Chris Gratien & Emily K. Pope-Obeda

OTTOMAN MIGRANTS, US DEPORTATION LAW, AND STATELESSNESS DURING THE INTERWAR ERA

Abstract
During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States developed a new apparatus for effecting large numbers of deportations at the federal level. By the time of the Great Depression, the US deported more than 10,000 individuals each year. People born in the Ottoman Empire, who migrated to the US in considerable numbers from the last decade of the nineteenth century onward, represented a small portion of this growing number of deportees. Yet their deportation cases presented special challenges to the Immigration and Naturalization Services as well as the diplomats of the US Department of State due to the rapidly changing map of the Middle East and the fact that the country they were born in no longer existed. This article studies the history of Ottoman-born individuals deported from the US during the interwar period and the role of diplomatic relations in the outcomes of deportation cases. By contrasting the cases of Anatolian Armenian, Lebanese, and Dodecanese migrants, we show that ambiguous nationality in some cases hindered and prevented deportation. In other instances, diplomatic correspondence or international agreements facilitated the resolution of deportation cases and established precedents for dealing with particular classes of migrants. While such cases point to strategies of national governments to address the issues associated with the emergent phenomenon of statelessness, they also demonstrate the mechanisms by which statelessness was created through mutual disavowal on the part of post-Ottoman governments of the Middle East and the increasingly anti-immigrant United States.

INTRODUCTION

In April 1933, Iaonnes Bardelis sat for a hearing with the United States Department of Labor Immigration Services at the Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield, where he was serving a multiyear sentence. He had no legal counsel and apparently required no interpreter; he was fluent and literate in English, besides this possessing only some basic reading skills in Greek. Iaonnes had lived his entire adult life in the United States as John. He married an American-born Irish woman and had operated a restaurant in New York City. Having come to the United States with his late father around the age of ten, John was like many Eastern Mediterranean migrants who eventually obtained US citizenship. The hearing concerned his deportation for violation of the Immigration Act of 1917: “to wit; that he has been sentenced, subsequent to May 1, 1917, to imprisonment more than once for a term of one year or more for the commission subsequent to entry of a crime involving moral turpitude, to wit; carnal abuse of a female child, and indecent assault.” As a convicted criminal guilty of multiple sexual assaults over the course of a decade, John was among the most clearly eligible migrants slated for deportation during the period. When asked why he should not be deported, he had no other defense than “because I was brought up here.”¹

There was nothing unusual about John’s hearing. Many thousands of immigrants faced similar hearings during the 1920s and 1930s for violations ranging from theft and assault to political activities, mental infirmity, chronic unemployment, and simply lacking proper documentation. In the insular political climate of the interwar period and the Great Depression, immigrants became the subject of strict immigration quotas and deportation policies that targeted people from eastern and southern Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, as well as of an expanding list of deportable offenses. What made John’s case so unusual, however, were the convoluted processes that would be involved in his deportation following that hearing. John had been born in the Ottoman Empire on a little island off the coast of Turkey, which had changed hands multiple times over the course of the wars that ended centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East, and the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Because it was no longer clear to where John belonged, and because he could not remain in the United States, his deportation case became a diplomatic case that involved four different countries. At the time, it was only one of many complex cases faced by the US Department of State, which corresponded and negotiated with a variety of European, Middle Eastern, and Latin American states to coordinate the deportation of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, and others who were no longer wanted in the country.

Cases involving the removal of Ottoman-born Americans like John reflect more than just a general trend in expanded deportations following World War I. They reflect a very particular set of international dynamics which complicated the efficiency of the nascent deportation state. In her recent Deportation, Torrie Hester makes the critical assertion that by the early twentieth century, the destination of an immigrant removal had become “more important than it had ever been. . . immigrant removals, once largely unilateral, were now increasingly bilateral.”² As was true in the case of John and the other migrants discussed throughout this article, deportation in practice often had to be more than just bilateral—it had to be trilateral or even quadrilateral. Once a migrant was slated for deportation, diplomatic efforts were often required to muscle through their removal.

This article expands the growing literature on the international dynamics of migration control through an examination of deportees from the former Ottoman Empire. While Hester notes that “the international legal regime became even more elemental to carrying out deportations during this period,” we demonstrate that the international diplomatic regime was in many instances just as critical.³ We document how the United States used (or attempted unsuccessfully to use) diplomacy in order to deport undesirable resident aliens who would have otherwise been able to remain in the country indefinitely, having arrived during the migration revolution prior to World War I.

Ottoman-born migrants presented unique challenges to the deportation state. The legal status of many of the hundreds of thousands of people born in the Ottoman lands became unclear under the rapid restructuring of nationalities in the postwar Balkans and Middle East. As Aristide Zolberg explains, in post–World War I Europe, there was a “massive uprooting,” and the establishment of new states increasingly created a disjuncture between location of birth and nation-state citizenship. “The doctrine of national self-government,” he asserts, “was applied with special fervor to the dismantling of the defeated Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and by the successor states themselves against their minorities.”⁴ In the process, many Ottoman-born Americans were rendered potentially stateless by the new immigration and nationality laws of different states. This paper narrows in on a comparison of the situation of three migrant groups―Anatolian Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks from the Dodecanese Islands―to show how diplomacy was used to find solutions to this emerging statelessness with the purpose of facilitating and streamlining deportation of Ottoman-born migrants who fell through the cracks of the fragmented postwar landscape. While in many cases the United States was unable to deport, cases of successful removal from the early 1930s could establish precedents that could be cited as the number of Ottoman-born Americans deported from the United States through recourse to diplomatic channels increased over the course of that decade. Through the stories of deported Ottoman Americans, we uncover a forgotten aspect of the Middle Eastern migrant experience in the United States and learn how the fragmented political landscape of the post-Ottoman world cast a decades-long shadow on those who had left for the Americas.

OTTOMANS AND THE AMERICAN DEPORTATION STATE

Deportation in the modern administrative sense developed in the late nineteenth century. Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, US immigration law was not centralized under the federal government, instead occurring largely at the state or local level.⁵ A series of acts, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Acts of 1891, 1903, and 1907, incrementally expanded the range of individuals subject to deportation and the Bureau of Immigration’s authority to carry out such deportations.⁶ During this period, the Bureau of Immigration briefly considered barring Muslims from the United States on the basis of their tacit embrace of polygamy, but the Department of State urged the bureau to reconsider in response to the protestations of the Ottoman government, an economic partner of the United States.⁷ Some were denied entry here and there, as in the aforementioned case, but the early twentieth century was generally a period of unrestricted and continually accelerating immigration from the Ottoman world.

