Doing some local historical research I came across a *half dozen or so families in my home county who had come from Lebanon/Syria. Apparently all were Christian. What I haven’t determined is whether or not they had emigrated before or after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Afterward, I can pretty easily see it. But before that, would the Ottomans have cared about whether or not their subjects made the trip over?
*A half dozen doesn’t sound like much, but in my sparsely populated home county, that’s a significant number.
In my state (West Virginia) they primarily came over as refugees escaping Ottoman rule. The migration began in the 1880s and continued even after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Christians in Lebanon and Syria tended to be wealthier than Muslims and had extensive trading contacts with the British and French. The Ottomans felt threatened by those contacts as well as good old-fashioned greed and there was a lot of heavy-handedness. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a lot of land was added to Lebanon which made Christians a minority and further pushed them to the US. I would say that likely the Ottomans would not have cared. Their attitude towards minorities was frequently ‘The fewer the better.’ and probably thought that Christians leaving Lebanon just meant fewer they’d have to deal with later. The Maronites (a Christian sect) had rebelled against Ottoman rule in the 1860s and were constantly fighting with the Druze anyway, so my guess is that Istanbul probably wanted them all gone.