an investigative podcast series

by Chris Gratien



How do you deport someone whose country no longer exists? This podcast addresses this question through the stories of Middle Eastern migrants subject to deportation from the United States during the 1930s. How do you deport someone whose country no longer exists? This podcast addresses this question through the stories of Middle Eastern migrants subject to deportation from the United States during the 1930s. Click to learn more.

After decades of liberal policies that allowed for millions of immigrants to enter the US, American society took a profoundly insular turn in the 1920s. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act established strict immigration quotas aimed at keeping out Southern Europeans, Asians, and anyone who might be judged as less than white. After the First World War, the government also built up its systemic capacity to deport individuals. By the time of the Great Depression, the US deported many thousands of people per year, and among them were some of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who had left the Ottoman Empire for a better life in America. But the Ottoman Empire had collapsed during the war. Displacement, ethnic conflict, imperial competition, and colonial rule had radically changed post-Ottoman societies and the geopolitical map. So while US Immigration and Nationalization Services found it increasingly easy to sentence these former Ottomans to deportation, it became increasingly difficult to identify where such deportees would go. Deporting Ottoman Americans involved legal and diplomatic maneuvering that tested the limits and exposed the contradictions of an emboldened American deportation state.



This podcast series employs US archival records as well as a trove of other historical resources and the contributions of numerous specialists in the field to show what deportation meant for people who fell through the cracks of the Middle East's fractured postwar landscape. Ottoman Americans did not comprise the majority of people deported from the US; yet, due to their unique vulnerability and the contrived measures required to deport them, their experiences embody the uncertainly, precarity, and injustice faced by so many migrants during a global period of xenophobia and economic strife. Through their stories, we interrogate discourses of morality, criminality, and illegality that have become so central in our immigration debates and show that deportation was not just a policy that impacted "alien" others. It has touched millions of American families and helped shape the national identity of the United States today.





Deporting Ottoman Americans is a scholarly project that draws on contributions from academic researchers to further public knowledge about the history of migration and the relationship between the United States and the modern Middle East. If you have something you'd like to contribute, please contact c.gr8n@virginia.edu.



Producer

Chris Gratien, University of Virginia

Chief Consultant

Emily Pope-Obeda, Harvard University

Script Editor

Sam Dolbee, Harvard University



Recorded Guests

Kalliopi Amygdalou, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy

Reem Bailony, Agnes Scott College

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stacy Fahrenthold, University of California, Davis

Linda Gordon, New York University

David Gutman, Manhattanville College

Claudrena Harold, University of Virginia

Torrie Hester, University of Saint Louis

Hidetaka Hirota, Waseda University

Aslı Iğsız, New York University

Panayotis League, Harvard University

Nazan Maksudyan, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Sarah Milov, University of Virginia

Devin Naar, University of Washington, Seattle

Graham Pitts, Georgetown University

Laura Robson, Portland State University

Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Association

Nadim Shehadi, Tufts University

Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan

Vahe Tachjian, Houshamadyan

John Torpey, City University of New York, Graduate Center



Further Reading



Balderrama, Francisco E. and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.



Barkan, Elliott Robert. Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2013.



Garland, Libby. After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965. 2014/2018.



Gualtieri, Sarah M. A. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora. University of California Press, 2009.



Hester, Torrie. Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.



Kanstroom, Dan. Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. Harvard Univ. Press, 2010.



Khater, Akram Fouad. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920. University of California Press, 2001.



Laliōtu, Ioanna. Transatlantic Subjects: Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America. University of Chicago Press, 2004.



Naff, Alixa. Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.



Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford University Press, 2015.



Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004/2014.









Episode 1 Deporting Ottoman Americans





Most Americans descend from people born elsewhere. But what if instead of simply a nation of immigrants, we see our society as a eugenicist project forged by immigration quotas and selective deportation policies? This proposal may fly in the face of the civic nationalism many hold dear. Generations of politicians have repeated the mantra that anyone can be an American and that our identity is defined not by race or blood but by the embrace of laws and ideals. Yet many historians have dedicated their lives to studying the pivotal role of exclusion in making American identity through the histories of those who were deprived of the American dream because of race, color, and creed. In this introductory episode, we talk to scholars who have written about the emergence of deportation as a method of population control and punishment wielded by the US government on a mass scale since the 1920s. Then, we set the stage for the rest of our series by considering how people from the former Ottoman Empire were part of both the making and unmaking of America as a nation of immigrants.

Click for sources, transcript, and additional listening



Most Americans descend from people born elsewhere. But what if instead of simply a nation of immigrants, we see our society as a eugenicist project forged by immigration quotas and selective deportation policies? This proposal may fly in the face of the civic nationalism many hold dear. Generations of politicians have repeated the mantra that anyone can be an American and that our identity is defined not by race or blood but by the embrace of laws and ideals. Yet many historians have dedicated their lives to studying the pivotal role of exclusion in making American identity through the histories of those who were deprived of the American dream because of race, color, and creed. In this introductory episode, we talk to scholars who have written about the emergence of deportation as a method of population control and punishment wielded by the US government on a mass scale since the 1920s. Then, we set the stage for the rest of our series by considering how people from the former Ottoman Empire were part of both the making and unmaking of America as a nation of immigrants.