The First World War brought a turning point in US immigration history. Responding to pressure from nativist groups within the country and anticipating the likelihood of vast postwar migration, Congress passed another immigration act in 1917, this time instituting a long-debated literacy requirement for entry, as well as creating a so-called “barred zone,” also known as the Asia-Pacific Triangle, further solidifying Asian exclusion. The Immigration Act of 1917 also introduced the first provision for deportation without a statute of limitations for certain cases, ensuring that immigrants, regardless of their length of stay in the United States, could always be subject to a state of “deportability.”

In 1921, responding to continued anti-immigrant sentiment shaped in part by the wave of postwar labor strikes and the so-called First Red Scare, the US Congress passed a comprehensive numerical restriction on immigration, introducing short-term quotas based on nationality, followed by permanent quotas in 1924. By the early 1930s, Congress had added additional deportable criteria such as carrying a weapon or bomb and being sentenced to six months or more, and violating US law on importation or sale of various drugs. It also made the reentry of a previously deported immigrant a felony, as well as making entry at an undesignated place, or by fraud, a misdemeanor punishable by fine or imprisonment. A critical shift had occurred from deportations along specific perceived “threats” (ranging from disease to anarchism to prostitution) to a broader condition of removability based on unauthorized entry or overstaying of authorized entry.

Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, annual deportations hovered below 1,000. The numbers rose gradually until the outbreak of World War I, peaking in 1914 with 4,610 removals. Throughout the war years, the numbers remained smaller, but following the war they resumed an upward climb. By 1929, they had reached an all-time high of 12,908. The following year, after the start of the Depression and the full impact of the permanent quota legislation, the number shot up even more rapidly, reaching 16,631. This massive growth was predicated on a number of different factors, including both the incrementally expanded legal basis for deportation over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and a gradual increase in the bureaucratic capacity for enforcing these new legislative changes.⁸ By 1932, the United States had reached a new record of 19,426 immigrants deported that year.⁹

As they comprised only a small subset of the total immigrant population in the United States, former Ottoman subjects—namely Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and Sephardic Jews—were only a tiny fraction of a massive American deportee population, an estimated 2 percent or less as of 1932.¹⁰ Though their overall numbers were small, these “Ottoman Americans” experienced an elevated risk of deportation, primarily because the deportation state did not emerge into a racially blind landscape. Recent scholarship has begun to explore how particular national and ethnic groups were impacted by the development of the immigrant restriction regime in early twentieth century America, focusing less on traditional narratives of success and assimilation, and more on the repressive power of the state.¹¹ As the work of Mae Ngai and others demonstrate, experiences of exclusion would touch most groups that became marked as non-white or less than white in the shifting racial imagination of the period.¹² Many of the regions most radically transformed during the war and postwar battles—the former Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires—were the same regions most vigorously targeted for exclusion. Ottoman-born migrants were subject to further scrutiny because of their ambiguous racial status in the United States. Former Ottoman immigrants like Syrian Arabs had fought and won court battles over their right to be included as full citizens of the United States through inclusion in the category of “white,” as Sarah Gualtieri demonstrates, further pushing their investedness in the idea of whiteness.¹³ Yet as Ian Haney Lopez asserts, certain populations were increasingly caught in the “contradictions between science and common knowledge.” Syrians and other former Ottomans, he explains, were disputed because while anthropologists deemed immigrants from the region to be Caucasian, “popular racial beliefs . . . held Syrians . . . to be non-whites.”¹⁴ The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act placed the strictest of quotas on immigration from most countries of the former Ottoman Empire. Greece, Turkey, and Syria were regions that had sent hundreds of thousands of migrants to the United States before the war; their postwar quotas for immigration visas were capped at 100 per year. As an example, over 9,000 Syrians had entered the United States in 1914 alone, meaning that total demand for migration far surpassed available visas.¹⁵

With many still clamoring to reach the United States and families divided between the United States and the home country, illicit migration was a natural consequence, as well-evidenced by the case of Jewish migration to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁶ Cases examined in this research confirm that the mere restriction of migration from the post-Ottoman world apparently fueled the rise of deportability among these groups, as many individuals entered the country using fraudulent documents to join family members who had migrated legally or were simply brought in by human smugglers. It was during this period in which the “illegal alien” became one of the primary targets of deportation measures. Many crossed into the country using Cuba or Mexico as a back door because there were not numerical quotas restricting immigration from Western Hemisphere independent nations.¹⁷

The history of these exclusionary immigration policies went hand in hand with the aforementioned increase in the US government’s growing willingness and capacity to carry out deportation. These changes, unsurprisingly, did not impact different immigrant communities equally. By the mid-1920s, the largest group of deportees by nationality shifted from Canadians to Mexicans, many more of whom were “repatriated” during the 1930s under varying degrees of pressure from local or federal government officials.¹⁸ Immigration law, by placing quotas on nationalities, automatically made certain groups of immigrants more susceptible to deportation, biased policing, and discriminatory institutional practices, and among local enforcers increased the disproportionate rates of deportation among non-white immigrants.¹⁹

The growing deportation state necessitated not only legislative, discursive, and cultural shifts in attitudes about immigrants, but very pragmatic, logistical shifts in the diplomatic capacity of the state. Deportation required that government officials on the ground be able to surveil, identify, capture, detain, and ultimately transport vast numbers of individuals, but just as importantly, to coordinate with a receiving nation.²⁰ Modern deportation, as scholars like Zolberg, Nathalie Peutz, Nicholas De Genova, and William Walters demonstrate, is premised upon coordination between sovereign states.²¹ John Torpey, in his study of the creation of passport controls, reminds us that the existence of state capacity to track and control the movement of noncitizens is neither timeless nor innate. “What is remarkable about the contemporary system of passport controls,” he insists, “is that it bears witness to a cooperating ‘international society.’”²² The development of mechanisms to track and record the movements of individuals, Torpey explains, is what enables the nation-state “to ‘embrace’ their own subjects and to make distinctions between nationals and non-nationals, and to track the movements of persons in order to sustain the boundary between these two groups.”²³

International migration, Zolberg explains, entails more than simply individuals moving across space, but instead “derives its specificity from the organization of the world into a congeries of mutually exclusive sovereign states . . . it involves the transfer of a person from the jurisdiction of one state to that of another.”²⁴ Likewise, deportation required the transfer of a person back to another jurisdiction, but in the complex cases of former Ottoman subjects, it was often far from readily apparent what jurisdiction that would be. De Genova and Peutz explain that modern deportation practice has always relied upon the “division enacted between more or less ‘rightful’ members (citizens) and relatively rightless nonmembers (aliens),” in which “citizenship has become the conventional determinant of an individual’s liberty to move into, out of, or across various national, international, and sometimes even subnational spaces.”²⁵ For the many Ottoman migrants whose citizenship was contentious or unclear following the dissolution of the empire, they increasingly found themselves outside of the protections of any nation-state, including at the point of expulsion from their chosen residence in the United States.

