of national obligation towards children of the same homeland. Their honorability rested on avoiding corrupt practices anchored in vice and personal greed that violated rather than benefitted the collective wellbeing of male and female Syrian migrants. This ethical framework featured as a basis to divide informal Syrian immigration brokers into “patriotic” and “unpatriotic” camps considering their contributions to the Syrian public good.

New York’s major Arabophone newspapers bestialized opportunistic underground immigration professionals tarnishing the national image of Syrians at US borders. They scorned this batch of smugglers for failing to honor their civic duties towards the nation by engaging in demeaning behavior that harmed the dignity of their brothers and sisters roaming on the routes of migration in Marseille. The Druze-owned al-Bayan newspaper joined with other factions of the Syrian American community to classify smugglers feasting on the wellbeing of migrants as “traitors to the nation” acting ruthlessly “without thinking about the fatherland and the nation.” Syrian diasporic newsmen in the United States were disappointed with the Machiavellian predatory tendencies of these unscrupulous smugglers for betraying members of their group. They were even stripped of their humanity likened to “wild animals” for being solely driven by self-interest similar to “wolves” running after new herds of debarking migrant “sheep” (“Marsilya, al-suriyyun wa trachoma,” al-Huda, August 15, 1913, 4; “Lusus suriyyun fi Marsilya,” al-Bayan, February 7, 1911, 3; “Shakwa al-muhajirin al-suriyyin min samasira Marsilya wa Beirut,” al-Huda, March 14, 1905, 4; Wynter Reference Wynter2003, 266).

Most infuriating for Syrian diasporic male publishers was the carelessness of smugglers towards the moral and sexual integrity of migrant women waiting in transit. Affected by white middle-class ideas on honorable masculinity and gender, Syrian newsmen emasculated smugglers not offering paternalistic care to Syrian “women wanderers” en route to the United States. Like fathers and husbands, smugglers were responsible for protecting the honor of Syrian women and defending the national reputation writ large in front of strangers. Like true men, they were supposed to think about the comfort of their mothers and daughters leaving home rather than “robbing a Syrian woman from your country, from your race.” The diasporic press lambasted smuggler men indifferent to the plight of expatriate Syrian women just as it attacked Syrian husbands for letting their wives take jobs such as peddling outside migrant households. As Arab American Studies scholar Charlotte Karem Albrecht explains, existing elitist preoccupations on female and national honor in the United States haunted diasporic discussions on masculine propriety in the Syrian smuggling profession. Hence, plunging women into poverty counted as a grossly treacherous deviation from the patriotic course and was designated a major patriarchal failure for bringing dishonor and shame to the Syrian prestige abroad (Albrecht Reference Albrecht2023, 81-82, 89-92, 95; Mays Reference Mays2020, 129-130; Nagel Reference Nagel1998, 245, 254). “You mercilessly plundered the money and tortured the woman without the slightest regard for the pulse of the fatherland and the nation to which she belongs because you are not of her, but of a demonic class…” asserted al-Bayan (“Lusus suriyyun fi Marsilya,” al-Bayan, February 7, 1911, 3).

The coercion of Syrian women into prostitution because of abuses by their smuggler road brothers was among the biggest fears of upper-class Syrian activists in the United States. It might have been a valid concern as the news reports in Syrian American newspapers indicate, the growing number of migrant women surrendering to vice caused by cash shortages. Narrowly fixated on their pockets and ways to amass wealth in no time, some smugglers exhibited little care to the probity of Syrian women by feeding off the bread of these helpless women. In a patriarchal world order, this had disastrous consequences on the chances of motherhood of many migrant Syrian women who were being forced into sex work to compensate for the stolen sums vital for their survival (“al-Suriyyun fi Marsilya,” al-Huda, August 7, 1911, 2; “Dhi’ab Marsilya,” Mirat al-Gharb, November 9, 1910, 3; “Shakwa al-muhajirin al-suriyyin min samasira Marsilya wa Beirut,” al-Huda, March 14, 1905, 4). “How many pure and beautiful girls fell prey to smuggler wolves, choosing suicide or living in shame—losing their futures, while the world lost the virtuous mothers they might have become?,” lamented New York’s prestigious al-Huda newspaper (“Jahannam al-suriyyin wa shakwa al-muhajirin,” al-Huda, February 2, 1905, 7). Syrian diasporic elites were disturbed by the ruination smuggler exploitation inflicted on the image of vulnerable migrant women ideally confined to the private realms of the home and the family. This was unpatriotic in two ways. First, smugglers through such infringements on the honor of Syrian women were liable for the downfall of the Syrian patriarchal family. Second, lack of marriage topped with affiliation with prostitution raised greater suspicions among US authorities on the “moral turpitude” of Syrian female travelers left out of patriarchal family structures. Thus, they could have been denied entry into the United States when judged against white Christian middle-class patriarchal standards on femininity that vilified women unfitting with American definitions of womanhood, pushing them further into precarity (Tawil Reference Tawil2022, 124, 137).

