Human Capital

Human Capital

A History of Putting
Refugees to Work

Laura Robson

First published by Verso 2023

© Laura Robson 2023

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-021-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-024-8 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-023-1 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robson, Laura, author.

Title: Human capital : a history of putting refugees to work / Laura Robson.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023013598 (print) | LCCN 2023013599 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804290217 (hardback) | ISBN 9781804290248 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Migrant labor—United States. | Foreign workers—United States. | Refugees—United States. | Employee rights—United States. | Human rights—United States.

Classification: LCC HD5856.U5 R63 2023 (print) | LCC HD5856.U5 (ebook) | DDC 331.5/440973—dc23/eng/20230418

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013598

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013599

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

For Silje

I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

Othello, V.ii.394

Red tape is a euphemism.

Jim Harrison, “A Sporting Life,” 1976

Contents

Introduction: Refugees, Workers

1. What’s a Refugee Regime? The Origins of Mass Displacement Policy

2. Turning a Profit: Refugee Policy at the League of Nations

3. Colonial Workers: Expanding the Refugee Regime

4. From Europe to America: Refugees and the Politics of “Overpopulation”

5. Zionism Goes Global: Refugees and Roosevelt’s M Project

6. Workers of Another World: Soviet Resettlement Policy

7. Refugees versus “Palestine Refugees”: Race and the Postwar International Regime

8. The Politics of Confinement: Refugee Aid in the Age of Decolonization

9. Containing Labor: Refugees, Migrants, SEZs

Afterword: Workers, Refugees

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Introduction

Refugees, Workers

“The year of Europe’s refugee crisis,” declared the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2015, the fourth year of Syria’s cataclysmic civil war. From a media perspective, it was certainly a defensible description. Newspapers across the European continent were reporting in appalled tones on the boats full of desperate migrants approaching Greece, pressing into Serbia and Hungary, trying to claim asylum rights in Sweden and Germany and the UK. Some of this coverage was sympathetic; much not. “The influx of refugees and migrants to Europe reached staggering new levels this year,” the UNHCR’s commentary went on, “dominating headlines and prompting stormy political debate … Tragedy propelled the issue to centre stage on the European agenda, and the sheer weight of numbers has kept it there for months.”¹

What were these numbers, exactly? As of December 2015, the UNHCR reported, “more than 911,000 refugees and migrants had arrived on European shores since the year began.” By the end of the year, just over a million refugees had made asylum claims somewhere in the European continent, home to some 508 million people. Of course, the phenomenon of migrant arrival tended to concentrate in certain places, with frontline locations like Greece seeing much larger numbers of migrant landings than other European states. Still, the number of refugees in the whole of Europe was smaller—for instance—than in Lebanon alone, which by the end of 2015 had admitted at least 1.2 million refugees into its 4,000 square miles, home to just 5 million people before the war. Turkey had more Syrian refugees than any other country in the world—upwards of 2 million by year’s end. In Jordan, refugees constituted almost one in ten inhabitants. In other words, a vast majority of Syrian refugees were landing in tiny or midsize Middle Eastern countries whose resources, territory, and population were infinitesimal compared to the European continent. But from a European (and indeed an “international”) perspective, it was not the migrants’ exit from Syria but their entrance into Europe that had transformed a tragedy into a crisis.

A coalition of policymakers from the EU and the UN now proposed a plan to control refugee outflow by putting displaced Syrians to work—as noncitizens with sharply delimited labor rights—in hard-to-staff Jordanian manufacturing zones. This scheme was supposed to solve two problems at once: Offering refugees an income (however tiny) would dissuade them from trying to move on to Europe, and providing a cheap local labor force would promote industrialization and help foreign investors turn a profit. “Jordan is shifting from a purely humanitarian approach to a forward looking development drive,” the World Bank’s Middle East director declared. “The Jordanian government is to be commended for its foresight and vision and for leading the way for the international community on what still today are unchartered territories.”² The so-called Jordan Compact, which assigned Syrian refugee workers employment in garment factories and other industrial manufacturing in the rural reaches of eastern Jordan, formally came into effect the following year.

Putting refugees to work seemed like a new idea, but it wasn’t. In 1949, in roughly the same part of the world, three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees—expelled from their homelands in the war that created the state of Israel—found themselves encamped in desolate tent cities in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and Egyptian-controlled Gaza. Israel, busy settling newly arrived Jewish immigrants in emptied Palestinian houses and neighborhoods and towns, categorically refused to allow the refugees to return. In response, the United Nations created a new agency—the UN Relief and Works Agency, colloquially known as UNRWA—and assigned it practical responsibility for displaced Palestinians, while strictly forbidding its officials to engage in the search for a political solution. Faced with this conundrum and backed by the United States, UNRWA began to enact regional employment schemes for Palestinians, from Jordan to Saudi Arabia, as a way of simultaneously channeling refugee discontent away from its Israeli target and providing cut-rate menial labor for a fast-tracked industrialization of the Middle East. By the mid-1950s there were dispossessed Palestinians at work on oil refineries in the Gulf, industrial farms in Jordan, and rail construction across the Hejaz—all employed via an international refugee regime that had deliberately remade them as cheap migrant laborers.

Advocates presented low-wage industrial work as a solution to interwar European crises of displacement as well. In 1938, official representatives from more than thirty countries convened in the picturesque southern French spa town of Évian to argue bitterly over who bore responsibility for dealing with the burgeoning European Jewish refugee crisis. The Nazi Party, in power in Germany since 1933, had been experimenting with anti-Jewish legislation for some years; now it had begun to enact draconian policies of denationalization, expropriation, and expulsion. At Évian, the Dominican Republic alone agreed to take in some of Germany’s expellees; the other countries categorically refused. (Australia, with its offer to take some refugees as long as they weren’t Jewish, was a partial exception.) On his way home, a discouraged Franklin Roosevelt tried desperately to come up with another way to disperse Europe’s stateless Jews without opening the doors to the United States. His subsequent wartime scheme would propose sending refugees abroad to serve as workers in American-backed industrial development—agriculture, oil, manufacturing—from Latin America to Iraq: remaking displaced people as cheap, disposable labor permanently deprived of political standing.

Even then it was not a novel concept. In 1923, the much-lauded Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen—coming off a heroic first career as a polar explorer, and already considered one of the great humanitarian thinkers of his age—had just been appointed the first high commissioner for refugees, under the auspices of the brand-new League of Nations. His first task was to deal with hundreds of thousands of Russian, Armenian, and Assyrian war refugees, dispersed in camps across the Middle East and Europe and widely regarded as a political and economic menace. Strikes were already breaking out across London, Paris, Chicago; postwar metropolitan governments worried that an influx of cheap workers into the Western labor market—especially refugees who might be all too close to Bolshevism—could render the situation totally unmanageable. Nansen, with no money of his own and needing to appeal to donors in the United States and Europe, proposed to solve the problem by shipping the displaced en masse to places where corporations and states could use them as laborers, from Brazil and British Guiana to Syria and Australia. His refugee employment office was soon scrutinizing its charges’ physical capacities and political opinions, and putting those who passed muster to work: in Belgian mines, French chemical factories, Brazilian coffee plantations.

For more than a hundred years, then, the idea of turning refugees into menial workers—preferably in colonial and semicolonial settings far from the Global North—has served as a driving force behind the construction and operation of the modern international refugee regime. How did such schemes come to dominate international policy on displacement across such disparate spaces and situations, across the whole of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first? It is a story that after all calls into serious question refugee agencies’ own accounts of their work as straightforward, apolitical, essential charitable assistance to otherwise abandoned people. This self-description remains existentially necessary to aid organizations like the UNHCR, whose donors generally imagine themselves helping to save the displaced from a variety of terrible fates—not condemning them to a lifetime of menial labor in places where they have no hope of ever attaining political or civil standing. The international refugee regime—encompassing UN agencies, NGOs, and all manner of private contractors—has therefore over many decades deliberately hidden its longstanding commitment to placing refugees in temporary, low-wage, sometimes dangerous industrial work under a veil of emotive rhetoric about the provision of essential humanitarian aid to suffering people. Glossy brochures depicting the altruistic provision of water, food, and education to the dispossessed belie both the history and the present of the internationalist refugee regime—which has, in fact, long partnered with the world’s most powerful states to ensure that international refugee policy would support rather than threaten the interdependent causes of ethnic nationalism and industrial capitalism.

The idea that mass displacement above all constituted a problem of labor, and that refugee employment in colonial settings could serve as a solution, dates from the very beginning of the modern concept of refugeedom. The earliest iteration of modern refugee policy—in Istanbul, in the administrative offices of the struggling Ottoman state in the late nineteenth century—had already identified refugees as potential agents of state power and industrial development. It was a vision developed almost simultaneously with the British quest to colonize East Africa and the Middle East, possibly with the help of displaced Jews from eastern Europe. After the Ottoman vision suffered its catastrophic defeat and dismemberment in the First World War, two decades of piecemeal and experimental European refugee policy would continue to revolve around these same principles.

Internationalist refugee policy, in the modern sense, started at the League of Nations; and from its inception the League understood mass displacement as above all a problem of labor. By the mid-1920s it was already putting forth an elaborate series of proposals to release its Russian, Armenian, and Assyrian refugee charges into the care of British-, French-, and American-connected corporate employers outside Europe, with a hopeful emphasis on the idea of using refugees to industrialize Latin America. In the event, though, the League’s first high commissioner for refugees—the abovementioned Fridtjof Nansen—tested these ideas mainly in the Middle East, where European military and political control over the former Ottoman Arab provinces rendered such experimentation practically possible. After the League collapsed, its imperial practices vis-à-vis refugees served as inspiration and example for an evolving “international community” now increasingly under American sponsorship.

Franklin Roosevelt, for one, saw a great deal to like in the League’s ideas as he faced the question of how to solve the exponentially larger refugee crisis of the Nazi era to American advantage. His wartime “M Project” (for “Migration”) created a detailed blueprint for an American-led international settlement authority to send refugees to places that, he thought, had been scientifically determined to be underpopulated and underdeveloped and could therefore make use of large populations of displaced and dispossessed people. Such midcentury visions for mass refugee repopulation of remote areas often found inspiration in Zionist proposals for mass resettlement-cum-development in Palestine: plans designed simultaneously to keep Jewish refugees far from Europe, offer them some kind of security, and make use of them as laborers in the Western-backed industrialization of a colonized region. There were Soviet models for this sort of refugee policy too; remarkably, some of the M Project’s own showrunners explicitly tagged Stalin’s use of displaced populations as mobile industrial workers in the Central Asian borderlands of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as a possible model for a successful American-internationalist-capitalist refugee policy. And though a skeptical Truman shut down the project after the war, its essential assumptions lived on. Operating in a global atmosphere mostly hostile to immigration, the postwar International Refugee Organization continued to promote low-wage industrial employment in far-flung locations, from Canada to India, as a primary mode of dealing with the continent’s remaining “displaced persons.”

It was an approach that sat comfortably alongside the first attempts to codify the definition of “refugee” in international law and offer some kind of legal protection to those so brutally displaced in Europe’s disastrous midcentury conflagration, a task accomplished to great fanfare with the signing of the Convention on the Status of Refugees in 1951. The convention, despite its narrow definition of refugees as only those displaced before 1951 (and mostly in Europe), has been hailed ever since as a model of humanitarian vision. In fact, its intentions and consequences were even less universal, and less altruistic, than they appeared. Three years earlier, the 1948 war for Palestine had produced a new and different set of refugees: people whom the emerging “international community” (dominated by the old imperial powers of Britain and France alongside the new superpower of the United States) did not want to access the rights and privileges guaranteed in the convention, particularly the possibility of some form of resettlement in the West. The Arab world—including many Palestinians—also objected to the inclusion of Palestinian refugees within the frame of the convention, on the grounds that a possibility of asylum elsewhere might weaken the Palestinian case for return and restitution. As a consequence, the category of “refugee” that eventually featured in the 1951 convention stood in explicit contradistinction from the “Palestine refugee”—a separate classification featuring none of the legal, political, and social protections mooted for the presumably normative (at this time, mostly European) version. In other words, the treaty’s architects carefully built its purportedly universalizing sureties over the legal non-protection of Palestinians, providing a crucial procedural model for the many subsequent legally articulated exclusions of non-Western refugee communities from its guarantees. The countries of the Global North would henceforth be able to use their support of the Refugee Convention to claim adherence to a universalist form of international humanitarianism, while denying its protections to nonwhite non-Europeans on the simple premise that they occupied a different legal track of “refugee.”

As the Cold War set in, this theoretical principle that refugees could be segregated into distinct legal categories received a new practical articulation on the ground. Western governments developed the notion of reserving political asylum mainly for white Europeans who could be plausibly depicted as victims of communism, while declaring refugees from the decolonizing world eligible only for material help in situ (usually offered via the mechanism of physical internment) rather than permanent asylum elsewhere. The new United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees piloted this approach of assistance-cum-containment in one of its first extra-European experiments, with Algerian refugees in Morocco and Tunisia during the bloody French–Algerian war of 1954–1962. UNHCR officials in North Africa developed practices of using the provision of aid to immobilize displaced Algerians in surveilled areas, thereby protecting the interests of both the bordering states and the beleaguered French military. In 1967, now confident that the UNHCR had proved itself mostly capable of containing refugee populations where they were, the General Assembly passed an addendum to the Refugee Convention that extended its purview to populations displaced beyond Europe and after 1951—thus augmenting the regime’s capacities for physical restraint of refugees across the globe while ostentatiously advertising an expanded internationalist commitment to humanitarian assistance and human rights.

