A 1909 Report on Armenian Emigration to the US Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a period of massive out-migration from Europe and Asia to the Americas. In the Ottoman Empire, Arab Christian migrants from Greater Syria, particularly Mount Lebanon, contributed significantly to this phenomenon. Armenians did too, especially those who had contact with American and European missionary schools in Anatolia. During the reign of Abdülhamid II, controlling and monitoring the movement of Armenians became an issue of state concern as Armenian political groups were among those most hounded by the secret police. Migrants played a big role in this equation, because in addition to fostering connections between Ottoman citizens and people abroad, they often sought to return from the Americas to their original homes. Keeping track of the number of Armenians in Anatolia and their locations was no simple task.
 

The photograph at right is a picture from the Ottoman archives of a Protestant Armenian family from Merzifon that migrated to Fresno, California in March of 1908. Words on the back of the photo indicated that they were issued a passport and relinquished their Ottoman citizenship (terk-i tabiiyet) in order to go to America. The father's name is Şekercioğlu (or we could say Shekerjian) Parsigh, the mother's Porab, and the son's Mihran. The accompanying documents say nothing about why they chose to emigrate.
Historians often attribute Armenian migration to the massacres of the 1890s and the general experience of persecution under Abdülhamid II. If this was the case, then the timing of the Shekerjian family's emigration was somewhat poor, since just a month later the events leading up to the 1908 Young Turk revolution and the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution would begin to unfold. The empire's non-Muslim communities largely welcomed this change, and many Armenian intellectuals in exile chose to return as a result. 

Yet, the set of documents that I will treat in this article deals with an apparent acceleration of emigration in 1909. On September 1, 1909, a Belgian newspaper reported that Armenians were leaving the provinces of Malatya, Antep, and Mamuretülaziz. The ranks of Armenians in Aleppo and the vicinity also thinned. Meanwhile, massive numbers of Christians were leaving Mount Lebanon for the Americas. The reason given was the prevailing violence, brigandage and lack of security in the Ottoman Empire. Any avid reader of Western media outlets such as the New York Times during the early twentieth century would have likely identified the Ottoman Empire as a political entity constantly persecuting Christians. The myriad stories about slaughtered and starving Armenians were certainly not without basis, but the trope of oppressed Christendom manifested itself in sensationalized and unsophisticated portrayals. This was an issue for the post-1908 constitutional government of the Ottoman Empire, for which both the security of its subjects and its image abroad were major questions following the Adana Massacre of April 1909, in which tens of thousands of Christians and around 1,000 Muslims were killed. 

Given the prevalence of depictions of the bloodthirsty Turk, the Belgian newspaper's attribution of migration to persecution would hardly have surprised a Western audience. It did, however, seem to be news to the Ottoman authorities, and they requested an explanation of the situation on the ground from each of the governors of the provinces mentioned in the article. Just as the Western press was always quick to report the depredations of the terrible Turk, Ottoman reports frequently reflect a tendency to downplay the sectarian aspects of any such events, and so these reports must also be read with skepticism. 

Of course, no governor in his right mind would have replied that the unbridled slaughter of Christians was taking place in his district even if there was a grain of truth to such a statement, so it is not surprising that each of the reports in this file reject the notion of violence as a fabrication. However, in the case of a report issued by the deputy governor of Mamuretülaziz, Mehmed Ali, we do find some analysis suggesting other reasons for emigration. Mehmed Ali reported that he had just come from Samsun and that on every day of his two-week trip he saw five to ten carts full of Armenians headed abroad. According to a subsequent investigation with the local population ministry, just over 5,000 residents of Mamuretülaziz already lived in America. Mehmed Ali wrote that the most important cause of this migration was economic, indicating that it was easier to make a living there (burada esbab-ı maişetin darlığı ve Amerika’da kolay olmasıdır). Poor Armenian villagers, like many others throughout the world, saw the United States as a land of opportunity. In order to emphasize the economic component and de-emphasize the role of fear of violence in the equation, Mehmed Ali noted that many Muslims had also chosen to emigrate and that there were even 500 Kurds working in America at the time. Moreover, while some had delayed their return due the "event that occurred in Adana", many emigrants were already returning, he wrote. With further stability, Mehmed Ali expected some professionals and wealthy Armenians to come back, too. He also predicted that the flow of migrants would decrease once railway construction began in the area, presumably creating jobs for laborers.
In the end, we cannot say exactly why Parsigh and his family and the thousands like them finally chose to emigrate. Maybe Parsigh left because of persecution, as readers of the Western press might expect, or maybe they left for economic reasons, as Mehmed Ali seemed to believe. They also might have left after converting to Protestantism. On a population level, these factors were all intertwined in the end. Economic explanations for migration were certainly valid and probably much more plausible than the sensational reports from the Belgian press described above. Yet, in light of what had just occurred in Adana and what was to come in term of violence between Muslims and Christians in Anatolia, the dismissive tone of reports by officials like Mehmed Ali also belies a certain indifference to the plight of Armenians on the part of local government.
However, it is clear that negligent though they may have been, Ottoman officials also did not want the Armenians to leave. As a result of the rise in emigration, the Ottoman government made an emergency order to halt the issuance of passports in Mamuretülaziz to stem the flow. The reasons for this measure seem to have been practical; migration decreased the labor supply and allowed men to escape military service. Of course, not having a passport didn't mean people stopped leaving. But it might have helped Ottoman officials sleep easier at night. As Reşat Kasaba details in A Moveable Empire, the late Ottoman state invested considerable resources in stopping people from moving. It told immigrants where to settle, forced nomads to stay put, and, as in the case of many Armenians, kept villagers in their villages. Amidst all these attempts to stop people from moving, the state also reserved the right to tell its citizens to move, a right that it would come to exercise in many extreme ways during the World War I period.

                 

  Sources : http://www.docblog.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2013/09/armenian-immigrants-united-states-california.html