Public animosity between smugglers and migrants – or between rival smugglers – was another source of panic for Syrian diasporic editors in the United States. Feuds within the Arab smuggler community in Europe reflected poorly on the national image of Syrians as a disharmonious group lacking a patriotic spirit uniting the children of the homeland. “Legal appeals against the Marseille smugglers have become so frequent that hardly a week passes without reading about them in the newspapers – accounts that fill us with shame,” communicated the al-Huda reporter from Marseille (“Shakwa al-muhajirin al-suriyyin min samasira Marsilya wa Beirut,” al-Huda, March 14, 1905, 4). Dispatches coming out of Mediterranean port cities in Europe exhibited the flooding of local courts with dozens of complaints filed by Syrian migrants against their smuggling agents. These could have left an indelible stain on the prestige of Syrians as the legal challenges sometimes erupted into angry public protests on the streets against chronic mistreatments by their brothers on the road (‘Abd al-Jalil, “Samasira Marsilya, kalam jadid fi al-mawḍu’ al-qadim,” al-Huda, March 23, Reference ‘Abd al-Jalil1910, 4). For example, in 1910, a small group of transit migrants in Genoa rallied against the imposition of extra taxes by Syrian smugglers. They marched to the offices of the Immigration Service and the local Ottoman Consulate, to garner support for grievances they faced. When their appeals were ignored, the migrants sparked a public uproar that drew the attention of foreign newspapers (“al-Muhajirun wa al-samasira,” Part 1, al-Huda, June 16, 1911, 4).

Heated hostilities between rival Arab smugglers were also not welcomed by upper-class diasporic men for sharpening the negative reputation of Syrians in the eyes of Europeans. Fierce competition between underground immigration agents turned smuggling into an evil practice no longer serving a noble patriotic cause for being overrun by personal greed. It put the honor of Syrian migrants on the ground; they were no more recognized as humans but as a pile of booty over which immigration brokers were fighting to grab their respective share. “Luckily the natives do not understand their [Arabic] language, they are unable to know the horrendous magnitude of the exchanged cursing,” wrote a Syrian commentator in 1911. He added that local police intervention was often required to stanch burning tensions between competing factions of smugglers. For Syrian commentators in the press, fiery physical confrontations and crude verbal insults made Syrian men look violent, and therefore not white and worthy of immigration (“al-Muhajirun wa al-samasira,” Part 2, al-Huda, June 19, 1911, 4).

Syrian diasporic newspapers, meanwhile, celebrated a handful of smugglers exalted for their patriotism. In Marseille, Antun Fares emerged as an exemplary hero in the pages of New York’s al-Huda newspaper, the largest Arabic language daily owned and edited by Naoum Mokarzel. Mokarzel, who was a Maronite Christian from Mount Lebanon, worked relentlessly to bring his co-religionist and fellow compatriot Fares to fame. Al-Huda succeeded in soliciting articles from high-profile Syrian diasporic leaders stationed inside and outside the United States who sang Fares’s praises as an honorable simsar based in Marseille (Regnard Reference Regnard2022, 67; Suleiman Reference Suleiman1999, 71-74). In a 1905 letter by ‘Abbas Bejani, a prominent Syrian merchant in Paris, testified to Fares’s patriotic credentials averring that “his chivalry does not let him to sell the children of his fatherland” (“Shakwa al-muhajirin al-suriyyin min samasira Marsilya wa Beirut,” al-Huda, March 14, 1905, 4). Bejani presented Fares as an honorable man standing above the pernicious clan of underground immigration brokers who willingly abused their power for material advantage. He affirmed Fares’s paternalistic care towards the most vulnerable elements of the Syrian nation, protecting their honor from enemies from within (Bashkin Reference Bashkin and Pernau2015, 134-135).

