The politics of Armenian migration to North America, 1885–1915: sojourners, smugglers, and dubious citizens

One of the most distinctive phenomena of our era is the high rate of mobility of people who leave their home to settle somewhere else because of war, persecution, poverty. According to UN estimate, the number of international migrants globally reached 272 million in 2019.1 Many of them die on their way as states try to block their movement for the sake of “national interests.” States decide which movements of human beings are legal which are not. Although its scale and tragedy have reached a stunning level, global migration from East to West is hardly a new phenomenon. David Gutman’s The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885–1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens handles one of the earliest cases, namely migration of Ottoman Armenians to the US. As Gutman argues, the high mobility of Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees of the time in question reshaped the policies and methods of states to deter them, most of which became well-established practices in the following decades. Gutman’s work opens up a perspective to assess how the modern regime and practices of migration have been shaped. He rightly complains about a lack of conversation between scholars (we may add activists) who study migration as a contemporary global phenomenon and historians of the subject (p. 45). His work may be read as an attempt at starting such a conversation, which would sharpen the understanding of the dynamics of global migration. The author calculates that at least 65,000 Armenians migrated from the Ottoman Empire to North America from the late 1880s to the 1910s (p. 4). He focuses on the Harput region in the east, as more than half of those Armenians were from this region. After a capable introduction, the book is divided into three parts. The first part, consisting of three chapters, handles the outbound migration of Armenians. It narrates the history of migration from the Harput region, and explains how and why the Ottoman state tried to halt the migration of Armenians to North America and why it failed, as well as how the smuggling networks emerged and worked after the ban. The second part, consisting of chapters 4 and 5, focuses on the return migration of Armenians and the efforts of the Ottoman state to block their entrance. N E W P E R S P E C T IV E S O N T U R K E Y