For those who lacked any national passport or clear claim to belonging in any currently extant nation-state, the risk of statelessness ran high. “Citizens’ identities are secured by passports” in the modern international system, as Linda Kerber reminds us, and while “international law limits the power of a nation to exclude or deport its own nationals,” there are many who fall outside of these protections.²⁶ William Walters explains that in the early twentieth century, Europe in particular was marked by conditions which lent themselves to statelessness. “As new national states emerged with the breakup of the old Kingdom of Prussia and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the phenomenon of national ‘minorities’ located within the territory of other national states became acute.”²⁷ While states resorted to population transfer to address this, a separate study of Ottoman Greek deportees would confirm this, for the migrants in this essay, Walters’ statement that repatriation becomes complicated when “states may bridle at the prospect of (re)admitting the undesirable.”²⁸

The US government attempted to navigate these complexities through diplomatic channels in a variety of ways. While consular services worked to identify the nationalities of particular individuals through correspondence with home countries or prospective receiving countries and in many cases procure passports for otherwise undocumented migrants, the embassies sought to reach agreements with those receiving countries or use diplomatic persuasion in cases of ambiguity or resistance. Yet for many, the obstacles to repatriation (or settlement in another nation) proved insurmountable, and they were effectively rendered stateless by repeated refusals to grant them entry. In a 1931 letter, the assistant attorney general bemoaned this problem to the secretary of labor, explaining that in many of the cases of unexecuted deportation warrants, the aliens were “natives of Soviet Russia, Turkey and other countries to which the United States does not have treaties providing for the deportation of their nationals.”²⁹ In cases such as these, where potential deportees would not be accepted by any nation, their statelessness made them vulnerable to indefinite periods of detention.

Despite the relatively small numbers, Ottoman-born immigrants posed unique challenges to the emerging deportation state. The fall of the Ottoman Empire had rendered their original nationalities ambiguous. Ottomans who came to the Americas all left the empire as Ottoman subjects, but upon deportation, their trajectories were refracted through the representative pieces of the shattered postwar Middle East. In many cases, the question of nationality was highly subjective, contingent more on the angle of the observer than a particular point of origin.³⁰ In the course of our research, we have identified a number of different groups from the Ottoman Empire who migrated to the United States in large numbers and were regularly targeted for deportation during the 1920s and 1930s. While they were commonly identified by these ethnic, communal, or racial categories, each group could be further subdivided by political status of subsequent post-Ottoman states. These categories naturally overlap in some cases, and there may be small numbers of Ottoman-born migrants who do not fall into any of these categories. A rough schematic illustrating the complexity of the question of post-Ottoman nationality is as follows:

Syrians – predominantly Ottoman Arab Christians with a significant Muslim minority of Arabs and Kurds, as well as some Mizrahi Jews

1. primarily from Lebanon under French mandatory control, with smaller numbers from Syria (also under the French Mandate)

2. significant numbers from Palestine, subsequently under the British Mandate

Greeks – Greek Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Protestants

1. from the independent Republic of Greece

• primarily from areas of Greece independent from Ottoman rule after the 1830s

• significant numbers from Macedonia and areas of Greece incorporated into Greece after the Balkan Wars of 1911–12

2. from Ottoman Anatolia, subsequently the Republic of Turkey, and subject to population exchanges with the Republic of Greece

3. from the Dodecanese Islands, subsequently under Italian rule until 1947

Ottoman Jews or “Turkinos”³¹ – Sephardic Jews speaking Ladino, Turkish, and Greek

1. from Istanbul and other parts of the subsequent Republic of Turkey

2. from Salonica and other parts of the subsequent Republic of Greece

Ottoman Armenians, Assyrians, and Kurds – Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Protestants, as well as Kurdish Muslims of Sunni and Alevi background

1. primarily from Istanbul and Anatolia, subsequently the Republic of Turkey

2. Assyrians from Iraq, subsequently under the British Mandate

3. Refugees of the Armenian Genocide in Lebanon and Syria, subsequently under French rule, and from Iraq, subsequently under the British Mandate, as well as the Soviet Union

While each of these groups would follow a potentially distinct experience of deportation, this article will focus on a comparison of Anatolian Armenians (4a), Lebanese (1a), and Dodecanese Greeks (2c). In different ways, each of these groups posed particular challenges to the American deportation state due to the postwar fates of their communities and the respective territories from which they came.

NO GOING BACK: OTTOMAN ARMENIANS AND EARLY REPUBLICAN TURKEY

Armenian migration from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas began during the late nineteenth century, and an estimated 60,000 migrants reached the United States before 1914.³² The initial wave occurred throughout the period of the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s, during which the Armenians of eastern Anatolia were victims of a number of pogroms carried out by irregular cavalry and other elements in local society as the rise of Armenian revolutionary organizations preoccupied the regime of Abdul Hamid II.³³ In addition to this, the socioeconomic marginalization of highland communities coupled with access to global networks of movement and American missionary institutions made predominantly Armenian places like Harput major sending regions for Armenian migrants.³⁴ A late Ottoman report concluded that while the persecution of Armenians and events such as the 1909 Adana massacres continued to be a contributing factor, economic opportunity was producing large numbers of Armenian and Kurdish emigrants to the United States.³⁵ In addition to East Coast cities such as Boston, California became a major destination for Armenian migrants who sometimes sought to reconstitute their rural communities in the United States. Fresno is the most prominent example of an American city built by Ottoman Armenians, over a quarter of whom came from Harput.³⁶

During the First World War, the Ottoman government summarily deported the Anatolian Armenian population, beginning in 1915. In many cases, the deportees were subjected to horrific overland marches to camps across northern Syria: murder, rape, massacres, and theft were part and parcel of the process.³⁷ Many of the survivors were left as refugees in Russian Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. After the unsuccessful attempt by the French to repatriate Ottoman Armenians to Cilicia, only a few hundred thousand Armenians remained within the 1923 borders of the Republic of Turkey out of a population of 1.5–2 million people. There, Armenians were able to reconstitute their community to some extent in Istanbul, but lived in a state of what Lerna Ekmekçioğlu calls “secular dhimmitude” as non-Turkish citizens of the Turkish ethnic nation-state under Kemalist rule.³⁸ While distinctive, the experience of the Assyrians who inhabited the eastern provinces of the empire bordering Iran and came to the United States in smaller numbers was altogether similar.³⁹ These communities were left without a nation-state during arguably the most formative period in the making of the modern nation-state system as their homeland was incorporated into the Republic of Turkey and their communities were dispersed across Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the Soviet Union, and other countries.