However, contradictions around Fares’ character surface in the investigatory files of the US Bureau of Immigration, where a starkly different take on the extolled Syrian smuggler emerges. In 1903, immigration inspector Marcus Braun conducted an undercover mission to the port of Marseille, and he considered Fares as “one of the most dangerous and unscrupulous men in the business” (Braun Reference Braun and Sargent1903, 89). Braun depicted him as an evil lawbreaker connected to sneaky machinations to smuggle in as many undesirable Syrian migrants as possible through transnational contacts along the Mexico border (Braun Reference Braun and Sargent1903, 88; Razek Reference Razek2018, 117; Fahrenthold Reference Fahrenthold2024, 161). French government records even went as far as to suggest Fares being responsible for the spread of infectious diseases among his countrymen en route to the United States. Fares was ordered to shut down his hotel business and leave. The expulsion order issued in Marseille in 1903 listed his hotel malpractices that kept Syrian migrants in unsanitary living conditions before their departure (Regnard Reference Regnard2022, 70, 267). An integrative reading of these sources lays bare Fares’ mishandling of his fellow compatriots who were ostensibly treated with “justice, kindness, and care” as claimed by the Arab diasporic press (“Shakwa al-muhajirin al-suriyyin min samasira Marsilya wa Beirut,” al-Huda, March 14, 1905, 4).

The diaspora’s laudatory remarks of Antun Fares intensified in the wake of his return from exile from the northwestern Italian port city of Genoa to Marseille after a six-year ouster. A series of apologetic stories printed in the mahjar (diasporic) press in 1911 disputing allegations made against him temporarily ended Fares’ presence in Marseille. Syrian authors wrote aggrandizing essays portraying Fares as the victim of his public conscience that prioritized the welfare of his people over private gain. “It was thanks to Fares’s efforts that an [unethical] smuggling monopoly was dismantled in Marseille, causing significant financial losses for some monopolist smugglers” al-Huda reported. Antun Fares was hailed as a “patriot” and the head of the “resistance” belt (muqawama) against a crooked band of immigration brokers who ripped migrants off. One article reasoned that Fares faced punishment because he refused complicity in migrant exploitation which ultimately united his conspirators against him (“al-Muhajirun wa al-samasira,” Part 2, al-Huda, June 19, 1911, 4).

Mahjari elites pinpointed Antun Fares’s respectability as a kindhearted man and compatriot to restore his professional credibility across Syrian communities in the Ottoman Empire and the United States. As evidence to rebuild his public trust, circulating accounts cited the great respect Fares enjoyed among ordinary Syrians, intellectual elites, and government bureaucrats. They underlined the dramatic impact his relocation from Marseille had on the sudden surge of Syrian migrants in alternative transit hubs in Genoa and Napoli, showcasing his popularity among his clients (“al-Muhajirun wa al-samasira,” Part 2, al-Huda, June 19, 1911, 4). “The number of those [Syrian migrants] passing through Genoa was insignificant not exceeding a few hundred annually but after Fares’ arrival that number increased exponentially, reaching into the thousands” touted al-Huda (“al-Muhajirun wa al-samasira,” Part 1, al-Huda, June 16, 1911, 4). Fares was idolized as a true patriot due to his sway on the smuggling scene but also for his “return with dignity” with the help of the diaspora’s towering figures and the mediation of powerful Ottoman diplomats (“al-Muhajirun wa al-samasira,” Part 2, al-Huda, June 19, 1911, 4).