Under these early regimes of refugee restriction, formal work for the interned became largely performative—intended to trumpet refugee agencies’ concern for human development and the capitalist principle of self-sufficiency, but mostly unlinked from local and regional (and imperial) economies. But the old idea that refugees represented an untapped labor resource persisted. By the 1980s, European states and the UNHCR alike had begun to experiment with a new idea: replacing refugee status wherever possible with new kinds of “temporary protections.” This legal approach to refugee status had the practical effect of releasing people who might once have qualified as refugees into the much larger and more nebulous category of migrant—a profoundly more vulnerable state, and all the more appealing to employers for it. And for those who did count as refugees, policymakers began to dream up a new version of older worker schemes: this time, one that combined the old principle of low-wage industrial employment with the newer practice of long-term refugee confinement. “Special Economic Zones” like those created by the Jordan Compact could simultaneously keep refugees in place and make use of them as low-cost menial labor in mostly foreign enterprises, on the much-touted premise that such jobs would provide the displaced with a sense of self-reliance. It would appear, then, that the old idea of forcibly remaking refugees into labor migrants working for the economic interests of the world’s most powerful states is very much still with us—along with the equally hoary defense that such labor participation represents a form of humanitarian refugee empowerment.³

This telling of the international community’s long history of putting refugees to work doesn’t just challenge contemporary refugee policy’s assumed philosophical foundations and political genealogies but also provides a new account of its temporal and geographical origins. Most histories of the modern refugee regime start in Europe after 1945: with the postwar European “displaced persons” camps, the dawning European crisis of conscience over the Holocaust, and the subsequent drawing up—nearly simultaneously, and with intensive cross-referencing—of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951), followed shortly thereafter by the Convention on Statelessness (1954). In other words, chroniclers of the modern refugee regime have tended to outline an origin point in wartime Europe and a subsequent global expansion driven by the upheavals of decolonization—first a mostly European story, and then a mostly non-European one. It will likely strike readers, then, that many of this book’s case studies are drawn not from the European crises that are usually assumed to have served as the wellsprings of modern refugee policy—from central Europe in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian war of the 1990s—but from the Middle East. This is no accident; for although it is rarely acknowledged, modern refugeedom, and modern refugee policy with it, largely began in the Middle East and has developed with direct reference to it for more than a century. And it is in the Middle East that we can see the real political and intellectual origins of modern refugee policy: located not in the particulars of the postwar European political landscape, and especially not in some generous impulse to offer humanitarian aid to the war’s displaced victims, but in the careful recasting of old colonial ideas about migration and labor as basic principles of a modern imperial internationalism attempting to control a seemingly dangerous global labor market.

The pattern of understanding refugees as potentially useful to fragile imperial economies can be seen in the very first modern refugee regimes, which arose in the late Ottoman Empire for populations displaced in the Balkan and Caucasian wars. It is even more visible in the interwar period, with the League of Nations’ remaking of the Middle East as an occupied zone where refugees could be forcibly deployed to support colonial occupation and imperial economic development. The Zionist movement pressing the case for mass European Jewish settlement in Palestine—both before and after the foundation of the state of Israel—offered not only an intellectual case study but also a practical model for European and then American policymakers interested in putting migrants and settlers to work developing colonial resources and markets. And in 1948, when the expulsion of three-quarters of a million people from what had been Palestine gave rise to one of the world’s longest-standing crises of displacement, the Middle East emerged as a crucial laboratory for global refugee policy. It was there that international policymakers first tested the deployment of refugees in the interests of large-scale foreign-funded industrial development, and then worked out best practices for their long-term physical and political containment-cum-exploitation.

Histories of the modern refugee regime that begin from postwar Europe, then, not only overlook the system’s many earlier incarnations but ignore all the ways in which it is impossible to imagine the modern international refugee regime without the Middle East, and especially without Palestine. The descriptive of the “Palestine refugee” first appeared in 1949, alongside the international negotiations over the presumably normative European “refugee,” whose rights were not long thereafter defined directly atop the lesser protections being afforded to displaced Palestinians. The crucial distinction, key to the way the modern refugee system operates, between different types of refugees—that is, the legal divide between those eligible for legal protection, asylum, and resettlement and those eligible only for material relief in situ—was first developed in and for Palestine. UNRWA, not the UNHCR, was the first major international refugee agency run by the UN; its plans to place Palestinian workers in industrial development schemes across the Middle East became models for developmentalist practice and refugee labor exploitation across the globe. In other words, the UN’s administration of displaced Palestinians—not least vis-à-vis the question of work—has shaped and prefigured broader internationalist refugee policy for more than seventy years. And belying the images on a thousand glossy pamphlets issuing from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the like, from this vantage point international refugee aid clearly appears as a regime of encampment and internment—propelled not by humanitarian feeling but by a deep anxiety about refugees’ potential capacity for organizing, combined with a long-term commitment to making use of their labor for both public and private profit.

A history of the modern refugee regime’s development via the Middle East, with a focus on the usually unacknowledged question of labor, tells us that the global refugee regime was built from its beginning around the basic premise of exploiting refugees as workers—preferably as far from the shores of wealthy countries as possible. Among other things, this history brings into question the common liberal assumption that primitive and visceral forms of nationalism represent the primary barrier to a fairer and more effective global refugee policy. From this vantage point, it’s not plausible that nationalists and populists have rendered the refugee regime’s original good intentions impossible to carry out. Instead, it looks rather like the twentieth-century liberal internationalists who so often appear as heroes in histories of modern humanitarianism—from Fridtjof Nansen to Franklin Roosevelt to António Guterres—deliberately, carefully, and strategically built a lasting global regime for the regulation and exploitation of refugee labor: a system that, astonishingly, is still mostly managing to disguise itself as a form of internationally administered altruism.

1

What’s a Refugee Regime?

The Origins of Mass Displacement Policy

Human displacement, often accompanied by religious or ethnic persecution, is an old and arguably even an ancient phenomenon. Mass expulsions were a regular if not frequent feature of imperial histories across the globe, from the Roman Empire forward. Indeed, the practice created some notable communities of the early modern period: Jews from Spain who reinvigorated Ottoman Salonika after the Inquisition, Huguenot settlers from France who remade early modern London. But in the twentieth century, the term “refugee” came to mean something more than just displacement. Refugees, in the modern sense of the word, were people who had been simultaneously displaced and stripped of their nationality—rendering them not just physically homeless but also politically unprotected. Historian Peter Gatrell succinctly states the case for the distinctiveness of modern refugeedom: “Twentieth-century displacement was unprecedented by virtue of being linked to the collapse of multi-national empires, the emergence of the modern state with a bounded citizenship, the spread of totalizing ideologies that hounded internal enemies, and the internationalization of responses to refugee crises.”¹ In other words, to earn the modern sobriquet of refugee, someone had not only to be displaced or dispossessed but also to have suffered—as the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees would eventually put it—through the essentially modern ordeal of losing “the protection of the country of his nationality,” in the process becoming a ward of a new kind of international regime designed to fill in the gap.

Legal analyses of this modern concept of refugeedom often locate its beginnings in the mass displacements of the Second World War. Historians of Europe sometimes put its origin point a bit further back, to the First World War, with its mass dislocations of Russians and Armenians (among others) and the simultaneous disintegration of the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. But this kind of modern refugeedom can be found even earlier in a slightly different geography: the disintegrating Ottoman sphere of the nineteenth century. The late Ottoman Empire saw both the mass production of stateless refugees and the construction of an official regime to deal with them, one that from its inception centered on an understanding of refugees as a pool of mobile labor. When its nineteenth-century Balkan and Caucasian wars brought enormous numbers of people fleeing into Anatolia, the Ottoman government made the crucial decision to put the refugees to work in the service of the state. Its formal state-level refugee regime—arguably the world’s first—imagined the displaced above all as workers, who could be placed wherever they were needed to consolidate state power and kickstart the economic development of remote or “difficult” areas.

This Ottoman refugee administration was a formal one that had no clear institutional parallel in Europe; but related European ideas began to appear not long thereafter about making imperial use of displacement, particularly with reference to Jews coming from the Russian sphere. Drawing on their own long-established practices of settler colonialism, British imperial thinkers in particular now considered the possibility of making use of persecuted or banished communities for imperial benefit; for instance, in proposals to put Jewish migrants to work in British East Africa or the Ottoman sphere (including but not limited to Palestine). By the first decades of the twentieth century, then, the Middle East had already become ground zero for a series of crucial early experiments in making the modern phenomenon of mass displacement serve the economic and political interests of various imperial powers.

Ottoman Refugees: The First Stage

The Ottoman Empire, which at its height in the sixteenth century reached from the doors of Vienna to the edge of Safavid Persia, had by this point suffered considerable territorial loss on all sides. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the European imperial powers of Britain, France, and Russia had all begun to invest in a strategy of claiming influence over Ottoman lands without actually killing off the empire by aligning themselves with local anti-Ottoman resistance movements in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Though these movements—especially in their earlier incarnations—tended in fact to be hyperlocal expressions of discontent over issues like excessive taxation, their new European advocates reshaped them in the Western public imagination as passionate Christian separatists seeking national “independence” from Ottoman Muslim tyranny. By the 1820s this approach had successfully peeled a semi-independent Greece and Serbia away from the Ottoman Empire and was fostering constant, low-level violence across much of the rest of the Balkans, including the future states of Romania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. In 1854 this veiled imperial competition broke out into actual war when British-French-Russian competition (purportedly over some minor disagreements regarding the Holy Places in Palestine) led to the two-year Crimean War and the Ottoman loss of the territories of Wallachia and Moldavia. This violence prefigured the more general brutality and territorial losses of the Balkan Wars of 1877–1878, in which the Ottoman Empire lost Bulgaria and Macedonia before reclaiming some territory under conditions of external European monitoring.² It was a period of near-constant upheaval.

These Balkan Wars, and the parallel bloodshed along the Ottoman–Russian border, uprooted huge numbers of people between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War. The refugees were mostly (though by no means exclusively) Muslims fleeing increasingly violent European-backed Christian proto-nationalist bandits and local militias, who were gradually articulating a new politics of Christian ethnonational statehood to be accomplished by the mass expulsion of other religious communities.³ This new landscape of ethnonational violence meant that, for the first time, displaced populations—forced out of their homelands not just by war and violence but by a new perception that their ethnicity, language, or religion precluded them from participation in the emerging national projects of the breakaway Balkan states—could be understood as having been not just physically removed but also politically denationalized. It was a brave new world of modern refugee politics.

Expulsions of this kind became more frequent and violent as Western imperial intervention in Ottoman politics intensified over the course of the nineteenth century. The early Greek nationalist movement, led by the Orthodox bishop Germanos of Patras and backed by British, French, and Russian supporters, murdered nearly all Morea’s 25,000 Muslims in 1821—an atrocity to which the Ottoman military responded with its own massacres and expulsions at Chios.⁴ Muslim Tatars, too, were expelled several times over the course of Russian-Ottoman military conflicts: first in 1828, when they were deported to Rumelia and then shortly thereafter re-removed to Anatolia, and then again during the Crimean War, when some 400,000 were forced out of the Crimea into the southern Balkans, later to be removed yet again to Anatolia.⁵ The Crimean War caused Christian dislocations as well; Bulgarian Christians fled Ottoman army violence in significant numbers, settling in Greece and Romania and beginning to agitate in opposition to Ottoman Muslim rule in the Balkans. Over the subsequent decade, as Russia sought the creation of a definitive Christian majority in its newly acquired Caucasian holdings, it spearheaded a mass deportation of Circassians, Abazins, and other Muslim populations from the Caucasus—an endeavor so large that the government had to cooperate with its Ottoman enemy to complete this “cleaning out.”⁶ Refugees were becoming a political fact of the late Ottoman landscape: across the Balkans, the Caucasus, Anatolia, and the Arab Middle East alike.

The World’s First Refugee Regime

In 1859, the beginnings of this huge and sudden influx of denationalized Caucasian Muslims into Anatolia led the Ottoman state to establish the world’s first formal state-driven refugee regime. The new “General Administrative Commission for Refugees” sought explicitly to renationalize Balkan and Caucasian refugees as Ottoman subjects, in service of both refugee and imperial interests. In other words, this was a first instance of a formal legal and political regime that understood refugeedom as a condition not just of displacement but also of statelessness. It would prove a prescient move as forced displacement became a more and more commonly deployed weapon of war.