The context of persecution and national loss not only shaped the experience of Armenian and Assyrian migration but also the experience of deportation from the United States. By the 1930s, the United States had been engaged in diplomatic maneuvering over Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and its successor states for decades. Douglas Baynton relates the case of an Armenian man from the Ottoman Empire who went before the Immigration Service’s Board of Special Inquiry in 1905 for his “lack of sexual development” or “feminism” (lacking male sexual organs). Although the immigrant explained that “he had fled the violent oppression of Armenians in Turkey, and had officially renounced his citizenship,” and his relatives were in the United States and able to provide for him, he was excluded as being “likely to become a public charge” on the basis of his condition. He feared imprisonment upon his return, and Baynton concludes that “Mousekian was returned to Turkey where, if he lived that long, he would have been caught up in the Armenian holocaust ten years later.”⁴⁰

By the First World War, the United States had become deeply intertwined with the story of Ottoman Armenians and the destruction of their communities through wartime humanitarianism organized by Near East Relief. After the war, US humanitarians remained involved in rehabilitating Armenian survivors and caring for orphans and refugees as individuals in the absence of an ability to restore their collective national community. Keith Watenpaugh cites the failures of humanitarianism during and after the Armenian Genocide as formative in the making of “American humanitarian exceptionalism,” which shifted its gaze from restoring the political rights of persecuted groups like Armenian Christians to generally aspiring towards the elimination of human suffering.⁴¹

As such, humanitarian groups did intervene on the behalf of Armenian-American deportees. In one exceptionally extensive case, which stretched from 1926 to 1930, the Immigration Service attempted to deport Varsenig Boudjikanian, an Armenian native of Harput who entered the United States in 1924, but was later hospitalized in Massachusetts for insanity. Based on a short period of residence in Syria before her migration to the United States, officials hoped to remove her to Syria after their attempts to obtain a Turkish passport failed, but determined eventually that it would be impossible to carry out either plan. Boudjikian came from an educated, well-connected family, and numerous advocates intervened on her behalf, hoping to avert her removal based on concerns for her welfare. James L. Barton, the secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had played a leading role in the work of Near East Relief in the Ottoman Empire was one.⁴² He wrote to the Department of Labor to insist that “deportation [of Boudjikian] to Turkey would be a terrible thing. . . . For this girl, however, who has no relatives and no home in Turkey, though she is technically a Turkish citizen, I can see no home. . . . Under these circumstances and with the attitude towards the Armenians which the Turkish government has taken I wonder even whether she will be permitted to enter Turkey?” Barton was not alone in pleading her case on what he called “humanitarian grounds.” Charles Frederick Weller of an organization called the League of Neighbors protested the subsequent plan to send her to Syria, highlighting the fact that she was a Christian and from a “cultured family,” and additional letters of support were submitted on her behalf by senators, editors, and attorneys. After years of maneuverings, the Board of Immigration Review continued to defend the grounds of her deportation but eventually canceled the warrant.⁴³

Despite humanitarian concern, it does not appear that the deportation state ever really softened its stance towards Armenians. During the 1930s, the United States was still regularly pursuing deportation cases of Ottoman-born Armenians. Ironically, it was the Republic of Turkey more so than any humanitarian organization which might have prevented the removal of a good many Armenians from the United States. Immigration officials repeatedly decried the impossibility of obtaining the necessary permission and travel documents to remove Armenians to nation-states of the former Ottoman Empire.⁴⁴ In United States diplomatic correspondence with Turkey, there are records of about ten or so diplomatically convoluted deportation cases from the latter half of the 1930s involving Armenians or Assyrians. Not one of these cases appears to have resulted in a deportation.⁴⁵

Particularly in the case of migrants who had emigrated before the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and did not have passports or travel documents, the United States rarely succeeded in using diplomatic channels to effect a removal. In many cases, the Turkish government simply replied that it could not verify the identity of a particular person using the available state records or establish that they were indeed an Ottoman national.⁴⁶ In other cases, Turkey applied another logic. Under the regime of Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman government became fearful that the movement of Armenians in and out of the empire would facilitate the ascendance of the Armenian revolutionary organizations founded in the Russian Empire and funded in part from abroad. The Ottoman government kept documentation and photographs of families who relinquished their nationality.⁴⁷ It adopted a policy under which Armenians who left the Ottoman Empire and naturalized in America would relinquish their Ottoman nationality and could be unilaterally barred from the country.⁴⁸ The principle that Armenian emigrés were subject to depatriation theoretically applied to many of the Ottoman Armenians who migrated to the United States before the First World War, although plenty of them were not naturalized.

The Turkish government responded to requests to issue travel documents for Armenian and Assyrian deportees by claiming that the individuals in question had lost their claim to Turkish nationality. In some cases, US diplomats were told that the Republic of Turkey reserved the right to revoke the nationality of any migrant who did not register with a Turkish consulate within five years of leaving Turkey.⁴⁹ In 1938, the American embassy reported that “officials have stated verbally that persons who have lived abroad without registering periodically with Turkish Consuls, as well as those who did not take part in the Revolution establishing the Republic, or did not return immediately after the Revolution, will not be recognized as Turkish citizens.”⁵⁰ For formerly Ottoman Armenians, there was simply no going back unless they themselves had maintained claims to citizenship and maintained documents substantiating those claims. In almost any other case, it appears that Turkey unilaterally rejected US requests for passports for deportees with an assortment of justifications, and with no other state to advocate on their behalf, Armenian deportees were judged effectively stateless.

NEITHER SYRIAN, FRENCH, TURKISH, NOR AMERICAN: “UNDESIRABLES” FROM LEBANON

Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Syrians, especially the predominantly Christian inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, had left the Ottoman Empire for the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1924, Philip Hitti estimated that there were over 200,000 Syrians in the United States considering both the almost 100,000 registered immigrants and the children and descendants.⁵¹ Return migration from the mahjar to Mount Lebanon was also common, and as a result, the American experience shaped class and gender norms back in the home country as well. Particularly for the Lebanese, the American mahjar and the Syrian homeland were increasingly interdependent.⁵² Migration was increasingly a population safety valve for the densely populated Mount Lebanon, and America was increasingly the lifeblood of the Lebanese middle class. This interdependence was underscored by the experience of the First World War, in which Greater Syria experienced a terrible famine from 1915 onward. Remittances from the United States, which remained neutral until 1917, were a lifeline for many families in Lebanon, as the work of Graham Pitts has recently illustrated.⁵³ The Entente actively recruited Syrians during the war. Yet even before the war ended, the United States began implementing policies aimed at preventing Syria migration and facilitating expatriation and deportation.⁵⁴ When the war ended, Lebanese families attempting to reestablish their transatlantic links ran up against quota system made it difficult for new migrants to enter the United States.