Antun Fares elevated into a legendary icon in the Syrian diasporic press in the United States during a tense political moment in Arab American history. His fame as a righteous Syrian smuggler transcended sectarian lines. His name was not only renowned in Maronite Christian circles through al-Huda newspaper that was influential but representative of a minor fraction of the Syrian community. Fares received endorsement as a righteous Syrian immigration broker guarding the national honor outside his Maronite community. He was commended by al-Huda’s rival Mirat al-Gharb newspaper in New York City run by Najib Diab who belonged to the Orthodox faith (al-Malaki Reference al-Malaki1998, 66, 69; Khater Reference Khater2005, 311-312; Suleiman Reference Suleiman1999, 72, 82). When the community was embroiled in conflict between Maronite and Orthodox Christians, Fares rose as an epitome of “chivalry, zeal, and trustworthiness” so different from “tricksters and fraud smugglers” attesting to a unanimous agreement on his unwavering fidelity to Syrian migrants (Abi Llami‘, “Samasira al-suriyyin fi Marsilya,” Mirat al-Gharb, October 16, Reference Abi Llami‘1911, 5).

Paternalistic Patriotism, Smuggling, and the Lebanese Emigration Bureau

Starting 1913, discussions in the Syrian diasporic press revolved around establishing an emigration commission in Mount Lebanon to offer additional support to migrants departing from Ottoman shores. Upper-class Syrian elites in New York City and Cairo deliberated about adding new government departments to stop the free reign of unethical immigration brokers operating without any “policing.” They underscored the merits of what was referred to as the Lebanese Emigration Bureau (Qalam al-Muhajara al-Lubnaniyya) to uphold Syrian smugglers in Beirut and other Mediterranean port cities to high professional standards. Through new localized bureaucratic procedures, the patrons of Syrian migrant communities hoped to bring smugglers of their own flesh and blood back to their patriotic senses.

At the beginning, mahjari elites in New York City counted on Ottoman state machinery to ameliorate the conditions of their nationals stuck in European transatlantic harbors. They thought the Ottoman state must shield its faithful subjects headed for the United States from smuggler assaults in transit. Writing in the short-lived al-Kawn newspaper in New York in 1908, Shibli Effendi Dammus demanded the appointment of Ottoman commissioners at European waypoints to maintain the wellbeing of Syrian travelers. Dammus implored Muhammad Ali Bek, the Ottoman Ambassador in Washington D.C., to persuade his masters in Istanbul to “take care of Ottoman migrants from the evil of smugglers and protect them from encroachments” (“Mataleb Shibl Dammus min ‘utufat al-safir,” al-Kawn, March 12, 1908, 8).

However, Dammus and others in the United States and elsewhere were soon irritated by Istanbul’s apathy towards the plight of Syrian migrants suffering in the hands of transnational smugglers stationed in and outside Ottoman imperial borders. As Kazım Baycar shows, the Ottoman government was hesitant in returning paperless Syrian migrants stranded in European ports to their places of origin for illegally leaving the empire without formal authorization (Baycar Reference Baycar2015, 125, 142-143). Disregard to the lives of migrants by Ottoman government agents giving in to handsome bribes from dishonorable smugglers further exasperated Syrian diasporic elites. By means of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau, they vowed to exert extraterritorial oversight on the Syrian contraband economy in Marseille.

The promoters of the project bet on rigid bureaucratic rituals to institutionalize the respectability of underground Syrian immigration brokers. In detailed roadmaps they published, the diasporic lobbyists of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau proposed a screening process for simsars to license only morally qualified men into the business. Under this proposal, smugglers who had become more visible in the Ottoman Empire following the 1908 Constitutional Revolution would apply for permits, given only after a clean criminal record corroborating their “good character and reputation.” In case of potential misdeeds such as overcharging, bribing, or mistreating women, severe retribution awaited licensed smugglers straying off the right patriotic path of dutifully serving their clients. The architects of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau proposed hefty fines and permit revocations for men indicted for migrant exploitation abroad (“al-Nahda al-Lubnaniyya wal mashari’ fi Lubnan,” Mirat al-Gharb, June 18, 1914, 4; “Mas’alat al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, June 5, 1913, 4; Gutman Reference Gutman2019, 159-160).