By the 1870s the picture had darkened further. As Ottoman soldiers tried to put down local rebellions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Bulgaria, Russia sent troops to support the uprisings—a blend of encounters that forced some two million civilians, mostly but by no means exclusively Muslim, to flee. By now, the deliberate tactic of ejection had become central both to the military strategy of the various backing empires and to the local construction of a politics of nationalist separatism—a pattern that became still more evident in the wars of 1877–1878, which resulted first in the creation and then the dismemberment of a greater Bulgarian state under Russian influence. Mass expulsions became an active and frequent military strategy, with chaotic consequences for civilians across the region. One historian describes the situation thus:

Organized expulsions characterized the conflict; an Orthodox refugee described a “complete clearing out of the Serbs of Bosnia.” Muslims fled from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Anatolia, where they were joined by Circassians and Kurds from the Russian Empire. The Treaty of Berlin made provision for Christian Orthodox refugees to return to their homes. Nevertheless Macedonia, having been absorbed by Bulgaria, was returned to Ottoman jurisdiction, with the result that Orthodox Christians now fled in large numbers to Bulgaria where they formed the backbone of revolutionary organizations dedicated to the overthrow of Turkish rule.⁷

The “ ’93 disaster,” as subsequent generations of displaced Muslims remembered it (referring to 1877, or 1293 in the Muslim calendar), killed or evicted more than half of Bulgaria’s Muslims, saw the death of 35 percent of Bosnia’s Muslims, and deported more than a million Muslims from the Balkans—a toll met with almost total indifference in the West. European elites, as one account of the Greek–Ottoman struggle has it, understood the brutalities as “a war between Christianity and Islam and came down on the side of Christianity.”⁸

The Ottomans struggled with this influx of destitute people, but they also saw a potential upside in the war’s production of refugees: these homeless and stateless Muslims, eager to declare loyalty to their host state, could serve a crucial role as representatives of and workers for the Ottoman empire. In 1857—two years prior to the commission’s creation—the Ottoman government had already instituted what they called a “Refugee Code,” a settlement scheme under which the imperial state dispensed plots of land to destitute migrants. These settlers would be exempt from both taxes and conscription “for six years if they settled in Rumeli and for twelve years if they settled in Anatolia,” a benefit contingent on committing to farm the land for at least twenty years. (One historian makes the useful point that apart from its refugee context, this practice in essence was not radically different from the Homestead Acts distributing land to settlers in the United States at roughly the same moment.)⁹ In any case, this measure proved so popular that the Ottoman state decided to set up a formal “Refugee Commission” to streamline and control refugee entrance and resettlement, a task they carried out in cooperation with aid agencies like the Ottoman Red Crescent.

Ottoman officials now began to think more systematically about how refugee resettlement might be made to serve their own economic and state-building interests. As would be true for so many future resettlement schemes, the commission carefully turned refugees (regardless of their own origins or preferences) away from cities, deploying them instead to work in agricultural development in thinly populated rural areas where state control was weak and where political organization was harder to accomplish. It mapped out regions of settlement in Anatolia and the northern Balkans where refugees would be collected and placed in areas deemed underpopulated, insufficiently settled, or home to unruly local populations. In central Anatolia the Ottoman state carefully positioned refugees from the Caucasus to block the established seasonal routes of certain migratory populations; around Ankara, refugees from Serbia were provided with newly built huts, clinics, and starter farm animals to create settled villages that would displace local nomadic tribes, particularly Kurds. In a preview of things to come, such refugees were often expected to turn a profit for the state. Their taxes were earmarked for deposit back into the Refugee Commission’s funds, and the mid-1860s saw the establishment of a new credit union that financed refugee agriculture through repayable low-interest loans, sometimes paid in seed or livestock.¹⁰

Balkan and Caucasian refugees thus became active participants in Ottoman efforts to establish greater control over some of the most difficult political territory in the empire, through their reclamation of “empty land” in the Balkans, eastern Anatolia, Cilicia, and the Syrian provinces. As the refugee issue intensified across the first decades of the twentieth century, this strategy became ever more prominent. The First and Second Balkan Wars (1912–1913) that marked the beginning of the end for the Ottoman state killed approximately 632,000 Balkan Muslims—nearly 30 percent of the Ottoman Muslim population in Europe—and displaced 414,000 more, most of whom subsequently entered Ottoman Anatolia as refugees. The numbers were so enormous that the Ottoman government had to add onto its already-extant refugee regime with the establishment of a “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants,” which not only undertook to find suitable locations for refugee settlement but also investigated the refugees’ political leanings and plotted punishments for the disloyal Christian nations who had pushed them out.¹¹

The Ottoman concept of a transregional, imperially run refugee resettlement regime was novel in several different ways. First, it interpreted refugeedom not just as physical displacement but as forcible denationalization; the “solution” to the problem of the refugee was necessarily physical (placement on a particular piece of land) but it was also political, involving the bestowing of a new form of citizenship on the stateless. Second, it envisioned refugee succor—and indeed humanitarian aid more broadly—as a tool of state centralization and state authority, creating specific branches of government that used refugees to expand the reach and practice of state action. And third, the Ottoman government understood refugees as valuable for their labor—their physical presence in difficult areas, their development of rural land into agriculturally productive territory, and their presence as a boost to the population of laborers needed by any empire not industrializing fast enough. This emerging Ottoman political imaginary surrounding the refugee, developed in the crucible of the bloody Balkan Wars, would shape the outlines of a subsequent century of European and American responses to mass displacement.

Making Jews into Workers: British Plans for Refugees in Africa and the Middle East

Nothing in Europe yet matched the Ottoman provision of a formal governmental regime dealing with refugee resettlement, citizenship, and assimilation. But Europe had its own ideas—admittedly rather more inchoate—about dealing with emerging patterns of mass displacement. The late nineteenth century was a period of large-scale eastern European Jewish migration in (or, more often, out of) Europe; the term “refugee,” though still infrequently used in this period, would have been most closely associated with the plight of the eastern European Jew and the growing global Jewish diaspora.¹² Turn-of-the-century western European approaches to Jewish flight, then, represented another origin point for modern national and international refugee policy—in this case focused around the dual principles of keeping Jews out of western Europe and using them as tools of imperial development and control elsewhere.

Anti-Semitism of various kinds was a prominent element in both British and French political life in the late nineteenth century, by which time a century-long campaign for Jewish “emancipation” had produced a Jewish political elite with which many imperial officials (steeped in the era’s scientific racism and anti-Semitism) were deeply uncomfortable. “The veriest scum of Europe,” British liberal philosopher and critic of empire J. A. Hobson called German Jews in South Africa, accusing them of falsifying their names to conceal “the extent of the Jew power.”¹³ In France, the Antisemitic League—founded in 1889 by the journalist and writer Édouard Drumont—combined historical Catholic anti-Jewishness with popular nineteenth-century ideas about racial hierarchy, derived from Darwinian thought. Though anti-Semitism was strong in the United States as well, there were no specific restrictions on Jewish immigration there until after the First World War, a fact that explains the massive influx of Jewish migrants from eastern Europe and Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth century: if not exactly welcomed, they were nevertheless generally allowed entrance as necessary labor in a period of intensive economic and territorial expansion. In Britain, by contrast, Jewish migrants were explicitly prohibited entry. In 1902 a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration reported on the dangers of uncontrolled Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, and in 1905 the “Aliens Act” more or less ended Jewish entrance into Britain.

Nevertheless, British officialdom sometimes treated migrant Jews as possible participants in an imperial economy even as it was ever more intent on excluding them from the metropolitan one. Some Jewish nationalists were interested in the possibilities this opened up. By the early twentieth century, a number of prominent British Zionists were beginning to develop a line of thought they called “territorialism”: the idea that a national home could be set up for European Jews in some colonial territory other than Palestine.¹⁴ The idea proved attractive to a British imperial government trying simultaneously to prevent Jewish immigration to the UK and extend its hold over colonial and semi-colonial territories from Kenya to Egypt. Over the next two decades, British officials would participate in a series of conversations about how Jews fleeing eastern Europe could be resettled in the British Empire to serve as workers for the imperial cause.¹⁵ In other words, informed by their own long experience of putting white settlers in places like North America and South Africa, the British were developing their own theories about how refugees could be turned into settlers and laborers and serve as useful tools of imperial control and economic development in far-flung parts of the empire even as they were explicitly excluded from the metropole.

The first proposals for settling Jews in colonies elsewhere came from one of the founders of the Zionist movement, Leon Pinsker, who wrote in his 1882 book Auto-Emancipation that “we need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers … from which no foreign master can expel us.”¹⁶ Palestine was one possibility, but there were others as well. Theodor Herzl took up the same theme in his seminal work The Jewish State, in which he proposed Argentina (already the site of a significant European Jewish presence) as a possible Zionist destination: “One of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over vast area, is sparsely populated, and has a temperate climate. It would be in its own highest interest for the Republic of Argentina to cede us a portion of its territory.”¹⁷ In 1902 Herzl, who had long sought European imperial sponsorship for his proposals for Jewish colonization, hit on the idea of a potential Jewish state in El-Arish, in British-controlled Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; but a commission sent out to the region reported unfavorably on its climate, soil, and access to sea lanes, and the plan sank into oblivion.

Still, the seed had been planted. Just a year later Herzl presented a more serious British-backed plan to the Zionist Organization: the idea of Jewish settlement in the British colonial territory of East Africa, between Kenya and Uganda. British colonial officials—in particular, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain—offered Herzl some 5,000 square miles in the Gwas Ngishu plateau, part of the Mau Forest in what is now Kenya. The territory had recently been shifted to the East Africa Protectorate from the Uganda Protectorate as part of a scheme to develop a Ugandan railway; Chamberlain, who had taken a recent train trip through the region, hoped that a Jewish settler community could develop the territory for agriculture and create a market for the new rail line.¹⁸ In 1904 a Zionist and British commission went out to the region to investigate the possibilities for a British-sponsored settlement of European Jews. For Zionists the main concern was the problem so evident already in Palestine, that of a preexisting indigenous population likely to resist European claims; but from the British perspective, it was the labor question that was most important. As the official report worried, what if European Jewish settlers “could never perform the work done by negroes under the burning equatorial sun”?¹⁹

As the Zionist Organization agonized over the so-called Uganda scheme, the emerging Jewish Territorial Organization under the direction of the British Zionist Israel Zangwill was constructing another settlement plan, this time for Jewish settlement in Mesopotamia. A Zionist Executive Committee member named Otto Warburg spearheaded a campaign to convince the British government that Jewish refugee labor could be deployed in service of the British commercial presence in Iraq, particularly in the realm of industrial agriculture. “We [should] be engaged in serious and broad-ranging economic politics,” he wrote to the president of the Zionist Organization. “I think we really must begin with this matter, especially when there is no doubt that the British Government will support us in Constantinople, and certainly the Germans and also the French as well—because of the Baghdad railway line and because of cotton cultivation.”²⁰ Warburg also contacted William Willcocks, a well-known English irrigation engineer who had written a book in 1903 proposing massive irrigation works on the Tigris and the Euphrates to create a new agricultural area that he thought could be connected with Syria and the Mediterranean ports via a Baghdad rail line. Zangwill was enthused about the idea, which he pitched to the Zionist Organization as a version of mainstream Zionism by deploying an idiosyncratically expansive interpretation of the geographical footprint of the ancient Jewish kingdom. He also approached the Ottoman government with a rather different argument that connected his scheme to their own practices of strategic refugee resettlement: “This wonderful country, however, is not necessarily suitable for Europeans. Of twelve thousand Circassian families that tried to colonize here, only a hundred now remain. But seeing that our forefathers flourished here for generations and that numerous Jews still live in Abyssinia and Arabia, it may be that the Jewish stock is more adaptable to the summer heat than the average white race.”²¹ Remarkably, it would seem, English Zionists were exploring putting eastern European Jews in service of the Ottoman Empire’s state resettlement schemes.

To many leading Zionists, though, London seemed a more promising imperial sponsor than Constantinople. Zangwill’s associate Max Mandelstamm took a third tack in his advocacy, speaking warmly of the possibilities for European development in Mesopotamia: “This historic land that was once the centre of great kingdoms, cannot be left a deserted wasteland in the future … [It should] have an energetic influence on the future revival of Western Asia.”²² This, of course, reflected an argument Zionists were using to potential backers about Palestine: that European Jewish labor could claim it for European empire. As Herzl himself declared, “The labor expended on the land will enhance its value, and the Jews will soon perceive that a new and permanent sphere of operation is opening here for that spirit of enterprise … We could offer the present possessors of the land enormous advantages, assume part of the public debt, build new roads for traffic, which our presence in the country would render necessary, and do many other things.”²³ Such migrants’ very presence—not to mention their labor—would constitute an outpost of empire: politically convenient, and potentially lucrative, for the imperial government willing to sponsor their settlement.

The Great War and the Beginnings of an International Refugee Regime

An inchoate refugee policy was already evident, then, in both Ottoman and British imperial practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and in both cases it was already beginning to understand refugees as potential imperial laborers. But the First World War produced displacement on a much greater scale than had ever been seen before; and its epic dislocations now also produced new supranational venues for negotiating transnational “solutions” to this quintessentially modern problem.

The outbreak of war immediately produced large-scale displacement in western Europe, both within and across national borders. With the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, more than a million Belgians fled into Holland, 200,000 into France, and another 200,000 into Britain. In France nearly three quarters of a million people were internally displaced by July of 1915, fleeing the German army. Recalling the first modern expulsions in the Ottoman Balkans, wartime patterns of refugeedom in Western Europe often followed ethnonational patterns: some 87,000 ethnic Italians, for instance, fled Austria-Hungary upon the empire’s declaration of war in the spring of 1915, and another 500,000 Italians fled south when the Habsburg army occupied Caporetto in 1917.²⁴ Similar patterns—and even higher levels—of dislocation could be seen on the eastern front. Half a million Polish and Ukrainian refugees escaped into Austro-Hungarian territory upon the Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovina; tens of thousands of Jews from these borderlands fled to Vienna, Moravia, and Hungary; nearly a third of the population of Serbia experienced some form of displacement.²⁵ Russia made especially prominent use of deportation and resettlement as a weapon of war; by 1915 there were some three million displaced Russians both within and outside the empire. By the time Russia withdrew from the hostilities in 1917, the figure had likely reached seven million. One historian outlines the policies that brought Russia to the forefront of the new refugee emergency:

The Russian general staff disposed of sweeping powers to enforce the resettlement of civilians, and deemed this an appropriate strategy in the western borderlands where the loyalties of the local population were held to be doubtful. Within this extensive theatre of operations the Russian high command was accused of pursuing a scorched earth policy and driving civilians from their homes. Jews bore the brunt of this policy, but it affected Poles, Baltic farmers, and others, including German colonists who had farmed in Russia for generations. Jews and German colonists found themselves put on the same train heading east. Tsarist officials deported Muslims on the Russian-Ottoman border and assigned their land to Russian settlers … For a while contemporaries distinguished between forced migrants and refugees: “refugeedom is something spontaneous, whereas administrative resettlement [vyselenie] amounts to arbitrariness [proizvol],” wrote a Russian doctor. But the distinction soon ceased to mean anything.²⁶

Russian expellees would eventually constitute one of the largest groups of the postwar displaced and present the victorious Allied powers with their first test subjects for modern internationalist refugee policy.