Lebanon and Syria came under the rule of new French mandates formally established in 1923. Critical to these colonial mandates was the idea that the new states represented nations that would someday become independent. Syrians and Lebanese were not French citizens; they were citizens of the colonial mandates in their home countries of the former Ottoman Empire.⁵⁵ And Syrians residing abroad were required to opt for Syrian citizenship by 1926 or otherwise became nationals of their resident countries in the eyes of the French government. For example, French consular records from the city of Adana reveal 126 applicants residing in the Cilicia region of Turkey sought to maintain their Lebanese or Syrian nationality under the Treaty of Ankara.⁵⁶ Such individuals who did not apply to maintain their Syrian nationality defaulted to Turkish nationality. But the vast majority of Syrians living in the diaspora likely did not report to a consulate in order to claim their citizenship; many were dispersed throughout rural communities in the American Midwest or Argentina, distant from urban centers where registration was more feasible.

The way in which the French mandate government responded to deportation cases involving Ottoman-born migrants who came to the United States from Syria and Lebanon shows that France was serious about the 1926 deadline and did not yield to American diplomatic urgings. The French government in Syria refused to issue passports on the basis that many migrants had never claimed Syrian nationality. One such migrant was Mahmoud, born in Beirut and baptized as a Protestant. He had traveled as a teenager to live with his father in the United States in 1919, right after the beginning of the French occupation. He had returned to Lebanon to visit his mother, who lived in the affluent Achrafieh district, in 1927, but during his visit, he decided that he wanted to stay in the United States for good. He had married an American woman and had taken the first steps to becoming naturalized in the United States before being arrested in 1933. In his deportation hearing Mahmoud stated that he “took out my first papers in 1933, and I was in hopes of becoming a citizen, but I didn’t have the money to go thru with the final papers. If the Government will allow me I prefer to remain here as I am more used to this country and its ways than I am of Syria, and I would like to take my final papers and become a good citizen.” Mahmoud was subsequently ordered to be deported for “breaking and entering in the night time a building; with intent therein to commit larceny and larceny,” which were judged to be crimes of “moral turpitude.”⁵⁷

In a testimony before immigration authorities, his American wife Alice furnished an official document issued by the French government that Mahmoud had used to visit his mother in Beirut. In other words, Mahmoud had entered and left Syria legally during years prior on a single-entry travel permit. But in November 1935, the French consul in Boston notified US immigration authorities that Mahmoud “failed to claim for his Lebanese nationality in the delays prescribed by the treaty of Lausanne and cannot be considered as a Lebanese (art 34 of the treaty). Also his presence is undesirable in Syria and Mt. Lebanon.”⁵⁸ As other cases demonstrated, a rejection from the French authorities was non-negotiable. According to the postwar agreements between Syria and Turkey, people like Mahmoud were, if anything, Turkish. But there had been no formal rapprochement between the French mandate and the Republic of Turkey. And while the government of Turkey had willingly accepted Greek-born Muslims as new Turkish citizens, opinions about Syrian emigres—most of whom were Christian and Arabic-speaking—were more ambivalent. For example, a Turkish consul in New York had notified the US Department of Labor that Turkey did not plan to entertain applications for passports by “non-Turkish” minorities in the United States.⁵⁹

With regard to Lebanese and Syrian migrants, the American ambassador in Istanbul explained the predicament as follows in 1936:

Under Article 34 of the Treaty of Lausanne, Syrians living outside of Syria were given two years within which to opt for Syrian and Lebanese nationality. If they failed to exercise this option they automatically became Turkish citizens. As an insignificant number opted for Syrian and Lebanese nationality, Turkey found herself saddled with some 300,000 Turkish citizens of Syrian origin in North and especially South America. When Falih Rifki Atay attended the Inter-Parliamentary Conference at Rio de Janeiro some four or five years ago he discovered these “Turkish citizens” and brought back to Ankara glowing accounts concerning them. As a result, a couple of Turkish diplomatic missions were established in South America and the Syrian Turkish citizens were invited to present themselves in order to receive Turkish passports and generally regularize their status. A discouragingly small number responded, and there the matter now rests except for an agreement between Turks and French to discuss the whole matter in the near future. The Turks, I am convinced, are anxious to find a way to give Syrian nationality to all the Turkish citizens of Syrian origin.⁶⁰

In other words, Turkey was prepared to do whatever it could to prevent “non-Turkish” Ottomans like Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs from obtaining Turkish nationality, and as a result, the deportation cases of Syrians who were legally Turkish had to be stalled so as to prevent the establishment of a precedent before a more comprehensive agreement could be brokered with the French government to make those former Ottoman subjects legally Syrian.

In correspondence regarding the deportation of Ottoman-born Syrians during the 1930s, the Turkish government did acknowledge and verify the argument furthered by the US government, i.e., that individuals who had not claimed Syrian nationality were in effect Turkish nationals. However, Turkey was able to use domestic laws to justify denial of passport requests from the US government. Turkish authorities delayed a decision on one such migrant for years by initially stating that Turkey would issue a passport so long as the United States could provide official documentation demonstrating that he was Ottoman-born and had not taken Syrian nationality. When documentation was furnished courtesy of the French mandate, the Turkish authorities responded that they could not accept him into the country because he had not carried out his military service and had never registered with the Turkish consulate.⁶¹ They acknowledged his Turkish nationality in theory but in practice rendered him stateless and therefore impossible to deport by considering him to have relinquished his Turkish nationality and therefore ineligible for a passport. In a similar case, the Turkish government went as far as to issue a person-specific decree depriving a formerly Ottoman Syrian his Turkish nationality in July 1938, roughly four years after he was initially ordered to be deported by American authorities.⁶²

The aforementioned American ambassador explained the tendency for Turkish authorities to delay proceedings or issue artful and arbitrary justifications for the denial of passports through internal conflicts within the Turkish government. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs held to “the view that whether or not a Turkish citizen is objectionable, if his citizenship can be established, he should be given a passport to return to Turkey.” While this principle was seemingly counter to the national interests of Turkey, it matched with the general concern of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for protecting Turkish sovereignty by claiming responsibility for Ottoman-born people abroad. By contrast, the Turkish Ministry of the Interior insisted that “if a Turkish citizen is for some reason or other objectionable, he should under no circumstances be allowed to return to Turkey. Since Turkish Consuls refer such cases to the Department of Public Safety of the Ministry of the Interior without even informing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is naturally the point of view of the [Ministry of the Interior] which has heretofore prevailed and which prevails at the present time.”⁶³

These comments pointed to the ways in which different states and types of institutions sought to resolve the question of deportation with divergent approaches that actually seemed to converge when held up to international comparison. While diplomatic institutions each sought to uphold nationality laws and international agreements, domestic policy of the three countries in question—Turkey, the United States, and the French Mandate—prioritized protecting the country from “undesirables.” Thus, the United States sought to deport perpetrators of “moral turpitude,” especially those of certain ethno-religious backgrounds, while Turkey adopted precisely the same stance with regard to issuing passports for Arabs and other “non-Turkish” communities who had left the Ottoman Empire for the Americas. Meanwhile, France claimed no responsibility to extend citizenship to those who had missed the chance to do so before 1926, much less convicted criminals residing the United States whose “presence [was] undesirable in Syria and Mt. Lebanon,” as was said of Mahmoud from Achrafieh.⁶⁴