The Lebanese Emigration Bureau was seen as a vehicle to address the racial volatility of Syrian transit migrants in line with Western bureaucratic norms. Impelled by the dozens of reports on the agonies of Syrian migrants in custody of remorseless smugglers, diasporic activists backed the assignment of qualified medical and professional personnel in Genoa and Marseille to help with crackdown on treacherous travel intermediaries. This was to be paired with the posting of two Syrian commissioners at the same transit depots tasked with “finding ways to ensure the comfort of migrants in the hotels and other places” (“Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya: Mutasarrif Lubnan yukhassis malan lihaza al-qalam li-rahat al-muhajirin al-lubnaniyyin,” al-Huda, January 30, 1914, 4-5; “Mas’alat al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, June 5, 1913, 4; “al-Muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” Mirat al-Gharb, September 2, 1913, 3; “Li janeb Mutasarrifiyyat Jabal Luban al-jalila,” Mirat al-Gharb, September 11, 1913, 5).

The preliminary drafts of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau accessible from illustrious Syrian American newspapers delegated it the mission of imparting immigration knowledge to villagers sailing for the first time to the United States. The templates enumerated the officers’ role in acquainting Syrian migrants with international immigration policies through preparing, publishing, and distributing travel manuals in Arabic language. The advice literature would have foregrounded precaution and self-awareness to assess whether those going aboard from Ottoman Syria were “morally, intellectually, and bodily unfit” for travel. Its champions foresaw the Lebanese Emigration Bureau’s value to impede the endless pattern of blind migrant following to the fabrications of untrustful Syrian smugglers duping their clients (“Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnani: al-ihtimam bil-muhajirin al-Lubnaniyyin wa kul man yarkab al-bahr min marafi’ihim ghaya min ghayat Jam’iyat al-Nahda al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, February 21, 1914, 4; “Li janeb Mutasarrifiyyat Jabal Luban,” Mirat al-Gharb, September 11, 1913, 5; “Mas’alat al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, June 5, 1913, 4). Instead of falling for the lies of smugglers, Syrian transit migrants might have evaded being ignorantly classified as LPC upon arrival in the United States.

The plan for a Lebanese Emigration Bureau drew inspiration from Euro-American preemptive models of remote migration control adopted in the late nineteenth century. Italy stood out as a powerful example in the purview of upper-class Syrian mahjari elites following the country’s far-reaching immigration reforms in response to Washington’s unliteral racial exclusions. Fed up with the games of unethical smugglers causing the racialization of Syrians in transit, diasporic men were incentivized from Italian legislators to make Mount Lebanon into what scholars identify as an international “partner in gatekeeping” (Braun-Strumfels Reference Braun-Strumfels2023, 115-116, 121-124). They learned from Italy’s paternalistic emigration management skills to organize Syrian transatlantic departures from Ottoman terminals in congruence with the racialized immigration checklists of the United States. “The Lebanese government should follow in the footsteps of the Italian government” insisted Ibrahim Salim al-Najjar – a renowned Syrian journalist and the honorary president of Cairo’s LLP (“Mas’alat al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, June 5, 1913, 4). The proposed Lebanese Emigration Bureau mirrored its Italian counterpart known as the Commissariat of Emigration established in Rome in 1901 (Braun-Strumfels Reference Braun-Strumfels2023, 115-116, 121-124). Like Italians, Syrian activists too sought to optimize the admissibility of their migrant nationals hastily turned away for mismatching with US immigration prerequisites.

The origins of the idea were contested in the Syrian diasporic press such as al-Huda and Mirat al-Gharb perhaps overridden by deep sectarian conflicts that set into the community. Ibrahim Salim al-Najjar of Cairo was lionized by his comrades from within the Lebanon League of Progress and the larger al-Huda community for defending the Syrian public good in transit. Al-Najjar claimed credit for being the first to pitch the idea to administrators in the autonomous Ottoman province of Mount Lebanon in 1913 (“Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnani: al-ihtimam bil-muhajirin al-Lubnaniyyin wa kul man yarkab al-bahr min marafi’ihim ghaya min ghayat Jam’iyat al-Nahda al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, February 21, 1914, 4; “Jabal Lubnan wa al-muhajara,” al-Huda, November 28, 1913, 4).