The other major refugee crisis would emerge from the Ottoman sphere, where a decades-long history of mass displacement and state resettlement was now contributing to an ever-more-toxic internal politics of nation, ethnicity, and religion. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an authoritarian party that by 1913 was more or less running the empire how it wished, drew its leadership and much of its support from soldiers who had cut their teeth serving in the Balkan Wars and from the Muslim communities displaced into Anatolia by these same conflicts.²⁷ By 1915 the war was not going well for the Ottomans; greater Syria had been struck by famine, the British military was moving north into Mesopotamia from Basra, and the Ottoman army was suffering major losses to the Russians on its Caucasian borders. Facing these multiple political and military disasters, the CUP leadership—which had in its earlier incarnations sometimes made space for Armenian participants in the party and the government—began to regard them as a potential fifth column, capable of betraying the empire to the Russians. In the spring of 1915, the Ottoman military (including, we might note, special forces featuring disproportionate numbers of Circassian refugee recruits) entered the Armenian provinces to enforce the empire’s new official policy of mass Armenian deportation.

It was not the first time the Ottoman government had turned violently on its Armenian subjects; a series of state-sponsored massacres in the 1890s, intended to warn Armenians of the consequences of political disloyalty, had left at least 80,000 and perhaps as many as 300,000 dead.²⁸ Still, the Armenian provinces had remained relatively immune to the lure of anti-Ottoman separatist nationalism. Though there were certainly Armenian nationalist movements, their most important leaders were operating from abroad (especially France), and many Armenians remained interested in the project of Ottoman governance. But now, under the pressures of war and remembering the long history of European intervention in the Ottoman sphere through the empire’s Christians, the CUP turned to a new and drastic strategy. The American ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau, who witnessed the genocide and documented it in a widely read memoir, described his impressions in terms that would eventually be broadly accepted by historians: “The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation.”²⁹

The violence against the Armenians proceeded under two frames: first the imprisonment and execution of the community’s political and intellectual leadership and virtually all its military-age men, then the forcible mass deportation of Armenian women and children through the Syrian desert.³⁰ It was the most brutal anti-civilian violence of an extremely bloody war. By the time the Ottomans surrendered in October 1918, at least 800,000 Armenians—more than half of the empire’s prewar Armenian population—were dead, perhaps more.³¹ The survivors, mainly women and children who had ended their brutal march through the desert in makeshift encampments in Syrian cities (above all Aleppo, but also Beirut, Damascus, Latakia, and Jerusalem) were, in the new and modern sense of the word, refugees: displaced by virtue of their ethnonational origins, and now not only homeless but stateless. They would join the millions of displaced Russians as the primary representatives of a new problem of refugeedom confronting the Allied powers seeking to construct a new world order atop the ruins of the defunct Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Empires.

In the chaotic years of the war and its immediate aftermath, it was not clear what form an Allied refugee policy might take. Indeed, much of the initial policy response to wartime refugee crises was private: mission organizations, humanitarian groups, medical aid agencies, and socialist volunteer operations. National governments, too, played a role in finding spaces for the refugees clustering within their borders, often anxiously monitoring them for undesirable political activity.³² Diaspora groups played a role too, trying to advocate for the interests of displaced populations they viewed as national relations. At this point, then, responses to refugees constituted a ragged patchwork of public and private aid, focusing mainly on either immediate relief—the provision of food, medical care, shelter—or repatriation.

Repatriation as a primary strategy for dealing with the displaced came out of the practice of repatriating prisoners of war; and like its precursor it could be accomplished much more easily in some situations than others. Belgian refugees largely returned to Belgium; Serbians to Serbia; the internally displaced in France began to move back to their homes. Even eastern European Jews, who faced discrimination, interrogation, and sometimes persecution as they sought reentrance to Poland, Latvia, or Lithuania, often eventually managed to make their way back. But Russians and Armenians presented a different set of problems. In both cases, the formal collapse of the empires to which they had once belonged was followed by their absolute exclusion from the empires’ successor states: the Bolsheviks refused to allow back “White Russians” (by the early 1920s a catch-all term for opponents or perceived opponents of the new Bolshevik regime), and the new Turkish Republic refused to permit Armenians to return to Anatolia. In 1921 Lenin formally revoked the citizenship of all Russians living abroad, a move that roughly coincided with the new Turkey’s visitation of another wave of violence on its remaining Armenian subjects.³³ Russian and Armenian refugees, then, could not be repatriated. In the minds of British, French, and American officials increasingly intent on restricting immigration, neither could they be absorbed into the West. They could not continue to exist indefinitely in their transient, crowded, unsanitary, and temporary places of settlement—at least not without posing a political threat to the host regime. And they did not fit into any of the ethnically defined nation-states emerging, under Allied supervision, as the territorial successors to the fallen central and eastern European empires. So when the Allies arrived at the peace talks in Paris, they felt the need to address this newly pressing question of statelessness —potentially with a view towards transforming refugees into partners in the making of a new form of western European imperial rule over the ex-Ottoman sphere.

Immediate refugee relief strategy, private and piecemeal as it was, had already begun making its way towards this goal prior to the establishment of a more formal international refugee regime in the 1920s. Some of the most iconic early expressions of refugee relief appeared in the wartime and postwar Levant, where the American mission group Near East Relief and other private Christian relief organizations set up some of the world’s first modern refugee camps in the Turkish-Syrian borderlands. Near East Relief had begun as a small collection of mission-affiliated American expatriates in Beirut, responding both to the devastating wartime famine in Mount Lebanon and to the evident suffering of the Armenians as survivors of the genocide passed into Syria. (Its original name, the “American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief,” linked these two disasters as the central Lebanese and Syrian experiences of the Great War.) By the later years of the war, Near East Relief—now separated from its parallel organization, the American Relief Administration, which had been recast as a formal governmental operation for refugee assistance in Europe and Russia—had become the most important humanitarian organization in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and an early venue for internationalist approaches to the question of mass displacement.

What would those look like? By the end of the war, greater Syria (a term encompassing the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine) was host to some hundred thousand Armenian refugees, mainly concentrated in Aleppo, Beirut, and Damascus. Immediately after the war, a short-lived constitutional monarchy headed by Emir Faisal (the erstwhile Hashemite commander of the Arab Revolt) was bombed into oblivion by the French, who immediately set up a colonial occupation in Syria and Lebanon legitimized and formalized as a “mandate” by the League of Nations.³⁴ The new French military administration, trying to establish itself as a functioning state across Syria, determined that these refugees could serve as physical markers of French territorial claims in Cilicia and began to resettle them in this contested area, which was also being claimed by the emerging Turkish republic. Near East Relief, using private funds raised from sympathetic American donors, threw itself enthusiastically into the work of remaking Armenian refugee communities into small, self-sufficient, French-supporting settlements on the ground. Its workers not only built hospitals, schools, and clinics but also constructed factories and banks offering refugees what would now be called microloans. Their initial solution, in other words, was to position Armenian refugees as clients and representatives of the French imperial occupation of Cilicia, in partnership with private sponsors.

This first refugee settlement effort quickly came to disaster as it became evident that the disposition of the territory among the emerging postwar nation-states of the Middle East was by no means settled. Turkish nationalists soon laid claim to Cilicia; in a matter of months the region had entered into a condition of low-level warfare in which, as one historian has acutely observed, “the security of the Armenian population in the region depended on a continued European military occupation.”³⁵ The fighting took a serious toll on the refugees; in the city of Marash, it killed perhaps ten thousand of the city’s roughly twenty thousand Armenians. In 1921 the French signed an agreement of withdrawal with Turkey and—with extreme reluctance and at the last possible moment—arranged for the mass evacuation of Armenians back to Syria, removing thousands of resettled genocide survivors for the second time in eighteen months.³⁶ The deployment of refugees as laborers in service of a European colonial project in the Middle East had failed, for the first but not the last time.

Refugeedom, in its modern sense, emerged out of the uneasy, gradual, and partial transformation from a world of empires into one of nation-states. Though it was by no means the only space to face this fraught transition, the Middle East emerged as an especially central venue for the production of both modern refugees and modern refugee regimes. The disintegrating Ottoman Empire was the first government to come up with a coherent state-level policy vis-à-vis refugees, centering around the quintessentially modern principle that the newly stateless could serve as measurable assets to the projects of imperial centralization, governance, and—above all—economic and territorial development. It was an idea that filtered into the European imagination easily enough; the British, in particular, were almost simultaneously seeking ways to exclude migrant Jews from the metropole but make use of them in imperial schemes elsewhere—in Africa, in Latin America, but above all in the Middle East. When the war arrived, the Ottoman state’s brutal production of Armenian refugees provided the setting for the emergence of a private refugee regime tightly tied to the project of imperial economic development and the establishment of French military rule over Cilicia. It was in the Middle East, in other words, that the figure of the stateless refugee first began to appear to the imperial powers—first Ottoman and then British—as a problem that might, if things went well, also represent a kind of opportunity.

2

Turning a Profit

Refugee Policy at the League of Nations

In January of 1920, with the Great War just barely in the rearview mirror, the world’s first intergovernmental organization to “promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security” officially came into being.¹ The new League of Nations, headquartered in Geneva and with an initial membership of forty-two countries, already had a reputation for a pie-in-the-sky utopian thinking, associated with hazily sentimental forms of pacifism, humanitarianism, and vegetarianism. But this veil of virtuous liberalism belied the true nature of the organization, which was above all organized to guarantee the longevity of British and French empire in a new era. The League’s many operations across its various political and economic realms rested on a firm foundation of racially conscious imperial capitalism. Its oversight of the world’s first internationalist refugee regime would be no exception.

Even before the League was officially in existence, its architects understood the postwar disposition of refugees as a major aspect of the new organization’s work. Fridtjof Nansen was engaged in a prisoner of war exchange under the League’s auspices when he was tapped for his new mission as the League’s first high commissioner for refugees in 1921. Over the next few years, his mandate expanded from an initial responsibility for the two million Russians displaced by the country’s civil war to include homeless Armenians, Assyrians, and Anatolian Greeks as well. This weighty charge came with few funds and little political clout; Nansen’s office spent much of its time fundraising and depended heavily on private organizations like Near East Relief for its practical capacities. But the engines of capitalism, Nansen thought, could be made to work in his favor. Over the course of the early 1920s, he built a refugee regime around a single core principle: that refugees, deployed as workers, could serve as a crucial resource for their new host states—and, under the right circumstances, might even be able to turn a profit for their investors.

The League of Nations: Purposes, Finances, Refugees

The League of Nations’ architects were initially reluctant to engage with the issue of postwar economic reconstruction, assuming that the system would gradually but inevitably return to the prewar norm of state absence from the economic sphere. But they changed their minds upon witnessing the spectacular global chaos unleashed by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The overthrow of the tsarist government, combined with extreme postwar economic precarity in the new states of eastern and central Europe, led the Allies—especially the British, in the person of John Maynard Keynes—to think that a broader international effort to stabilize the system would be essential to secure the prosperity of a postwar European order.

In February of 1919, then, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and the United States banded together to create a “Supreme Economic Council” to advance the process of reconstruction in western Europe, on the model of wartime financial assistance from American banks. A year later, under pressure from a number of prominent economists, bankers, and humanitarians, the brand-new League spearheaded an “International Financial Conference” in Brussels, charged with finding “a means of remedying [the financial crisis] and of mitigating the dangerous consequences arising from it.”² The conference’s main purpose was not to settle the ongoing questions of financial responsibility among the war’s winners and losers but to attract private capital—particularly the American variety—for the task of rebuilding the shattered countries of central and eastern Europe.³ To provide a maximally convincing case to potential investors, the League asked member states to produce extensive documentation on their financial and economic circumstances: not only currency stability and trade practices but also domestic specificities like prices of goods and production of fossil fuels.

Under the leadership of one Arthur Salter, formerly of the Allied Maritime Transport Council, the League formed a new “Economic and Financial Section” to serve as a primary venue for determining the financial path forward from the ruin of the war. Its approach set out one of the central premises of postwar economic policy, one that would interact substantively with the League’s other nation-building tasks: that the new postwar order would be made up of identifiable nation-states with sealed borders, whose economic circumstances—like their ethnic, linguistic, and communal makeup—could be known, compared, and engineered to produce economically and politically desirable outcomes. In this view, national ethnic homogeneity would stabilize not only states but markets, prices, and currencies. By placing the interests of private finance at the center of its political and social planning, the League ensured that henceforth it would need to make the case that its actions—including its approach to refugees—were not only humanitarian and peace-guaranteeing but also economically stabilizing and perhaps even profitable.