Shifting relations between states constantly reconfigured the landscape of deportation. Over the course of 1936–1939, the French Mandate and Turkish governments clashed over the status of the Alexandretta (Iskenderun) and Antioch (Antakya) region at the border between Syria and Turkey. While the territory had been part of Syria since the creation of the League of Nations mandates in 1923, Turkey successfully clamored for the region’s independence and subsequent elections in which the province henceforth known as Hatay was formally annexed to Turkey.⁶⁵ While a diplomatic outcome to the conflict was successfully brokered by the League of Nations, the contentious and disputed elections and annexation resulted in the displacement of many Armenians and other residents who did not wish to become citizens of Turkey. In addition, the post-Lausanne window for claiming Syrian nationality was reopened according to the agreements between France and Turkey. US diplomats saw this window as a new opportunity to resolve the issue of the many undeportable Lebanese and Syrians in the United States. However, this new opportunity still required the individuals in question to opt for Syrian nationality. Some might have gladly done so in cases where they were indefinitely detained, but in at least one such case, a man named Sharbel preferred to remain in prison than be deported back to Mount Lebanon. In this case, the United States was unable to compel Sharbel to apply for Syrian nationality in 1938. American diplomats in Turkey tried to secure a Turkish passport for Sharbel, but he was murdered near his Ohio hometown in 1940 before any resolution could be reached.⁶⁶

GREEK, ITALIAN, OR TURKISH? MIGRANTS FROM THE OTTOMAN DODECANESE ISLANDS

To conclude, we now return to the abovementioned John, who arrived from the Dodecanese Islands in the United States with his father in 1906.⁶⁷ The stories of Dodecanese migrants who were deported from the United States are essential to understanding the global context for the application of deportation laws not because they were highly representative or particularly many in number but rather because of how the unique geopolitical position of the Dodecanese Islands laid bare the competing factors of race, religion, nationality, and morality within immigration policies of the interwar period. John’s stated age was thirty-five or thirty-six years old, meaning he was ten years old when he came to the United States and was educated in American public schools. He had been born on Nisyros, a small volcanic island among a cluster of islands known as the Dodecanese (Turkish: Oniki Ada) region of the Aegean. He was baptized Roman Catholic in the local church and would state that his father was Italian and his mother was Greek. John considered himself to be of the “Greek race.” As was often the case with migrant families, his mother had remained in Nisyros, where John had other siblings. John was married to an American-born Irish woman whose testimonies appeared nowhere in his deportation hearings. His only blood kin in the United States were his father, who had died in the early 1930s, and a brother who had come around 1920.

John had been arrested multiple times under an alias and sometimes employing his mother’s maiden name as a surname. His first major arrest as an adult was in 1926, when he served ten months of a twelve-month sentence for three counts of “indecent assault” in New Haven. By 1933, he was serving another prison sentence for “carnal abuse of a female child.” While his deportation case file contains little detail about his trials and crimes, John admitted guilt and awaited possible parole. Normally he would have been considered a legal resident of the United States, having immigrated long before any quotas concerning Eastern Mediterranean migrants were in place. However, immigration law rendered John subject to deportation due to his being guilty of a crime of “moral turpitude.” This vague concept allowed the United States to deport foreigners guilty of crimes that might be considered immoral, “vile,” or “depraved.” By the standards of the time, John’s crime fit the definition of moral turpitude perfectly; in today’s terms, John was a repeat sex offender.

Had he wished and been able to mount a more vociferous legal defense, John might never have been deported from the United States. At his second hearing before US Immigration Services, John initially refused to begin before securing legal representation. He requested that a certain judge from New Haven be brought to the Wethersfield prison near Hartford to serve as his legal counsel. The judge apparently denied the somewhat unorthodox and impromptu request. Rather than looking for another defender, John waived his right to counsel, saying “the quicker I get it over with the better because I want to make parole on short time and I may get it if I am going to be deported.” This statement however did not necessarily reflect his desire to be deported; rather, he saw deportation as the easiest way out of his multi-layered predicament. When asked why he should not be deported, John said, “Well my reason for not being deported is because I was brought up here in this country. I came here when I was young and went to school here and spent all my life here so I know more about this country than I do about my own country. I don’t think they should send me back.”

John’s hometown, meanwhile, had been through decades of political tumult. The residents of the Dodecanese were predominantly Greek with a large Muslim minority who lived together under Ottoman rule for centuries. During the nineteenth century, such regions of the Balkans and Mediterranean Islands became the site of contention between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbors. Greece obtained its independence in 1832. Other regions of Macedonia and Bulgaria broke off from the Ottoman Empire as a result of subsequent wars. Crete became a semi-independent state before joining with Greece. Cyprus became a de facto territory of the British in 1878 and remained as such until after World War II. As for the Dodecanese Islands, they were occupied by Italy in 1912 after the Ottoman defeat in Libya. During the First World War, the Dodecanese Islands were used as a base of operations for Allied ships in the Mediterranean. After the Ottoman defeat in 1919, the Dodecanese were meant to be transferred to Greece, which occupied Izmir and much of western Anatolia. Yet after the expulsion of the Greek occupation by the Kemalist resistance and with it most of the Greek Orthodox population in 1922, another geopolitical shift occurred. Italy, which had briefly occupied Rhodes and the Antalya region of southern Anatolia, formally annexed the Dodecanese Islands. Rhodes and the rest of the Dodecanese were allotted to Italy in the Treaty of Lausanne, which hardened the postwar borders of the former Ottoman world. The Dodecanese Islands, John’s home of Nisyros included, became subject to Italian colonization during the interwar period.⁶⁸

The Dodecanese had posed a problem to immigration authorities from the beginning of the new deportation regime and quota system. The Bureau of Immigration struggled for years to ascertain under whose quota immigrants arriving from Rhodes (the largest island of the Dodecanese) should fall. In 1921, the assistant secretary of labor wrote to the secretary of state, seeking clarification “as to the status of aliens who were born in the Island of Rhodes,” and whether, for the recently established quotas, “Rhodes is included in the area known as ‘Other Asia.’” “Several aliens claiming birth at Rhodes and carrying Italian passports,” he explained, “are applying for the purpose of the act in question that Rhodes should be included as a part of Italy, thereby making the Italian quota available.”⁶⁹ The secretary of labor expressed his uncertainty, explaining that “the Department’s understanding is that Rhodes has not definitely been transferred to Italy. . . and therefore, that the classification of the island as a part of Other Asia is correct . . . however, the Department would be glad if you will advise whether its interpretation in this respect is correct or whether Rhodes would be considered to be a part of Italy for the purposes of the act.” In their response, the office of the secretary of state confirmed this interpretation. “Of course,” they wrote, “the island of Rhodes is so detached from Italy that its immigration quota must, in any event, be considered separately from that of Italy, just as is the case with Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, Tripolitania. . .” While Italy had occupied the island, they explained, in the absence of a larger population which would have necessitated a separate quota (as they noted was the case in Smyrna), the Department of Labor was correct in including them under the quota of “other Asia.”⁷⁰

