“Not All Smugglers are the Same: Some are Righteous and Some are Crooked:” Paternalistic Patriotism, Race, and the Syrian Migrant Smuggling Industry (1900-1914)

Smugglers dominated the major routes of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States starting from the second half of the nineteenth century. Using the Syrian American press in New York, this article explores how Syrian diasporic activists in the United States married smuggling with patriotism against the backdrop of anti-immigrant nativism. It demonstrates the diasporic impulse to reform the Syrian migrant smuggling economy in line with the racial prerequisites of transatlantic border regimes. The essay argues that representatives of the Syrian American diaspora did not question the moral legitimacy of the smuggling profession. Instead, they sought to impose patriotic paternalistic standards on Syrian smuggling agents to retain the physical and moral wellbeing of US-bound Syrian migrants facing limitations on their freedom of travel. Preserving the “comfort” and “honor” of probationary white Syrian immigrants obsessed diasporic activists who were anxious about the nation’s racial standing at the US borders. The essay finally analyzes the overlaps of reforming the Syrian smuggling industry with the performance of Ottoman citizenship following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution through World War I. It examines the entanglements between Syrian diasporic proposals of expanding the Ottoman emigration bureaucracy and the exercise of political self-government from abroad.