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David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 246 p.
Anouche Der Sarkissian
p. 235-240
Référence(s) :

David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 246 p.

Texte intégral

1The militarization of borders, criminalization of migrants, and emergence of smuggling networks are often perceived as contemporary phenomena, springing from the efforts of states to curtail and control mobility. Yet in his inspiring book The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens, David Gutman convincingly demonstrates how, as early as the 1880s, the Ottoman Empire implemented restrictive migration policies that shaped the experiences of exiting and returning migrants. Focusing on Armenian migrants travelling back and forth between the Ottoman Empire and the United States from the 1880s to the 1910s, Gutman’s work underscores the parallels between Ottoman and American political responses to migratory flows. Buttressed by a wealth of Ottoman and American state sources, as well as Armenian village histories, memoirs and letters, the book examines an understudied facet of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migration processes and provides new insights into Ottoman history. More specifically, it sheds light on the uniqueness of the Armenian case, as other Ottoman minorities were not targeted with the same relentless efforts to police their circulations in the last decades of the Empire. Among the most noteworthy achievements of Gutman’s study is how it highlights the expansive and well-organized web of underground intermediaries that assisted migrants in their overland journeys to port cities on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, their transatlantic voyages, and often their travel back home. The book pits personal trajectories against global history, and local circumstances against larger-scale dynamics. It aptly shows how both the Ottoman and American politics of migration delineated and circumscribed citizenship and nationality, and how naturalized Armenian Americans, straddling two tightening regimes, found themselves in a legal no man’s land upon returning to their native communities.

2Gutman explores these intersecting histories in three different parts. The first focuses on emigration, as well as the different stakeholders involved – migrants, smugglers, and the state. While scholars investigating America-bound migration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mostly explore how newcomers integrated into the host country and/or how they maintained ties with their homeland, Gutman unveils the practicalities of migrants’ journeys as well as the clandestine aspects of their enterprise. He meticulously depicts how legally restricted migrants managed to reach their destinations, the favored itineraries, the multilayered nature of smuggling networks, the operations of brokers, and the financial transactions involved.

  • 1 At least half of the 65,000 Armenians who migrated to the United States between 1885 and 1915 were (...)

3The book also reveals that pre-World War I Armenian migration to North America runs counter to commonly held assumptions and differs from the experiences of other immigrant groups flocking to the United States in the same years. According to Gutman, Armenian overseas migration was not a response to impoverishment and persecution but instead the result of the relative political and economic stability of Harput/Kharpert in Eastern Anatolia, the main sending region.1 In line with internal labor migration, whereby workers from rural areas temporarily sojourned in Istanbul or other burgeoning cities, toiling in the factories of the Northeastern United States became a strategy for Harput Armenians to improve their financial situation. However, migrating to America came at too high a risk and too hefty a price to constitute an option for Armenians from poorer backgrounds, which explains why it was reserved to relatively well-off individuals. American religious revivalism also played an undeniable role in cross-border connections between Ottoman Armenians and America, as missionary efforts in the Harput region were highly visible, and as the factory towns around Boston, home to the headquarters of the American Board of Christian Foreign Missions (ABCFM), were the primary destination of Armenian migrants. Yet Gutman argues that circumstances specific to Harput paved the way for the emergence of a local elite and constituted one of the chief factors in the Armenian large-scale migration flows towards North America.

4What is remarkable in this first part is its multiscopic approach. An abundance of documentary evidence vividly pieces together the stories of successful and less successful departures, pinpoints the range of actors and interests involved, and juxtaposes Ottoman measures for limiting Armenian overseas travel with the diverse and sophisticated efforts deployed by migrants and smugglers to circumvent the 1888 ban on Armenian migration to North America.

5The second part of the book concentrates on Armenian return migration, a subject that has received little if any scholarly attention. In this section, Gutman demonstrates that contrary to what has been assumed so far, North America was not necessarily a permanent destination for pre-genocide Armenian migrants. Male migrants, who made up the bulk of departing cohorts, returned to their home community – on a temporary or longer-term basis – to manage family properties or interests, assist relatives, get married or bring their dependents back with them. According to the author, the available data points to a 10% rate of return between 1890 and 1907 and 20% between 1908 and World War I. This represents a sizable number of returnees, given the many challenges they faced, as restrictions on Armenian mobility did not exclusively concern outbound migration. Apart from a short-lived period of leniency between 1898 and 1901, starting from 1893 the Ottoman state enforced a series of laws refusing reentry to Armenians, especially those hailing from the United States. As was the case with emigration, the ban on return migration was motivated by the Ottoman regime’s fear that migratory circulations fueled sedition and aroused Armenian nationalist sentiments. Gutman’s work is illuminating in this regard for it describes how the Ottoman state took an increasingly hard line on return migration, whether it involved deterring returns by stripping emigrants of their citizenship, refusing to grant reentry, or cracking down on those who reentered the empire illegally – sometimes years after they had come back.