But by 1923, the debate still had not been put to rest, and yet another possible quota designation was confirmed for immigrants from the island. Three immigrants from Rhodes, Spiros Haralampoulos, Panagiotis Mantzouranis, and Christos Strateges, were excluded at the point of entry because the quota for “other Asia” had been filled already by their entry. However, when they fought back against the decision, a judge issued writs of habeas corpus releasing them. As the solicitor general’s opinion in the case stated, “there was not authority in the Secretary of Labor to exclude the aliens,” because the “court holds in effect that they were natives of Turkey, a country whose quota was not exhausted at the time of their arrival. In fact, the opinion went on, “The provisions of the Quota Act . . . are so clear as to leave no discretion in the Board or certainly no discretion to authorize the placing of the Island of Rhodes under the quota for ‘other Asia’ instead of under the quota for Turkey, a country of which it was part of at the time of the census of 1910 and the transfer from which has never been recognized by the United States Government.”⁷¹

The ambiguity of nationality was not necessarily relevant to the hearings of potential deportees like John from Nisyros, although he himself alluded to the complex geopolitical restructuring that had occurred on Nisyros. “At that time it was a part of Turkey altho I am a Greek,” he stated. “In the war between Turkey and Greece in 1910 [sic] Italy took over this territory where I was born so now it belongs to Italy.” On the passport data sheet prepared for deportation, his home was listed as Nisyros, “formerly Greece, now Italy.” However, John did not actually possess a passport of any country, nor could his birth certificate—allegedly in the possession of his deceased father—be found. Once deportation orders had been issued, Immigration Services needed to secure a passport for John to travel.

The US Department of State called on its embassies to work with the relevant foreign governments. The first was Italy, which had occupied John’s home island for roughly two decades. But Italy refused to grant John a passport on the grounds that he had never lived under Italian rule, having left the island in 1906, and that he had never subsequently obtained Italian nationality. In issuing this refusal, Italian authorities cited a precedent involving another migrant born on the Dodecanese Island of Symi. The details of the case were summarized as follows:

That said deportee is of the Greek race and is allegedly a native of the Island of Symi, formerly a Turkish possession, that he emigrated from his native land about March 1912; that he arrived in San Francisco on July 18, 1917, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, traveling on a Greek passport issued by the Consul for Greece at Buenos Aires. The determination of citizenship in the case of those born on the Aegean Islands does not necessarily follow the place of their birth. By the treaty of Lausanne, in vigor as of August 6, 1924, the Italian Government grants to those natives of these islands who were established residents as of that date, Italian citizenship. Those natives not residing as of that date on any Aegean island acquired by Italy have the faculty to elect their Italian citizenship within two years, to wit on or before August 6, 1926. The record in this particular case does not disclose that the deportee has ever elected by positive act, to acquire Italian citizenship.⁷²

John’s case was almost identical. He was probably about twenty years old and living in New York in 1926, when he lost his claim to Italian nationality, according to the Italian authorities in the Dodecanese.

On the basis that he was—according to his own statements—Greek, the Department of State then began corresponding with the American Legation in Athens about the possibilities of obtaining a Greek passport for John. The Dodecanese Islands had never formally belonged to Greece. At the time when John left, they were in Ottoman possession, and while the Ottoman possessions that became part of the Republic of Turkey were subject to an exchange of population agreement between Turkey and Greece (more below), Nisyros and the Dodecanese Islands were not part of this exchange. The American ambassador in Athens relayed the Greek verdict on the matter saying, “the Department of the Interior, having sole jurisdiction in the matter, to which the Ministry (of Foreign Affairs) referred the case, has just communicated that in its opinion the person in question belongs to the category of apatrides (having no nationality). . . . A Hellenic passport can therefore not be issued to him.”⁷³ The English translation of the original Greek letter written in French preserved the word apatride, meaning “stateless,” pointing to the fact that such a concept had not fully crystallized within the American immigration vocabulary at the time.

While John had in effect been judged stateless, the Department of State had one last option in its quest for a passport. Since he had been born an Ottoman subject, John may have legally defaulted to Turkish nationality on the basis that he had never claimed any other nationality after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Even though his hometown was never part of the Republic of Turkey, it stood to reason that Turkey might be able to issue a passport for John. In a communication from May 1934, the American embassy in Ankara notified the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it believed John was legally “deportable to Turkey,” opening another round of negotiation.⁷⁴ However, Turkish authorities were equally reluctant to issue a passport. The first Turkish response stated that based on the evidence presented by the US government, it was impossible to issue a passport or to make a judgement on the case.⁷⁵

John’s was one of a few lingering deportation cases involving former Ottoman subjects that the US immigration authorities pursued through diplomatic channels, including the case of another man from the same island. Harry was born in a small village on Nisyros. He had left sometime at the end of 1920 and arrived in the United States during the spring of 1921, a chaotic period in the history of the Aegean. At that time, the Dodecanese were still under the Allied occupation, presumed to someday be part of Greece and not yet formally annexed by Italy. So while Harry had lived under Italian rule for a decade, his nationality had remained ostensibly Ottoman. Unlike John, Harry had committed no violent crime during more than a decade in the United States, although he was imprisoned for counterfeiting. The basis for his deportation was instead that “he has been convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, prior to entry into the United States, to wit; attacking a girl (assault).” In his hearings, Harry launched a failed defense of his honor with two variations on the same story. Back in the old country, he had been involved with a woman in his village whom he was falsely accused of “attacking,” presumably by her relatives, “because I didn’t want to marry her.” His conviction had been based on those witness testimonies, even though Harry claimed that the woman in question had said in court that he was innocent.⁷⁶ As a result, he served one year of a two-year sentence on Rhodes. After his release, he left Nisyros, claiming that he entered the United States on an Italian passport. But at the time of his hearings, he had neither passport nor other documents to substantiate that claim.

As in the case of John, the US embassy in Turkey eventually worked to secure a Turkish passport for Harry. For months over the course of 1934 and 1935, the Turkish government failed to respond to or honor US requests regarding these cases. Finally, US immigration authorities secured a Turkish passport for Harry, who was deported to Istanbul in January 1935.⁷⁷ Then in August 1935, immigration officials reported that a Turkish passport had been obtained for John.⁷⁸ Remarkably, there is no documentation within the diplomatic records as to why or how these decisions were reached nor whether it was the result of further diplomatic pressure on the part of the United States or the conclusion of an internal investigation by the Turkish government. Likewise, we do not know what happened to John and Harry thereafter beyond that in 1935 they were deported to Turkey. They may have made their ways to Nisyros, but there is no evidence in US census or immigration records that they ever returned to the United States.