Al-Najjar’s ownership of the idea was criticized by Orthodox Syrians in the United States. Disagreeing with al-Huda’s communal politics, Mirat al-Gharb turned the spotlight on presumably a non-Maronite Christian man by the name Khalil al-Aswad from New York for standing behind the Lebanese Emigration Bureau. Mirat downplayed Maronite al-Najjar’s agency pinpointing the role of Mount Lebanon’s newly appointed governor Ohannes Kuyumdjian Pasha in mentoring al-Najjar into the “Italian way.” Al-Aswad alluded that al-Najjar spent some time in Rome only upon the Mutasarrif’s (governor in Turkish) guidance to closely observe the Italian emigration system there.

This may be plausible because Ohannes Kuyumdjian Pasha served on an Ottoman diplomatic mission in Rome between 1898 and 1908 before being nominated by Istanbul as the governor of the Mountain. The mutessarif’s 1921 memoir, written after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, remains silent on this matter, limiting our ability to cross-check the credibility of the stories in the diasporic press. But by following the scripts of so-called “civilized governments,” al-Najjar and his companions in the mahjar proposed a Lebanese migration management system to respond to the asymmetrical securitization of national borders in transit. The Lebanese Emigration Bureau would have helped monitor the racial fitness of Syrians bound to the United States (“al-Muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” Mirat al-Gharb, September 2, 1913, 3; “Li janeb Mutasarrifiyyat Jabal Luban al-jalila,” Mirat al-Gharb, September 11, 1913, 5; “Jabal Lubnan,” Mirat al-Gharb, February 16, 1914, 4; “Thalathmi’at lira la takfi,” Mirat al-Gharb, May 14, 1914, 1; al-Malaki Reference al-Malaki1998, 47; Kuyumjian Reference Kuyumjian, Kevorkian, Tachjian, Paboudjian and Caloustian2015, 13).

The notion of installing a Lebanese Emigration Bureau gained stronger currency among diasporic elites in the critical years following the 1908 Ottoman Constitutional Revolution. As historian Bedross Der Matossian argues, the revolution opened the “Pandora’s Box of ethnic, religious, and political conflicts” in the empire giving rise to long-suppressed ethnic tensions. The lack of a universal consensus on the post-revolutionary political order and the competing definitions of Ottoman citizenship failed to unite Ottomans under one banner. The euphoric dreams of an egalitarian empire “began to fade” as ethnocentric bigotries among dominant and non-dominant Ottoman groups loomed large on the horizon. The situation exacerbated in 1913 as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the main force behind the Young Turk Revolution, consolidated its political power through a Coup D’etat against the backdrop of the devastating Balkan Wars. Committed to creating a “unified and centralized [Ottoman] state apparatus,” the CUP pursued discriminatory policies that favored Turkish cultural and political hegemony in the empire. For example, as part of this aggressive Ottoman state-building program, Turkish became the official language of the empire combined with the placement of Turkish-speaking employees to high government posts. Although hotly debated in Ottoman historiography, what is dubbed as “Turkification” increasingly alienated the empire’s non-Turkish, non-Muslim populations (Kansu Reference Kansu2000, 2, 8-10; Der Matossian Reference Der Matossian2014, 2-3, 5-7; Hanioğlu Reference Hanioğlu and Kasaba2008, 73-74; Minawi Reference Minawi2023, 183-185, 191-193).