Episode 2 Syrian in Sioux Falls



In the years after the world war that ravaged the Ottoman Empire, Hassan left his native village in modern-day Lebanon to join his parents and siblings in the growing Midwest town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. To do so, he had to sidestep the stringent immigration quotas newly implemented by the US. But years later, when the authorities learned that he entered and was living in the US illegally, he was threatened with deportation. Through Hassan's story, we'll learn about the experience of Arab migration to the United States and get to know the Syrian-American community that despite numbering in the hundreds of thousands by the 1920s, found itself repeatedly compelled to prove its worthiness to be included in a society where nativism was on the rise and being entitled to full citizenship often meant being considered white.

Click for images, bonus materials, and more.



In the years after the world war that ravaged the Ottoman Empire, Hassan left his native village in modern-day Lebanon to join his parents and siblings in the growing Midwest town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. To do so, he had to sidestep the stringent immigration quotas newly implemented by the US. But years later, when the authorities learned that he entered and was living in the US illegally, he was threatened with deportation. Through Hassan's story, we'll learn about the experience of Arab migration to the United States and get to know the Syrian-American community that despite numbering in the hundreds of thousands by the 1920s, found itself repeatedly compelled to prove its worthiness to be included in a society where nativism was on the rise and being entitled to full citizenship often meant being considered white.

Episode 3 Turkino





Leo lived in New York City with his family. Born and educated in the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he was now part of the vibrant and richly-textured social fabric of America's largest metropolis as one one of the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who migrated to the US. Though he spoke four languages, Leo held jobs such as garbage collector and shoeshine during the Great Depression. Sometimes he couldn't find any work at all. But his woes were compounded when immigration authorities discovered he had entered the US using fraudulent documents. Yet Leo was not alone; his story was the story of many Jewish migrants throughout the world during the interwar era who saw the gates closing before them at every turn. Through Leo and his brush with deportation, we examine the history of the US as would-be refuge for Jews facing persecution elsewhere, highlight the indelible link between anti-immigrant policy and illicit migration, and explore transformations in the history of race in New York City through the history of Leo and his family.

Click for images, bonus materials, and more.



Leo lived in New York City with his family. Born and educated in the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he was now part of the vibrant and richly-textured social fabric of America's largest metropolis as one one of the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who migrated to the US. Though he spoke four languages, Leo held jobs such as garbage collector and shoeshine during the Great Depression. Sometimes he couldn't find any work at all. But his woes were compounded when immigration authorities discovered he had entered the US using fraudulent documents. Yet Leo was not alone; his story was the story of many Jewish migrants throughout the world during the interwar era who saw the gates closing before them at every turn. Through Leo and his brush with deportation, we examine the history of the US as would-be refuge for Jews facing persecution elsewhere, highlight the indelible link between anti-immigrant policy and illicit migration, and explore transformations in the history of race in New York City through the history of Leo and his family.

Episode 4 All's Fair in Love and War



Lafky had seen her share of drama well before her bitter divorce. Born near the Ottoman city of Izmir, she had come to the US as a teenager after war had destroyed her entire community. Her family was made refugees by fighting between the invading Greek army and the Turkish national resistance. Izmir was burned to the ground and over a million Anatolian Christians were transferred to Greece as part of an “exchange of populations.” Peace reigned after that, but trouble often followed these refugees wherever they went. That was the case for Lafky, whose vengeful ex-husband tried to have her deported from the US. Through Lafky’s fight to stay in the country with her American-born daughter, we'll confront the cruel injustices that only women migrants faced as we explore the fate of the Ottoman Empire's Greek citizens.





Episode 5 Lest They Perish



During the First World War, America and its Allies decried the mass deportation and killing of Anatolian Christians by the Ottoman government. Yet the US government did everything it could to prevent impoverished and displaced Armenians and Assyrians from coming to America after the fighting had stopped. So when human smugglers took pity on Thomas, a young Assyrian man from Diyarbekir, and helped him reunite with his mother in America, they were perhaps only using a profitable crime to right a wrong first inflicted by callous postwar immigration policies. When Thomas was ultimately detected by the authorities, his deportation case became part of a massive crackdown on illicit migration between Cuba and the US that involved many formerly Ottoman Christians. But would the US really deport survivors of one of history's first genocides to a place they could no longer call home? The stories of people like Thomas allow us to test the limits of postwar xenophobia, the capacity of the deportation state, and America’s status as refuge for those “yearning to breathe free.”