Comparison with another case reveals that the indirect justification for John and Harry being deported to Turkey was, strangely enough, that they were Catholics. As their cases were being resolved, a contemporaneous deportation case involving another man from the Dodecanese stymied US diplomats. Stamatis, also known as George, was from the Aegean island of Kos. Like John and Harry’s island of Nisyros, Kos was under Italian occupation; the two islands were separated by less than twenty miles of sea. George was ordered to be deported from the United States for the following: “keeping a disorderly house, and grand larceny; and that he has been found managing a house of prostitution, or music or dance hall or other place of amusement or resort habitually frequented by prostitutes, or where prostitutes gather.”⁷⁹

Having come to the United States in 1906, George was almost identical to John in every way except one: he was Greek Orthodox. The Greek Orthodox or Rum inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire had been subject to an exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece. It was one of the first and largest mutual transfers of populations between two states. The agreement was signed in 1923 and over the next decade, more than a million Greek Orthodox born in Anatolia and Thrace were transferred to Greece, and over 500,000 Muslims born within the postwar boundaries of Greece were settled in the Republic of Turkey.⁸⁰ In practice, this process was chaotic, and questions regarding the properties of transferred people and Orthodox communities who remained in Turkey, particularly Istanbul, lingered for years. In 1930, Turkey and Greece resolved their remaining diplomatic issues in a final rapprochement at the Ankara Convention. Among the topics of discussion was which minority populations had the right to remain: a category of people called etabli or established residents. Greece hoped to allow the Orthodox community of Turkey to remain in Istanbul while Turkey had hoped to remove as many non-Muslims from the country as possible. The Ankara Convention stated that any Greek Orthodox residing in Turkey or any Muslim in Greece as of 1930 would be considered etabli. Those who resided beyond the borders of their birth countries as of 1930 were de facto subjects of the exchange of populations.⁸¹ This closed the major question of return among exchanged peoples, but it also resolved ambiguity regarding Ottoman-born Greek Orthodox living abroad in the United States or elsewhere. They no longer had any claim to Turkish nationality and were for all intents and purposes considered to be Greek.

Yet with regard to the Greek Orthodox of the Dodecanese, another layer of complexity was added by the fact that those territories were never part of the Republic of Turkey. As the correspondence confirmed, George had lost his Turkish nationality by virtue of being in the United States as of 1930, and according to the Turkish government he was a Greek national. Yet according to Greece, by virtue of his having left the Ottoman-ruled Dodecanese, which had come under Italian control, George was not legally a Greek national. In an attempt to resolve the matter, the US ambassador urged the Turkish government to issue a passport for George with the understanding that he would be subsequently shipped to Greece after arriving in Turkey. We did not find a reply, but the matter remained indefinitely unresolved according to the diplomatic archival record.⁸²

To summarize, Greek Orthodox migrants who left the Dodecanese while it was under Ottoman rule were no longer Turkish nationals by virtue of the population exchanges and the Ankara Convention of 1930, but they were also not Greek nationals in the eyes of Greek authorities. Greek Catholics who had left the Ottoman Dodecanese meanwhile defaulted to Turkish nationality by virtue of not being subject to the population exchanges. Turkey established a precedent for the handling of deportation cases involving such migrants by issuing passports to two different individuals. Italy, which had occupied the Dodecanese islands for two decades absolved itself of responsibility towards people who had left during the Ottoman period if they had not claimed Italian nationality prior to 1926. The breakup and fall of the Ottoman Empire had rendered the nationality of Dodecanese migrants ambiguous, and Italian colonial policy in the region made them potentially stateless.

CONCLUSION

Diplomacy was critical to deportation in a number of a senses. Consulate and embassy employees were needed to track down documentation of deportees in the post-Ottoman states of the eastern Mediterranean, where documentation was often hard to come by. Diplomacy was also critical to deportation in that the diplomatic relations between different countries could determine the fates of Ottoman Americans. Rapprochement and agreements between Turkey and Greece could help facilitate deportation of Greeks who had migrated to the United States from Ottoman Anatolia. Diplomatic negotiations between the French Mandate and Turkey over the region of Hatay opened a new window to potentially deport Lebanese and Syrians who had come to the United States decades prior. Finally, deportation required diplomacy because in cases of ambiguity or apparent statelessness, the United States tried to simply convince receiving countries to take its deportees. While it does not appear that any amount of urging could force the Republic of Turkey to accept unwanted Anatolian Armenians, the United States did succeed in deporting Dodecanese migrants to Turkey even when the individuals in question might never have set foot in Istanbul or anywhere in the Republic of Turkey.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire cast a long shadow on both the political map of the Middle East and the lives of ordinary people who had been born there. Whether Dodecanese migrants deported to places other than the country of their birth or Syrian-born migrants kept in limbo by years of bureaucratic stalling on the part of the Turkish, mandate, and US governments, these individual deportation cases suggest that the implementation of deportation policy was often experienced as arbitrary, counterintuitive, or unfair. Many of the cases described here involved “unsympathetic migrants” guilty of crimes that were beyond the pale of decency at the time. But the outcome of these brokered deportations and the precedents they established had real consequences for a much broader swath of Ottoman-born Americans, especially Greek migrants, who from 1936 to 1940 generated so much work for the diplomatic corps that they became one of the only groups to earn a separate archival series on deportation at College Park.⁸³

In some scenarios, ambiguous nationality was as much an asset as a liability when it came to implementation, and many Ottoman-born Americans were ultimately able to prevail in the deportation cases for various reasons. But in total, the diplomatic records of the United States reveal many stories of families on the brink of separation due to the deportation of individuals guilty of seemingly forgivable offenses. In many cases, the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire added savage absurdity to these cases. A young Armenian man raised in Upstate New York faced deportation to Turkey despite his parents obtaining US citizenship papers.⁸⁴ A Czech woman who grew up in Ohio, after charges of prostitution, faced deportation to Syria—a country she had never visited—due to brief marriage with a Syrian-born American.⁸⁵ Such bizarre stories add yet another layer of cruelty to the perplexing arbitrariness and indifference of the deportation state, which became increasingly engaged in incarceration and deportation of people who might otherwise have been regular citizens. They prompt reflection on a different version of America’s immigration narrative. While new immigrant groups have continually fought for inclusion and overcome forms of prejudice to join the American social fabric, it is equally important to consider, as the historiography on immigration, deportation, and race in the United States emphatically illustrates, how the exclusion and expulsion of others has equally shaped the makeup of the “nation of immigrants.”

NOTES