President Trump’s January 27th Executive Order attempted to ban the entry of nationals from seven Middle Eastern countries and suspended the resettlement of refugees unless they are “persecuted religious minorities,” a terminology that is itself selectively deployed to refer to Middle Eastern non-Muslims in general, and Christians in particular. This policy has correctly been understood as part of Trump’s campaign promise to create a ban on Muslim travel to the United States; the order is currently facing legal challenge in 9th District Federal Court. As a scholar of Middle Eastern migration, I am stunned by this administration’s unwillingness to engage the expertise of refugee resettlement agencies, asylum experts, or historians before attempting this discriminatory and impracticable policy.
As a historian, I would also like America to know that we have seen this before. An American president imposed a ban on Muslim travel nearly a century ago, during World War I. That president was Woodrow Wilson.
America’s 1918 Muslim Ban was one facet of the multiplying wartime restrictions that immigrants faced in the United States. America declared war on Germany and Austria in 1917 and mobilized millions of men in the largest conscription by that point in American history. But despite the fact that the Ottoman Empire was fighting America’s allies in the Middle East, the United States never declared war on Istanbul. America’s position toward the Ottomans was a frosty, armed neutrality which it maintained throughout the armistice of 1918. Istanbul recalled its diplomats from Washington and severed ties with the United States, but no declaration of war ever came between the Ottoman Empire and America.
In 1917, around 250,000 Ottoman subjects lived in the United States.[1] Though German and Austrian immigrants were reclassified as “enemy aliens” during the war and were marked for surveillance and policing, subjects of the Ottoman Empire—Turks, Syrian Arabs, Kurds, Sephardic Jews, and Armenians—were granted an intermediate status as “neutral allies of the (German) enemy.”[2] As neutrals living in the United States, Ottoman nationals were initially granted enhanced access to military enlistment and to naturalization as U.S. citizens.[3] But even as they bought Liberty Bonds, joined the Army, and deployed to the French Western Front, Ottoman immigrants simultaneously faced the rising tide of nativist hostility. A stepped up security regime confronted them; the federal Bureau of Investigation, for instance, routinely detained and questioned Ottoman migrants, suspecting them of pro-German loyalties. Ottomans were marked as a security threat because of their Empire’s relationship with Berlin, but also because of pervasive Islamophobic anxieties that as Muslims, they could be compelled to rebellion by their Caliph in Istanbul, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet V. Because travel restrictions were among the only facets of immigrant life that the federal government had control over, limitations on Ottoman movements and travel became the preferred means for policing these communities.