In the autumn of 1921 the Red Cross, the Save the Children Fund, the League of Red Cross Societies, and a number of Russian relief organizations approached the newly formed International Labour Organization (ILO)—one of the first agencies formed under the League of Nations under the French socialist Albert Thomas—and offered to assist with the practicalities of reabsorbing the war’s refugees into the global workforce. They proposed a three-part plan: creating an emigration office to determine which countries might accept able-bodied refugees as workers, establishing a system of “labor exchange” across eastern Europe, and coordinating the work of private organizations seeking to place refugees in employment. The League leadership found such proposals attractive for the way they combined humanitarianism with investment while also defusing a potentially destabilizing political situation. Further, involvement with the refugee question was beginning to lend the League a new shine: as the Red Cross president Gustave Ador declared happily, the League was “the only supranational political authority capable of solving a problem which was beyond the power of exclusively humanitarian organizations.”⁴ It was therefore decided to appoint a general commissioner to deal with the specific issue of Russian refugees dispersed across the continent. In September of 1921 Fridtjof Nansen accepted the new position, which he would hold for nearly a decade.

His responsibilities included strategizing about refugee passports and identification papers, coordinating private and state-level relief efforts, and—especially—finding permanent and gainful employment for refugees now subsisting on relief funds all over Europe. The League’s definition of refugee was sharply delimited, extending solely to the protection of “any person of Russian origin who does not enjoy or who no longer enjoys the protection of the Government of the USSR, and who has not acquired another nationality.”⁵ Denationalized Russians’ seamless incorporation into the global capitalist labor force was of more than practical import; it would stand, League officials hoped, as a rebuke to the emerging Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union and a warning to labor movements closer to home. But as the refugee presence became more evident in cities across Europe—by 1922 there were more than 300,000 Russian refugees in the city of Berlin alone—western European and North American governments alike began to introduce new immigration restrictions and tighten their borders. In Britain, the undersecretary for foreign affairs declared that “Cossacks, Kalmucks, priests, generals, judges and ladies” represented “an intolerable burden.”⁶ In the United States, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes declared that “our restriction on immigration should be so rigid that it would be impossible for most of these people to enter the United States. Reference is especially made to Armenians, Jews, Persians, and Russians, all of which have been so driven hither and thither that they cannot be regarded as desirable populations for any country.”⁷ Increasingly, it seemed that other destinations would have to be found.

Nansen harbored hopes that Russian refugees could be repatriated to the new Soviet Union, particularly—in a sign of plans to come—to war-devasted rural areas where their labor would help the recovery effort. Nansen put it clearly to the ILO in 1922: young refugees “must be regarded as potential workers in the Russia of tomorrow, in other words, as soldiers in the economic army designed for the work of reconstruction which the Western States are now discussing.”⁸ Such a plan, of course, required at least some degree of Russian cooperation. As the Czechoslovakian government told the ILO, “In order that they may carry out this task they must first of all be fitted for these duties by receiving the required training and the necessary facilities for returning to Russia and entering upon their work in that country … Finally, safeguards must be obtained, on their behalf, from the Russian Government for the protection of their lives and liberty on their return to Russia, and for the grant of at least such civil rights as are indispensable for the economic development of any country.”⁹

It was a risky strategy; but under intensifying international pressure to reduce the refugee burden, and with some tensions eased by British and French recognition of the Bolshevik regime in 1924, the League began cautiously to negotiate with the new Soviet regime over an Armenian “return” to the Soviet republic. Soviet authorities themselves displayed mixed feelings over Armenian resettlement. On the one hand, with the task of postwar rebuilding at hand, labor shortages were a very real problem; refugees could perhaps help with the leviathan task of constructing a new Bolshevik state. (Indeed, the Soviet “New Economic Plan” had initially promoted mass immigration for the purpose of increasing the number of industrial and agricultural workers.)¹⁰ On the other hand, widespread postwar privation and financial difficulties meant it was an inopportune moment for the arrival of tens of thousands of destitute people who would certainly be heavily dependent on state assistance, at least initially. Further, there was no guarantee that the Armenians who would be admitted were loyal to the political precepts of Bolshevism.

Still, the Soviet regime felt considerable pressure to open its doors; the Red Army had after all included half a million Armenians, and there was significant Armenian communist organizing from Paris to Beirut.¹¹ Armenians themselves sometimes made the case for what they called “repatriation”—not, in most cases, an accurate presentation of the phenomenon of refugee resettlement—through appeals that highlighted their potential utility to the state; as one advocate put it, “The nomadic life of the settlers, full of torments, has made them sturdy and capable workers.”¹² In practice, then, to limit the numbers of resettlements and ensure ideological adherence to Bolshevism, Soviet officials created a system of security clearances that tested refugee applicants on their political affiliations, language skills, and local contacts; those admitted would be subject to police surveillance for years to come. Some 300,000 Armenian refugees, most from camps in Turkey and Greece, were eventually resettled in Soviet Armenia on Nansen’s premise that their labor would help build, stabilize, and modernize the Soviet state. It was a promising, if limited, start for an international refugee regime that viewed the provision of work as the primary solution for the various problems presented by the war’s displaced people.

Making Refugees Workers: The International Labour Organization and the “Nansen Passport”

This narrowly focused accommodation with Soviet Armenia did not however signal an end to the refugee crisis, which still included large numbers of Russians, many further Armenians, and Assyrians as well as assorted other displaced people across Europe, the Balkans, and the ex-Ottoman sphere. The question of their employment (and unemployment) posed a fundamental dilemma for the nascent internationalist system. On the one hand, the existence of so many dispossessed and homeless people seemed to constitute a clear and present political danger to the Allies, who by and large understood refugees as vectors of disruption, protest, and the dissemination of socialist ideas. It was a fate that large-scale refugee employment might well help avert. On the other hand, mass unemployment was a domestic political worry as well, and the Allied powers all feared that an influx of refugee labor into western Europe or North America would diminish labor movements and workers’ rights and create equally difficult metropolitan political instabilities.¹³

Such anxieties were especially prominent at the ILO, charged as it was with the task of building a functional global labor market to benefit the postwar Allied powers. As the American booster James Shotwell would put it, in a piece none-too-subtly entitled “The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution,” the ILO had a very specific task to undertake. “The Governments of Europe were nervous in the face of rising industrial unrest, with unknown Bolshevist possibilities, with menacing fires of revolution in Germany, and with at least one or two of the governments represented at Paris daily in danger of being overthrown,” he wrote. “As a result, the Allied Governments had to offer to labor some definite and formal recognition at the very opening of the Conference … to prove to the workers of the world that the principles of social justice might be established under the capitalist system.”¹⁴ It was a view that encapsulated the League’s labor-related worries, expressed in none other than the ILO’s founding documents: “The well-being, physical, moral and intellectual, of industrial wage-earners is of supreme international importance.”¹⁵ Without cooperative workers there could be no postwar stability; and as the ILO saw it, the large numbers of unemployed refugees floating around Europe presented a real danger to the development of a workable set of labor agreements between fragile postwar governments and the domestic and international worker movements threatening them.

It was in this context that the peacemakers began to consider that “preventing unemployment,” as one commentator has put it, might require “transplantation of ‘workers’ to frontier regions.”¹⁶ In other words, Albert Thomas and his colleagues at the ILO now began to consider the possibility of offering refugees menial jobs in rural locations as far from western Europe as possible—thereby making active use of them in a global economy without rousing the ire, or even the attention, of labor unions and workers in the metropole. This new “solution” raised the crucial question of whether labor safeguards in receiving countries would match labor law in western Europe. As the ILO began to negotiate the specifics of shipping refugees overseas to work, the colonial powers all insisted on exempting colonial territory from international labor standards—a state of affairs codified in the “colonial clause” of the organization’s constitution, which stated that its work standards would not apply in non-metropolitan territories “owing to the local conditions.”¹⁷ (Eventually, the ILO would adopt what it called the “Native Labour Code,” which created a formal category of “native worker” with notably fewer rights than other laborers.) Not everyone approved of this nakedly imperialist approach. “If [the conference] now defeats this motion which asks for workers who emigrate the protection of reciprocity of rights in the legislation of countries they go to,” thundered the Italian representative to the International Labour Conference in 1919, “it will then have confirmed the fact that this assembly recognizes the right of countries richly endowed in natural resources to maintain in a state of economic slavery those countries which are deficient in natural resources,”¹⁸ whether formally colonial or not.

With this issue still unresolved—and perhaps unresolvable, given both the resistance to international monitoring of national labor conditions and the emerging commitment to providing an ever-expandable secondary labor market outside Europe—the ILO nevertheless now began to approach a number of non-Western states, particularly in Latin America, about receiving large numbers of workers. In 1921 it put together a list of potential refugee-accepting countries that detailed the legal conditions under which such migrants would operate in each. The new “Emigration Commission,” put together to negotiate the details of such arrangements, noted a carefully constructed balance among its various stakeholders: “The points of view of European and non-European emigrating and immigrating countries have been presented in an equitable manner despite the absence of certain delegates.” (Its representative added, “It must finally be noted that big private organisations in the United States had sent representatives to Geneva and that these were admitted by the Commission to attend its proceedings”—a public-private partnership par excellence.)¹⁹ In promoting these schemes, the ILO depicted itself as a strictly technocratic, nonpolitical organization. “The characteristic feature of these Commissions,” it declared, “is that they are composed entirely of experts chosen for the single reason of their acknowledged competence. It is, of course, possible that some of these experts may be found either to belong to national administrative services or to have connection with employers’ or workers’ organizations, but such a circumstance could not in any way affect the purely technical nature of the advice for which they are asked.”²⁰ In other words, Thomas’s ILO was coolly arguing that internationalist refugee policy was not a venue for the discussion of anyone’s political or civil rights—merely a neutral economic experiment in placing workers with industrial employers across the globe.

Its early attempts to realize such plans, though, were fairly haphazard. Following on failed wartime efforts to resettle Belgian refugees in Chile and South Africa, early League and ILO authorities tried to make contacts in China, Tunisia, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru (among others) for possible refugee employment. But the complications of travel, the reluctance of governments, and the resistance of refugees themselves all contributed to the general failure of such proposals, and the number of placements was at first very small. Instead, Nansen now decided, employment should be negotiated by the refugees themselves. In July 1922 he brought together sixteen governments to discuss the invention of a new legal document for Russian refugees: the identity card that came to be known as the “Nansen Passport.” These papers, valid for just a year at a time, gave the bearer the ability—though not a guaranteed right—to move across international borders in search of work and to reside (temporarily and on sufferance) in the countries acknowledging the validity of the document. In 1924 the passport system was extended to Armenian refugees, and in 1926 it was amended to include the right to a return visa, allowing the holder to come back to the issuing state. In 1928 eligibility was further expanded to include “any person of Assyrian or Assyro-Chaldean origin.”²¹ Eventually, fifty-four states signed agreements to recognize Russian Nansen Passport holders and thirty-eight agreed to honor it for Armenians.²²

Historians and policymakers have often lauded the Nansen Passport as a valuable first step in the construction of a later and more comprehensive internationalist refugee policy; as one long-ago assessment put it, “The beginning of international refugee law can properly be dated to the creation of the Nansen passport system.”²³ And indeed, it did point the way towards a later system of international refugee law: one that regarded refugees as workers above all, and encouraged states to imagine the stateless and displaced as a pool of mobile, temporary, essentially rights-less laborers. “As much as Nansen had hoped to restore dignity to refugees through the League’s policies,” one historian writes, “the passports themselves bear witness to the moral and ethical vacuity (even uselessness) of the interwar refugee regime … It provided states with a reservoir of controllable workers deprived of any ability to claim political agency or civil rights.”²⁴ The Nansen Passport system purported to offer humanitarian assistance to refugees while in practice reinventing them as expendable migrant labor.

Investing in Refugeedom: The Greek/Turkish Exchange and the Role of Private Capital

The Nansen Passport opened the way for refugees to negotiate their own path as global laborers in search of the new era’s most contingent, unprotected, and temporary forms of work. Now, the League of Nations would begin to engage in other, more interventionist forms of refugee resettlement—this time with an eye to private profit.

By the early 1920s the Economic and Financial Organization (EFO) had become a permanent part of the League’s structure and was engaging in large-scale data collection on state finances and private commerce across the globe. Its ties to industry went the other way as well, with its staff—eventually reaching fifty-six people—receiving financing for their projects from the oil-funded Rockefeller Foundation and other private organizations in the United States. When the World Economic Conference was convened in 1927 to convince states to move away from the protectionist policies the EFO believed were hampering global economic recovery, it included not only representatives of state and banking interests but also lobbyists for specific commercial industries. The context was forming, then, for funding the League’s “humanitarian” work: it would look not just to states, or to the charitable bodies so central to humanitarian relief efforts during the war, or to individual philanthropists, but to private industry and finance. Moreover, such humanitarian ventures would now be promoted not just as modes of world economic stabilization helping to make Europe once again safe for investment but also as potentially profitable undertakings in themselves.