6Gutman introduces us to the little-known situation of Armenians who returned home through the back door, detailing the methods and networks they employed to bypass the obstacles placed in their way. More particularly, Gutman documents the underexplored case of US-naturalized citizens who represented the majority of Armenian returnees. Caught between Ottoman and American domestic and diplomatic concerns, Armenian Americans found themselves in a perilous catch-22. Following an 1893 decree, Armenians who had adopted US citizenship were not allowed to reenter the Empire. As a result, a widespread strategy used by Armenian returnees was to conceal their American passport when going back to their homeland. As the regime grew more repressive toward Armenian returnees, the volume of petitions addressed to American consular officials requesting US intervention with respect to debarments, detentions and deportations rose sharply, and sparked diplomatic controversies. In the 1890s, against the backdrop of the Hamidian massacres, the American government lent a sympathetic ear to the plight of Armenians and proved a vocal defender of its naturalized citizens subject to Istanbul’s harsh treatment of returnees. However, Washington changed its stance beginning in 1901, spurred on by rampant anti-immigrant discourses and mounting hostility towards “bogus” or “dubious citizens” suspected of using their newly-acquired American citizenship to engage in questionable activities. Naturalized Armenian-Americans who had migrated back to their home country were therefore no longer deemed worthy of US protection, especially as not disclosing their naturalization at the Ottoman border was equated with forfeiture of citizenship. This proved fatal during the Genocide, when US representatives were unable to safeguard Armenians who had been divested of their American nationality.

7Part 3 of the book provides a chronological overview of the years following the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, led by the Young Turks, and tackles the legacy of Armenian migrants. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the new government lifted all the legal constraints barring the international movements of Ottoman nationals. As a direct consequence of this liberal migration policy, the period saw a dramatic increase in Ottoman transhemispheric expatriates, most of whom were draft dodgers. Between 1908 and 1914, the number of Armenians travelling to the United States jumped from approximately 1,700 to over 5,000 a year. Ironically, at the same time, the United States passed a series of laws that severely restricted immigration, thus leaving a substantial number of Ottoman emigrants stranded in Europe. The Ottoman government’s laissez-faire approach to migration ceased with World War I, when the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)-led government ended international mobility to support the war effort. Although official sources on state-directed migration policies are unsurprisingly scarce in the months before and during the Armenian Genocide, the politics of Armenian migration, Gutman writes, “does not end there” (p. 177). In the 1920s, the Turkish government’s handling of international migration aligned with its policies toward the confiscated wealth and properties of Ottoman Armenians. Taking its cue from decades of discriminatory practices and restrictive migration legislation in the Hamidian era, the newly-founded Turkish republic devised a legal apparatus to prevent Armenian Genocide survivors or families from returning to their homeland to reclaim their assets.

8As the book draws to a close, Gutman discusses how, once more, the United States gave up on Ottoman-born Armenian Americans. In 1934, when Armenian Americans had a legal window to seek compensation, Ankara and Washington reached an agreement – based on the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law – stipulating that since most Armenians had emigrated illegally, they had become American citizens illegally, which meant they were Turkish and hence could not claim compensation. This provides evidence of how, yet again, US citizenship proved unstable and revocable for Armenian Americans.

  • 2 For pre-WW1 Armenian migration to the US, see Robert Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in Am (...)
  • 3 See Nicholas P. De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life”, Annual Review (...)

9All in all, Gutman’s book is a pivotal and much-needed contribution to the scholarly literature on Armenian migration to North America.2 It expands our understanding of the Ottoman past by spotlighting invisible actors as well as underappreciated factors at work in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migratory dynamics. For migration scholars, comparing Ottoman and US migration policies is a promising avenue of research since it complicates the traditional narrative of the migrant experience – focused on sending nations or host countries – by revealing the impacts of joint state actions and the ways in which migrants can be tragically caught up in conflicting, fluctuating and overlapping political decisions. In this respect, Gutman’s study is a relevant complement to recent scholarship in migration studies describing how migrant “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are produced or shaped by immigration laws, bureaucratic mechanisms, and the increased monitoring of border crossings.3 The topics developed throughout also echo present-day issues and rhetoric with disturbing acuteness, such as the detention of unauthorized migrants, travel bans against undesired nationals from certain countries, and recourse to punitive revocation of citizenship, showing how the idea of mobility has long been perceived as a threat to political order, and how the politics of migration can be an instrument to define, constrain and test citizenship and nationality.

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Note de fin

1 At least half of the 65,000 Armenians who migrated to the United States between 1885 and 1915 were from the Harput region.

2 For pre-WW1 Armenian migration to the US, see Robert Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983. For Canada-bound migration, see Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, “Migratory Caravans: Armenian Sojourners in Canada”, Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 6, no. 2 (Spring 1987), pp. 20-38; Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, Like Our Mountains: A History of Armenians in Canada, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.

3 See Nicholas P. De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life”, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 31, 2002, pp. 419–447; Cecilia Menjivar and Daniel Kanstroom (eds.), Constructing Immigrant “Illegality”: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

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Anouche Der Sarkissian, « David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 13 | 2021, 235-240.

Référence électronique

Anouche Der Sarkissian, « David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 13 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2021, consulté le 16 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/2709 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2709

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Anouche Der Sarkissian

Université Paris Nanterre and Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

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