The CUP’s administrative reforms and systematic attacks on the old political structure upset not only Ottoman religious and non-religious authorities in the empire as the scholarship argues but also diasporic communities abroad. The Lebanese Emigration Bureau was the Syrian American diaspora’s “reaction” to Istanbul’s monoethnic strategies of state centralization in the climate of mounting Turkish nationalism. By vesting jurisdictional power over emigration to Lebanese authorities, diasporic leaders sought to preserve the privileged political status of the Mount Lebanon Mutessarifate as demarcated by the international statutes of 1861. The parties proposing the Lebanese Emigration Bureau did not see their land as a “simple Ottoman province” as Carol Hakim puts it. They sympathized with a broader urge for Ottoman decentralization trending among Arab reformist groups present at the Arab Congress held in Paris in 1913 (Hakim Reference Hakim2013, 195-196, 202, 207, 210-212; Hanioğlu Reference Hanioğlu and Kasaba2008, 83; Kayalı Reference Kayalı1997, 63-64, 86-88, 100; “Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya: Mutasarrif Lubnan yukhassis malan lihaza al-qalam li-rahat al-muhajirin al-lubnaniyyin,” al-Huda, January 30, 1914, 4-5). Thus, the political implications of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau were local as much as global serving the nation’s interests in transit and at home.

The diasporic lobbyists of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau elaborated on its contribution in actualizing Mount Lebanon’s economic independence from the Ottoman center. Al-Najjar and others marketed this new unborn multi-branched migration agency as a generator of huge cash returns for the Mountain’s ailing economy and its integration into the global capitalist system. By preserving salubrious migrant bodies in transit, the Lebanese Emigration Bureau would have smoothed the passage of racially fit migrants ready for capitalist exploitation in the United States. The larger the number of Syrian migrants admitted to the mahjar the greater the financial returns for Mount Lebanon in the form of remittances sent back home to families. Al-Najjar was also optimistic about the Lebanese Emigration Bureau’s potential to expedite the repatriation of migrants to the Mountain, returnees who would be essential as investors and wage laborers. In a 1913 report sent to the Lebanese government, he estimated an additional net income of 8,000 Ottoman Liras annually would enter the Mountain’s coffers from services sold to migrants and smugglers. Al-Najjar highlighted the tangible material benefits of what was a costly venture: preserving Syrian whiteness in transit on the sustainable advancement of Lebanese society (“Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnani: al-ihtimam bil-muhajirin al-Lubnaniyyin wa kul man yarkab al-bahr min marafi’ihim ghaya min ghayat Jam’iyat al-Nahda al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, February 21, 1914, 4; “Jabal Lubnan wa al-muhajara,” al-Huda, November 28, 1913, 4; “Li janeb Mutasarrifiyyat Jabal Luban al-jalila,” Mirat al-Gharb, September 11, 1913, 5; “Mas’alat al-muhajara al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, June 5, 1913, 4; “Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnani: al-ihtimam bil-muhajirin al-Lubnaniyyin wa kul man yarkab al-bahr min marafi’ihim ghaya min ghayat Jam’iyat al-Nahda al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, February 21, 1914, 4; “Jabal Lubnan wa al-muhajara,” al-Huda, November 28, 1913, 4; Fairchild Reference Fairchild2004, 5-8, 13-15; Akarli Reference Akarli1993, 122, 126).

The talks to create a Lebanese Emigration Bureau dovetailed with diasporic cries to enlarge the Mountain’s borders into hitherto uncoalesced Ottoman territories, the greater Lebanon (Grand Liban) that ultimately emerged under French Mandate in 1920. Al-Najjar’s utterance on “offering protection to Lebanese migrants and everyone else departing the Lebanese waters” signaled a drive to gradually materialize a de facto Lebanese rule over coastal towns falling under direct Ottoman control. Under the guise of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau, the Syrian diasporic milieu attempted to solidify Mount Lebanon’s sovereignty on the port cities of Junieh, Nabi Younes, and Chekka as pressure was under way to open these harbors to international navigation. Expanding the emigration commission’s control of transit migration through Mediterranean ports would have given the leeway to renegotiate lopsided power relations with the Ottoman center. However, the outbreak of World War in 1914 and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire indefinitely postponed the establishment of the Lebanese Emigration Bureau (“Qalam al-muhajara al-Lubnani: al-ihtimam bil-muhajirin al-Lubnaniyyin wa kul man yarkab al-bahr min marafi’ihim ghaya min ghayat Jam’iyat al-Nahda al-Lubnaniyya,” al-Huda, February 21, 1914, 4; Akarli Reference Akarli1993, 73-74; Hakim Reference Hakim2013, 209).