The Greco-Turkish War, as it eventually came to be known, began in 1919 when the Greek army landed in Anatolia to claim its portion of the territorial spoils of the Allied victory over the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, assigned large portions of Anatolia to Greece to make a territorial reality of what Greek nationalists called the “Megali Idea”—the “revival” of some kind of greater Greek state. With the Ottoman government in full retreat, Turkish nationalist forces began to rally around the former Ottoman commander Mustafa Kemal, whose wartime military successes bolstered the political legitimacy of his revolutionary government in Ankara. As battle raged against the invading Greek army and atrocities mounted on both sides, ex-Ottoman Christian communities (most of them Greek Orthodox) began to flee Anatolia en masse. By the time of the 1922 torching of Smyrna—once the empire’s preeminent cultural and economic center for Ottoman Orthodoxy—hundreds of thousands of Anatolian Christians had fled for Greece. Both they and the fragile Greek government begged the League for aid, which eventually arrived in an unexpectedly radical form. In 1923 the last agreement of the Great War era, the infamous Treaty of Lausanne, finalized these displacements by signing off on a mandatory population “exchange” that forcibly deported and denationalized some 1.2 million Anatolian Christians and 500,000 Muslim Greeks, with the imprimatur of the Allied powers and under the formal supervision of the League of Nations.

Despite its centrality to the proceedings, the League’s refugee office had no money of its own to assist with the actual work of evacuation. Nansen begged for money from states, international organizations, and private donors to fund the evacuation of Greeks and Russians from Constantinople in 1922. It wasn’t enough; and in the autumn of 1922 he finally appealed to the League of Nations assembly to let him use money earmarked for Russian refugee assistance to help the huge numbers of people fleeing Anatolia into Greece—nearly 900,000 by November. The strain on the Greek state and the political dangers posed by a large and desperate refugee population were becoming increasingly evident. One account recorded the degree of chaos:

The relief of distress was indeed as much a political necessity as a moral duty, for the danger of a starving population largely concentrated at a few strategic points was obvious. Wherever possible the congestion at the ports was relieved by distributing the refugees among the population and a fine was levied on households which could not or would not receive them. Churches, schools, theatres and private houses were taken over to shelter the newcomers. A family of refugees was lodged in every box of the municipal theatre of Athens … Relief institutions sprang up all over the country and no distinction was made in the treatment accorded to Greek and non-Greek.²⁵

Private charitable organizations still represented the main source of assistance: the International Red Cross (which bore sole responsibility for more than half a million refugees for six months at the height of the crisis), Near East Relief, Save the Children, and the All-British Appeal.²⁶

It was at this point that the League, together with the struggling Greek government, came to think that perhaps there was a way to attract private funding for an externally organized mass resettlement of the refugees designed to ethnically homogenize the Balkans and thereby “stabilize” the European order. “It was evident,” wrote one observer not long after the exchange, “that no piece-meal measure would suffice, but only some vast settlement scheme; and the Government was not slow to connect such a scheme with the secular problem of creating an ethnically homogenous Macedonia.”²⁷ In more straightforward terms, the new plan was to Hellenize Macedonia by placing Anatolian refugees on agricultural lands expropriated from now-expelled Muslim Greeks. To this end, Nansen began to press the League council to guarantee some kind of private international loan directly to the Greek government. He succeeded in securing an initial £750,000 from the Bank of England on the condition that the use of the funds be supervised by an independent Refugee Settlement Commission that would monitor the money’s dispersal. The loan was specifically not for relief but for establishing the refugees in “productive work” that would eventually turn enough of a profit to repay the loan with interest. “All assistance given,” the agreement stated in no uncertain terms, “shall be given on terms involving ultimate repayment.”²⁸

Notably, a related proposal to fund a less profit-driven though similarly strategically oriented form of refugee resettlement in the new republic of Turkey, proposed by one Major General G. M. Franks (apparently following an inspiring meeting with Mustafa Kemal), had met with rejection before the transfer. Noting pointedly that “the Turk is not the only offender” in the conduct of the war, Franks had reported to Whitehall that there were hundreds of thousands of Turkish refugees across Anatolia who needed assistance just as desperately as their Greek counterparts. Active funding for reconstruction and settlement, Franks thought, would be vastly preferable to forcible exchange, and would substantively benefit Britain’s imperial position as well as serve as a humanitarian example. “This is a golden opportunity for England to step in and lend the money,” he wrote to the Foreign Office. “She would thereby not only assist materially in the restoration of peace and stability in the Near East, but would regain at one bound her much damaged prestige with the Turk, and indeed in the whole Moslem [sic] world.”²⁹ Such an idea—which in some ways paralleled the subsequent refugee resettlement scheme for Anatolian Christians in Greece, but lacked its economic orientation towards profit—failed to appeal to the British authorities. The House of Commons, Franks was told, would “dislike the idea of the Government guaranteeing a loan to the Turks for re-settling their refugees, when we are able to do less than we should like to do for refugees on the other side who are the victims of the Turks.”³⁰ The sympathies of the British were, unsurprisingly, with Greece; but even beyond that, the finances of the situation were all-important.

As the Greek loan plan got underway, then, the Refugee Settlement Commission maintained total control over all the relevant money—including both the loan from the Bank of England and a kind of matching fund from the Greek government, guaranteed by an International Financial Commission made up of British, French, and Italian representatives.³¹ Furthermore, the commission now became the official holder of more than 500,000 hectares of Macedonian land representing “the large estates of the Turks in Macedonia in addition to such land as became available elsewhere through expropriation measures.”³² As it gradually became clear that there would be considerable difficulty in legalizing and formalizing the ownership of such arrogated property, both because of challenges from the land’s former Muslim owners and because previous “exchanges” had left some of this territory under the control of earlier Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Turkish exchange commissions, the legal language was tweaked to allow for physical possession without legal ownership. The commission and the Bank of England agreed that it would accept the use of funds to settle people on land with a promise of eventual title, “and that the Commission should be allowed a corresponding liberty to settle refugees on lands of which it was not de jure owner.”³³ In other words, the funding scheme was now—with the blessing and backing of the League of Nations—supporting the relocation of refugees onto appropriated land, with the dual purposes of forcibly ethnically homogenizing Macedonia along the lines desired by the Greek government and turning a profit for the investors funding the loan.

It seemed to work. “The [Bank of England] loan was issued in December 1924 for a nominal amount of £12,300,000,” one observer wrote. “Of this, £7,500,000 was offered for public subscription in London, £2,500,000 in Athens and the rest in New York … The English block was offered for subscription first, and was very heavily over-subscribed in less than one hour. During the first five months of 1925 the price of the stock on the London market remained consistently above the issue price.”³⁴ Another similar loan floated in 1927 (following the 1926 overthrow of the Pangalos government) was explicitly tied to the stabilization of currency as well as refugee work: £3 million for ongoing refugee settlement, £3 million “to provide liquid assets in the form of foreign exchange,” and another £3 million to pay off government debt.³⁵ The commission dissolved in 1930 after having taken “steps to secure the rights of the bondholders of the 1924 loan on the one hand, and of the refugees to the properties in their possession, on the other”—mainly through the signing of an agreement with the Greek government to complete some infrastructure schemes in the resettled areas and amortize the loan through additional annual payments.

This novel investment scheme tied all sorts of postwar Allied political interests—the stabilization of eastern European currencies, the ethnic homogenization of the Balkan states, the settlement of large numbers of destitute refugees who might otherwise represent an entrée for Bolshevism—to the interests of private capital in Britain and the United States. It also began to indicate the shape of future humanitarian endeavors surrounding refugees, who were becoming a visible point of entry for transnational (and neoimperial) plans to develop and industrialize rural spaces in eastern and central Europe and the Middle East—often to the commercial benefit of Allied investors. As one scholar has put it, by the mid-1920s the League of Nations had fully committed to “treat[ing] refugees as labour migrants rather than subjects—or masses—of humanitarian need.”³⁶

Refugees and the ILO: The Creation of a Refugee-Labor Nexus at the International Level

The Armenian-Soviet schemes, the Nansen Passport system, and the private financing of Greek refugee resettlement together signaled the advent of a firming League of Nations commitment to the idea that refugees were, above all, workers whose thoughtful relocation could help remake the global economic system. This approach took newly concrete form in the decision, taken in 1925, to place the League’s refugee-related operations under the authority of the International Labour Organization.

There was already significant overlap and cooperation between the high commissioner for refugees’ work and the ILO’s. Now, in the spring of 1924, Nansen approached the League council with a proposal that the ILO could formally take over some of the duties of the refugee office, as a kind of preliminary step towards shutting down international refugee work altogether (an expression of faith in the stability of the emerging international system that would prove distinctly over-optimistic). In a presentation to the ILO’s governing council, Albert Thomas explained the details and the rationale for this merging of agencies: “The local agencies of the High Commissariat would be retained, and would still remain under its direction. The budget of the High Commissariat would form a special chapter entirely distinct from the rest of the budget of the International Labour Organisation.” He added, carefully, “The report at the same time gave the assurance that it was the intention of the Office to prevent the refugees from competing with the workers in the countries which they entered by accepting lower wages”—a goal to be accomplished by “direct[ing] the refugees towards non-European countries.”³⁷ This conversation crystallized a crucial moment of transformation, one paralleled by other concomitant developments at the League: the deliberate and premeditated recasting of political questions into technocratic ones, the presentation of the League’s actions as neutral expert-driven technical work, and the acknowledgment that this approach would primarily involve placing refugees in jobs well away from Europe. The ILO’s Italian representative put it in no uncertain terms: “The problem of the Russian refugees … had ceased to have a political character, and was now a technical problem of the finding of employment and emigration.”³⁸

Not everyone accepted this assessment. One representative argued that the ILO, whose chief purpose was limited “to promot[ing] the conciliation of labour and capital,” should never have concerned itself with humanitarian assistance of this kind.³⁹ Another opponent, Louis Kershaw, declared that the League had “merely entrusted the Office with work of an administrative character which could not be compared with the management of an employment exchange dealing with one and a half million refugees.”⁴⁰ The French representative, one M. Jouhaux, agreed, but issued a caveat: the difficulties “were not sufficient to justify an attitude of indifference towards the suffering people who were wandering throughout the world and might perhaps in the future become an element of danger to the development of social progress.”⁴¹

Nansen himself presented the case for a merger to a somewhat skeptical governing body at the ILO, blending reassurances with threats. The ILO, he declared, shared the refugee office’s vision of—and stake in—the formation of a Geneva-regulated global labor market:

Mr. Oudegeest had referred to the possibility of the refugees competing in the labour market with the workers of the country which received them. This was an argument in favour of closer collaboration between the Office and the High Commissioner. It was essential that there should be some control of the placing of refugees, and the collaboration suggested was the best means for establishing such control. If the work of the High Commissariat came to an end, there would be disturbances of the labour market in various countries owing to clandestine emigration … The Governing Body should realise the consequences of non-acceptance of the proposal made to it.⁴²

In other words, refugee assistance under the ILO would take the form of a labor exchange explicitly aimed at preventing refugees from flooding the western European labor market with low-wage migrant workers, directing them instead into colonial and semicolonial spaces for the purposes of industrial development. Such a scheme would simultaneously protect labor conditions (and therefore political stability) in the metropole, defuse the potential political threats posed by large displaced populations in Europe, and provide a useful source of cheap labor for Western-owned industrial enterprises overseas.

Despite considerable dissent, Nansen eventually carried the day. In December of 1924 the ILO officially took over responsibility for much of the League’s refugee work, thus cementing its longstanding commitment to viewing the problem of refugeedom as essentially a problem of labor. By 1928 the office’s modus operandi had been set: the high commissioner (still Nansen, who had become increasingly invested in the question of Armenian settlement over the past few years) dealt with the “political aspects” of the work, negotiating with governments over the Nansen Passport and assisting with the actual transport of refugees admitted to participating countries.⁴³ The Refugees Service of the ILO contributed by connecting Armenian and Russian (and, by the early 1930s, Assyrian) refugees with appropriate employment opportunities across the globe.

Under the auspices of the ILO, then, the focus on exporting surplus refugee labor elsewhere (i.e., into semicolonial spaces far from western Europe) gradually solidified into a basic principle of internationalist refugee policy. The Governing Council of the ILO was reporting by 1928 that “as a result of the uneasiness awakened by the preliminary symptoms of an economic crisis in France, it began to be thought that difficult as it was to transport the refugees to distant countries, it would be better to attempt to settle large numbers of refugees as permanent colonists, particularly in South America.”⁴⁴ The Refugee Sub-Committee therefore proposed ongoing funding for the placing of refugees in employment as distant as possible from Europe. “With a view to effecting a gradual reduction of the refugee problems,” it noted, “refugees once settled in permanent employment should, unless some special problem arises in regard to them, be regarded as having no further claim on the services of the Office. Detailed reports should be furnished to the Refugee Committee regarding the proposals for the settlement of the refugees in Syria and South America.”⁴⁵

Refugees were an ideal raison d’être for the League of Nations: an evidently humanitarian cause whose existence and suffering made an easy and straightforward case for international authority. But the League’s refugee office under Nansen—with no money, few staff, and limited political clout—struggled to come up with ways to deal with its displaced wards in an era when (for the first time ever) migrants needed passports, visas, and permission to move around the globe. Sympathy for their plight, too, was at a low ebb; speaking of Russian refugees after the revolution, Nansen recalled bitterly, “There was in various transatlantic countries such an abundance of maize, that the farmers had to burn it as fuel in their railway engines. At the same time, the ships in Europe were idle, for there were no cargoes. Simultaneously there were thousands, nay millions of unemployed. All this, while thirty million people in the Volga region—not far away and easily reached by our ships—were allowed to starve and die. The politicians of the world at large, except in the United States, were trying to find an excuse for doing nothing on the pretext that it was the Russians’ own fault.”⁴⁶

Humanitarian arguments like these usefully positioned the League on a moral high ground, but failed to move its main showrunners to practical action. Presenting the refugee issue as a question of global labor distribution, by contrast, immediately drew “Great Power” interest. Nansen therefore sought to construct refugee policies that could be described in a language of altruism while also offering measurable economic benefit to the imperial powers. His resettlement of Armenians in the Soviet Union as a stabilizing labor force, and his subsequent collaboration with French forces remaking Armenian refugees as clients of the French military occupation in Syria, suggested intriguing possibilities for an ongoing relationship between imperial interests and refugee foot soldiers. His more all-encompassing Nansen Passport scheme perfectly encompassed the dawn of a new refugee era: one in which an international refugee regime could claim humanitarian bona fides while churning out cheap, disposable, temporary refugee workers, with no rights of permanent residence or reentry, for the benefit of industrial employers abroad. And his final stroke of genius—floating public bonds to finance Anatolian Greek refugee resettlement in Macedonia—successfully advanced European imperial interests in the stabilization (and the ethnic homogenization) of postwar Greece without drawing on state coffers. As the League wrapped its first half decade in business, its new international refugee regime—with the world’s most famous humanitarian at the helm—was managing not only to make use of refugees to advance its main constituents’ political interests but to hold out the tantalizing possibility of turning a profit in the process.

3

Colonial Workers

Expanding the Refugee Regime

The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey demonstrated that under the right circumstances Western financiers could be convinced that refugees constituted a solid capital investment opportunity and that it was indeed possible for refugee resettlement schemes to make money for their backers, if not their charges. Over the next fifteen years, the League of Nations—desperate to prove its own relevance in the era of increasing danger of war within Europe, and still charged with the welfare of hundreds of thousands of refugees without having received any actual money to assist them—built on the Greek resettlement model to put together still more dramatic plans for making use of refugees as agents of imperially sponsored industrial capitalism, from the Middle East to Latin America. The League’s refugee operations under both Nansen’s office and the ILO began in the mid-1920s to run a global employment matching system, fielding requests for large numbers of cheap laborers from private and semiprivate companies and providing physical and security clearances, visa and travel assistance, and some initial settlement funds to refugees who could be compelled to undertake such work. The League settled many thousands of refugees in this way, but it faced continual resistance: from refugees themselves, many of whom did not want to travel thousands of miles to become menial labor in French chemical factories or Brazilian sugar plantations, but also from host states, who were increasingly skeptical of taking in large numbers of displaced people who might destabilize domestic labor markets.

By comparison, it transpired that the League’s most powerful member states had a much greater capacity to enforce refugee employment in colonial spaces where they exercised active political and military authority: the “mandate” territories of the Arab Middle East. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine all became test cases in an experiment to make mass refugee settlement serve the interests—political, economic, and military—of the European colonial powers. In occupied Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, the French and the British made use of Armenian and Assyrian refugees as agricultural settlers, charged with bringing remote and difficult territory under the active economic and political control of the mandatory state. Not content to stop there, colonial officials also remade these same refugees as colonial soldiers, maintained for the explicit purpose of keeping anticolonial nationalisms in check. As the interwar period wore on, the British—who had long used all manner of vulnerable migrants as laborers in their Middle Eastern oil holdings—began to turn to refugee populations for that purpose as well, citing with approval their low cost and their apparent willingness to endure dangerous conditions. And in Palestine, British mandatory authorities increasingly argued that rapid colonial industrialization would increase the country’s “absorptive capacity”—thus entrenching the principle that refugee resettlement was appropriate only for industrializing (rather than already-developed) spaces, and relieving Britain from admitting European Jews into its own metropolitan sphere.

In theory, then, the League and its imperial showrunners Britain and France were beginning to envision and construct a refugee policy that would help shore up a neoimperial economic system, one that that could withstand the simultaneous threats of fascism in Europe and anti-imperialism in the colonies. In practice, as it turned out, to enforce refugee resettlement in the interests of colonial states it was often necessary to exert not just economic but also military power over the host territory. And even in these unfavorable circumstances, refugees proved to have their own capacities: for nation-building, for assimilation, for finding nonmenial labor, and—not least—for disappearing altogether from an ever more evidently exploitative system.

The “Refugee Service”: Worker Colonization in Latin America

By the mid-1920s the League had begun to establish itself as a new kind of international dealmaker: this time not of borders or political arrangements, but of global employment. In 1925 the ILO set up a new branch of its recently acquired refugee office: the “Refugee Service,” headed by Nansen’s former right-hand man T. F. Johnson. This organization served as a kind of clearinghouse for refugees seeking jobs, and made financial and political arrangements for refugees’ transit logistics, travel permissions, and work agreements. Across the next decade the Refugee Service became a bureaucratic embodiment of the idea, floating around in the ether in the previous years and decades, of turning refugees into untethered migrant laborers who could serve the interests of empire, colonization, and industrial development across the globe.

Nansen outlined the details of one early arrangement, the transfer of sixty-five Russian refugees from the provisional Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (which became Yugoslavia after 1929) to a chemical factory in France. The process carefully balanced the interests of the various corporate, national, and international entities involved. First, private corporations—in this case, the chemical factory—submitted requests for labor to the French government, which passed on the request to the Near East Agency. In Belgrade, the agency held interviews with the refugees to determine their “fitness and general suitability,” to ensure that they would not be leaving behind dependents in eastern Europe, and “generally to control the information supplied by the refugees.” Once some candidates had been chosen, they had to undergo a medical exam directed by the French ministry; those who passed were organized into groups for travel. Nansen’s office advanced cash to those who could not pay their own way, with the understanding that once employment began, up to 10 percent of their wages would be deducted monthly to repay the loan.

Next the transit arrangements were made. The service cleared the refugees’ names with the Ministry of Justice to guarantee that none of the refugees had suits pending against them; with the Fiscal Department to ensure that they owed no taxes; and with the Ministry of the Interior to be certain they were not “political suspects.” The Ministry of Communications within the kingdom paid for their railway travel “to the Austrian frontier,” the police authorities distributed departure visas, the Austrian and Swiss consuls issued transit visas, and the French government provided entry visas. Finally, the refugees “were required to sign their engagements” and were handed over to an assigned group leader who was given their fares, instructions for the correct “conduct of the convoy,” and a sketch map detailing the necessary changes of train, fare amounts in different currencies for each leg of the journey, and directions to their final destination. “The refugees by their own efforts,” Nansen declared, “could not possibly have overcome all the difficulties that stand in the way of their leaving one country in order to seek employment in another, and it may be said that the experience of the past months has shown clearly that without an efficient local machinery nothing effective can be done for the evacuation of unemployed refugees.”¹

This was, of course, not only an arduous process but one that obviously could engage only with the tiny fraction of willing refugees who met the stringent requirements of both host governments and corporate employers. Further, even with these narrow conditions met, France was the only European country willing to admit refugees as laborers.² So the Refugee Service turned to other avenues. Drawing on earlier ideas about Jewish territorialism as well as the League’s support for the recent Greek-Turkish expulsions, Johnson put together a commission of “experts” to travel to Latin America—Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—for a monthslong study of the possibilities for what was now explicitly being called “refugee colonization.” The commission included one Colonel Procter, described as having “considerable experience of refugee work in Constantinople and Greece as well as possessing wide colonial knowledge”; M. Varlez, the head of the ILO’s Migration Service branch; a representative of the private refugee organizations with “considerable agricultural experience”; and representatives from the territorialist Jewish Colonization Association and the Conference universelle juive. In other words, its ideas were derived directly from (first) the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the resultant Balkan/Anatolian refugee crisis and (second) early twentieth-century ideas about removing Europe’s Jews and using them as colonial settlers across the globe, particularly in rural areas ripe for industrial development.

In Argentina the commission met with members of the cabinet and with the president, who expressed ambitions to grow the population and economy of the country through the rapid development of rural land—a process he explicitly described as colonization. Refugee settlement schemes could, the Argentinian government thought, fit into an already-extant system of homesteading in the northern regions of Chaco, Formosa, and Misiones, where the government was already distributing parcels of land to settlers at subsidized prices as a way of staking territorial claims, and with hopes of developing a cotton industry. Another extant system of government settlement involved “leasing land from the large proprietors on a crop-sharing basis,” with tenant farmers committing to three to five years on the property in exchange for some of the profit. Just as in the United States, after which this system was clearly modeled, this homesteading scheme was designed to push indigenous populations off unincorporated land and gather territory under the control of the federal state.³ The League, in accordance with its stated support for emerging industrialized ethnonational states, recognized the model with enthusiasm: “The economic position of the Argentine might be compared with that of the United States some fifty years ago … there is a very great demand for an industrious population, and the outlook for the willing worker who does not expect too much at first is perhaps as promising in Argentina as anywhere in the world.”⁴

The commission’s trip to Brazil highlighted the labor politics of a colonial society even more strongly. The extension of Brazilian territory under the expansionist foreign minister José Maria da Silva Paranhos, and the close and corrupt relationship between the government and the powerful coffee industry, led to a period of political unrest that began with a failed coup in 1922 and lasted for the rest of the decade. The so-called tenentes (a group of junior officers advocating a modernist reform of Brazil’s economic and political systems, including the recognition of trade unions and introduction of labor law) engaged in a series of uprisings through the 1920s, as the old republican government tried to hold on to its authority. Like Argentina, the Brazilian state had used homesteading to take control of indigenous territory. Now, though, it was more concerned with the issue of labor. “The demand for labour, both industrial and agricultural, is acute, amounting almost to a crisis,” the commission noted, adding that “the States endeavor as far as possible to hinder the migration of their working population.”⁵ To the Brazilian government, then, it seemed that refugee migrant labor—done at a low cost and under restricted circumstances—offered a potential counterweight to the ever-looming threat of labor and strike action. Migrant labor could even be partially funded by industry, which shared the government’s concern about the power of organized labor under circumstances of labor shortage. Such policies were indeed already in existence in some spaces; as the report noted, “The State of São Paulo [already] undertakes to reimburse the cost of overseas transport to agricultural immigrants, this being effected through an arrangement with the shipping companies, who themselves advance the cost of transport.”⁶

Refugees would work primarily on the coffee plantations that represented both Brazil’s most important industrial export and the source of its government’s political and economic support. Procter described the nature of the work, and the likely political and economic situation of such refugee migrant labor, in some detail:

The work on a coffee facenda consists of hoeing the ground between the trees to keep it clear from weeds. This is done every two months except during the picking season. The crop is picked between the months of May and December according to the situation of the plantation, the fruit being cleaned, dried and sorted at the facenda. Agricultural families are desired for this work, as all the members of a family over twelve years work in the plantations. The usual system of employment is by yearly contract … There has been a certain amount of criticism of the conditions of work on the coffee facendas. There are, of course, both good and bad, from the point of view of the worker; at the same time the Government takes a practical interest in his protection from unjust treatment, and the conditions of employment are closely supervised. On the other hand, the work is hard, and there is little scope to advancement other than by saving sufficient means to obtain a start in other fields.

He added, probably unnecessarily: “Many families who are now wealthy started life in the plantations, but their wealth was not obtained by remaining as workers in the plantations.”⁷

Foreign companies were especially interested in the idea of importing refugee labor, in some instances approaching the League’s commission directly with requests for workers and offers of benefits. In Brazil, the Canadian-owned São Paulo Tramway, Light and Power Company sought three thousand unskilled workers for the construction of a new power plant and promised fair treatment for workers, though “in view of the occasional cases of emigrants claiming that extravagant promises have been made to them, we would wish to be protected against annoyance by having the necessary agreements clearly incorporated in a written contract.”⁸ In Paraguay, the American-owned International Products Company’s manager, one Mr. Scott, told the commission that “the Company was very interested in colonization, as they had the land and a large power plant. They were industrialists, and they wished to encourage a local population which would give them industrial work to take the place of production of tannin when the supply of quebracho trees gives out”—an especially telling comment for its projected use of refugee migrants not only as a labor pool but also as an eventual market.⁹

Echoes of the capital-raising schemes of the Greek-Turkish exchange appeared frequently, particularly with regard to funding. In their investigation of Uruguay, the commission proposed a system of financing for tenant farmer investment under which refugee laborers could invest in their own future as landholders, just as Anatolian refugees in Greece had been invited to do:

The [Mortgage Bank of Uruguay] is prepared to grant leases for some of the agricultural land owned by it, giving tenants who are in a position to pay 15 percent of the purchase price, under certain conditions, an option to purchase according to the provisions of the Act of March 10th, 1923. The Bank might also be willing to make advances, secured on the produce of the land, to assist in the purchase of agricultural implements and stock and for the erection of buildings. Under this system a hard-working and efficient tenant farmer should be able to become owner of his land. The Bank would run little risk, as both land and the buildings, etc., remain its property during the period of tenancy, and any improvements effected by settlers would constitute additional security.¹⁰

Proposals for refugee settlement, then, could be recast as schemes of private investment, with benefit to accrue to both investor and national government should the refugee successfully colonize the land.

These plans for refugee colonization reflected assumptions about the shared economic and political interests of national states, international organizations, and private capital that almost instantly became widely accepted premises of twentieth-century refugee policy. First, they assumed that it was through their uncertain relationship with employment—not with citizenship or statelessness—that refugees represented a threat to a stable, Allied-dominated political and economic order. If refugees remained unemployed, they might tip their host societies towards Bolshevism; if they entered labor markets in the West, they might undermine Allied efforts to control domestic labor movements by way of high employment and livable wages. These were not necessarily the positions of all contemporary trade unions or labor movements, at least some of which advocated for equal pay, rights, and working conditions for migrant workers against the tide of an increasingly anti-immigrant global political landscape. Trade unions in the United States were bitterly divided over the question of whether they should support immigration. Their European counterparts in the main supported the rights of migrant workers, even to the extent of advocating for their free movement—although plenty of unions opposed international regulation of migrant labor.¹¹ In neither sphere was it a settled conclusion that refugees represented a threat to labor organizing; sometimes immigrants were seen as a hazard, but sometimes they seemed to represent an opportunity for union expansion.¹² At the very least, it is fair to say that the impact of migrant workers, refugee or otherwise, on union membership, wages, or rates of employment remained an open question for trade unionists across the Allied sphere.

But, as one historian of the ILO has pointed out, “It was not trade unionists but rather representatives of the British Empire who drafted the International Labour Charter in the course of the peace negotiations in Paris” and dominated the conversation about migrant labor and refugees thereafter.¹³ And for imperial officials, refugees often did appear to constitute a threat to the fragile ongoing process of worker pacification, both as disruptive sources of labor and as vectors for Bolshevism. This, then, was why the Nansen Passport, limited and constricting though it was, could be considered a success by the League of Nations and its primary stakeholders (which did not, in the end, include unions): because it offered the possibility of turning refugees into a kind of labor that would not threaten—indeed, might help support—imperial economic systems. It was also why the League’s proposals for refugee colonization so often featured early iterations of an essentially imperial approach to the problem of displacement: the mooting of a purportedly scientific method for identifying areas of “surplus population” that were producing refugees, and an equally technocratic practice of removing them to areas where labor was scarce. Though it would eventually be retooled as a politically neutral technical principle, in the 1920s the imperial benefits of this idea could be explicitly acknowledged: these migrant laborers were to develop rural areas of the globe into future industrial markets for the major empires. As the Latin American colonization commission’s report neatly put it, “On general principles the satisfactory solution of the problem of unemployment which is one of the main causes of political unrest, and which is seriously aggravated if not at present dominated in some countries by the refugee problem, can alone be found … in the emigration of the surplus populations from the congested areas or ‘emigrant’ states to immigrant countries which require labour for their normal economic development.” Moreover, “the advantages accruing from a practical policy on these lines could be considerable, both to the ‘immigrant’ state, which would receive the man-power necessary to turn its potential wealth to practical account, as well as to the ‘emigrant’ state, which would not only be relieved of the expense of supporting its unemployed and the refugees within its borders, but would also indirectly benefit in the expansion of its overseas markets.”¹⁴

And there was another conclusion, every bit as important: these schemes should not, under any circumstance, become sites of financial outlay for the ruling powers. Indeed, upon further consideration—drawing on their recent experience in Greece—the League could not see why such migration might not in fact represent a money-making opportunity for interested investors. “It is self-evident,” its report declared, “that a policy of subsidy for emigrants on a sufficiently generous scale and large enough to afford relief to congested states could involve a progressive expenditure which, if irrecoverable, would soon assume dimensions beyond any sums it could be hoped to obtain … [But] a system of loans to emigrants to be refunded by the recipient out of his earnings in his adopted home, to be secured by an undertaking signed by his employer to subtract a percentage of his salary until the advance is liquidated, or out of his crops should he settle on the land, would not involve a permanent outlay.” It added, “Interest and commission on advances would be charged and regulated to cover working expenses and for the establishment of a reserve to cover bad and doubtful debts.”¹⁵ Refugee settlement, then, could be not only a political solution but an investment opportunity—yielding both immediate monetary rewards and long-term market opportunities for private investors in the West, on top of substantial political benefits in the form of long-sought control over labor in a Europe purged of its most troublesome workers.

It seemed axiomatic, to those constructing such plans, that for any of this to work refugees had to be imagined and treated as unskilled, menial labor—irrespective of their actual training, education, or experience. As the commission’s report put it, “There is a great demand for immigrants for: 1. Colonisation 2. Agricultural labor. There is a demand for industrial labor in Argentina and in Brazil. There is no demand for professional classes.” It added, crucially, “All the countries point out that they only desire immigrants who are prepared to settle in the country, and they oppose immigrants seeking to settle in the capitals.”¹⁶ In an addendum to his classic work The Refugee Problem, the British refugee expert Sir John Hope Simpson wrote in 1939, “There seems to be a widespread conviction that permanent refugee resettlement on a large scale must necessarily take an agricultural form.”¹⁷ It was true: these were schemes for the development of land, the global limitation of labor rights, and the creation of new industrial markets for the western European empires. They had no space for professionals or urban dwellers, both associated in the minds of League officials with leftist political activism. The price of settlement, for refugees, was not just the immediate financial burden of the private loans being extended to them through the League. It was the experience of being stripped down to the most replaceable kind of worker: unskilled, indebted, and in the country on sufferance.

Refugee Labor in the Middle East: Mandatory Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq

Between 1925 and 1928, the Refugee Service—though it did not manage to send as many displaced Russians to Latin America as it had hoped—placed more than 50,000 refugees with companies across the globe, and perhaps another 150,000 more indirectly.¹⁸ Unsurprisingly, these sorts of settlement schemes proved easiest to impose in colonial territory, where—as it turned out—they also proffered some special advantages for the ruling imperial state. In particular, these years saw the development of a number of schemes for mass refugee settlement in the newly colonized areas of the old Ottoman Arab provinces, now British-and French-occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

The Allied postwar arrangements for the ex-Ottoman eastern Mediterranean established all these states as what the League of Nations called “Class A” mandates: in theory, nascent nation-states temporarily under British or French tutelage with the League acting as supervisor and guarantor, but in practice essentially long-term violent colonial occupations.¹⁹ These Middle Eastern mandatory states created out of the old Ottoman Arab provinces were host to huge numbers of refugees, mainly Armenian and Assyrian genocide survivors from eastern Anatolia who had ended the war in camps and settlements in cities across the eastern Mediterranean: Aleppo, Beirut, Latakia, Damascus, and Jerusalem, to name a few. Already, both the British and the French were imagining such refugee populations as potential sources of political and military support against a rising anti-imperial activism. They were consequently anxious to maintain Assyrian and Armenian segregation from the local Arab population; the fostering of social and political sympathies or ties between refugee and native might, these colonial administrations thought, make this kind of refugee coercion more difficult to realize.²⁰ At the same time, though, the collection of large numbers of destitute people in close quarters within urban enclaves seemed to many colonial officials—like their metropolitan counterparts—to represent a dangerous invitation to Bolshevism. Consequently, as one British chronicler of Armenian policy in Syria put it, “The pressing necessity was to find work in these towns for refugees accustomed to urban conditions and to make arrangements for getting the agriculturalists back to the land.”²¹

In Syria, the first goal of French and League policy towards Armenians was to remove the squalid camps that had come to dot the landscapes of Aleppo and Beirut and build segregated Armenian neighborhoods where the refugees would live as a distinct, self-sufficient, economically engaged community, available and willing to assist the French colonial apparatus as needed. Following on the model of the Greek-Turkish exchange, the French hoped to accomplish this goal without state expenditure—and, while they were at it, to position the refugees as a captive market for French construction firms. To that end, Armenians were made to participate in the process of investing in their own housing. In Beirut, a detailed process had been worked out to ensure both construction and repayment. “Each refugee gives roughly 15s to purchase his plot of land,” a British official reported. “He is then left alone for one year, after which he is called upon to make returns according to the terms of his land purchase contract. Materials for building his house are supplied to him after the first contract is signed. A second contract is then made for materials supplied by Mr. Burnier’s architect on the estate.”²² A similar practice emerged in Syria, with adjustments for the local economic situation. Here, “the returns paid by the tenants are to be completed in seven years. The tenant pays an agreed sum down, then after the first year pays 10s a month. Damascus has a longer term for refunding than other parts of Syria owing to the poverty and bad economic conditions of Armenians in this city. In all other districts refugee tenants will have refunded their debt for their houses in five years.”²³ Above all, this project of remaking Armenian refugees as productive colonial citizens was not to cost the state anything.

In rural areas mandatory administrations schemed to use refugees for developmentalist purposes, claiming “fallow” land for modern industrial agriculture. To realize these goals, the French mandatory government followed almost exactly on older Ottoman models of resettlement, providing a kind of basic kit for the creation of agricultural villages: seed, livestock, tents, and farming implements, some provided by the mandatory government directly and others supplied by private charities like the Armenian Central Committee of Aleppo. In some villages the refugees occupied mud huts that were shared among two or three families, paying rental fees to the state (which had acquired large swathes of land at rock-bottom prices from reluctant local landowners). Refugees, then, were agents for developing the land and for tightening French state control over remote rural areas, while also being charged for services, provisions, and farmland. The colonial strategy of using refugee resettlement as a justification for expropriating agricultural land from Arab landowners did not go unnoticed in local circles. As one close observer noted, “The Armenians are placed just how and where the Government like … Their present policy of favoring them naturally tends to increase Moslem suspicion, as well as to intensify hatred of the Armenian people.”²⁴ This was fine with the French, who above all wanted to ensure that Armenians did not simply melt into an increasingly anticolonial Syrian Arab political landscape. The maintenance of refugee segregation became particularly important during the anticolonial Syrian revolt of 1925–27, when the French military pressed Armenians into colonial service to defeat a Syrian Arab nationalist vision for independence by force of arms.

In British-occupied Iraq, it was an Assyrian refugee population brought in during the late stages of the war from the Turkish-Iranian borderlands around Hakkâri that provided a ready-made labor and military force for the British colonial occupiers. The British initially settled the refugees in a newly constructed camp in a tiny village called Baquba, just north of Baghdad, where they provided inhabitants with tents and transport carts requisitioned from the military.²⁵ Here, too, the refugees labored for their own resettlement. They laid some fifteen miles of pipes for distributing chlorinated water, and some found themselves organized into a “sanitary section” that built incinerators and collected and removed trash from the camp’s living quarters. The infrastructure was elaborate: a section for new arrivals was separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire (itself a new commodity, produced for the first time in the late nineteenth century and immediately deployed as a basic tool of encampment in places like Boer War–era South Africa). The camp also included bathing huts and a disinfecting area; animal sheds and veterinary spaces; separate schools and playgrounds for Armenian and Assyrian children; women’s quarters; and three field hospitals, providing medical care for the surrounding villages as well as for the refugees themselves.

This expansive vision for refugee succor, which not accidentally also projected a new and extremely visible British physical presence in the landscape, cost the British administration in Mesopotamia dearly. Historian Benjamin Thomas White has calculated that “the cost of supporting the camp (population just under 50,000) was equal to two-thirds of the entire revenues of the civil administration of Mesopotamia, whose population numbered some 3 million.”²⁶ In early 1920 this amounted to some £6,500 per day, a total expenditure of several million pounds over just a year and a half of operations. Part of the rationale for spending such sums was that the refugees were emerging as a site of a viable capitalist economy that would eventually yield substantial returns on the government investment. In service of this vision, the refugees were made to work locally: on one of the camp’s five poultry farms, in its bazaar, and in a women’s collective bankrolled by the American Persian Relief Commission, producing yarn, quilts, and clothes. Other refugees made pocket money through the sale of livestock, meat, and milk to local communities in Baquba and its hinterlands, and some worked for other private enterprises like the Baghdad Dairy Farm. These Assyrian refugees were, in effect, building a developmentalist colonial village under British direction.

But the project did not end with Assyrian refugees generating income and developing land; they were also to become colonial soldiers. Some had already been pressed into service during the war as soldiers in a series of British-affiliated reconnoitering and security forces. Once hostilities had ended those battalions were disbanded and reformed as security operations for the camp itself and for the defense of the British presence and the refugees, in Baquba and then in Mosul—a newly important British military strategy following a major countrywide revolt against the imposition of colonial rule in 1920. Here again we can see the close connections between military strategy and refugee settlement. As White acutely observes, “This accumulation and management of animals created a pool of potential military steeds and beasts of burden, just as the camp’s human inhabitants were a reservoir of potential military recruits … When the revolt began in the summer of 1920, the up-to-date tables detailing the number and condition of animals in the camps meant they could be readily allocated to military purposes, whether they were oxen in logistics or horses and ponies in counter-insurgency.”²⁷ Such details go a long way to explain the willingness of colonial administrations—both British and French—to commit such significant resources to the cause of refugee resettlement. As in so many other situations, the introduction of capitalist economies and the remaking of landscapes as economically productive in classical liberal terms went hand in hand with the exertion of military control over valuable land.

Migrants, Refugees, and the Middle Eastern Oil Industry

The British closed Baquba in 1920, a consequence of the revolt. Most of the camp’s Armenian residents found themselves deported “back” to Cilicia, from where (as we have already seen) they would have to be re-evacuated not eighteen months later when the French relinquished their claim to the new Turkish republic.²⁸ But Baquba’s Assyrian inhabitants were marched to a new camp at Mindan, in northern Iraq, where their presence would serve to establish a territorial claim—as well as provide a pool of military recruits—in the oil-rich Mosul region, which was simultaneously being claimed by the new Turkish republic.²⁹ This scheme was eventually successful in its goal of formal international recognition (in the form of League of Nations approval) of Mosul’s incorporation into mandatory Iraq under British control; and it left a large number of Assyrian refugees as a potential labor force not just for servicing, protecting, and supporting the British colonial occupation but also, crucially, for a rapidly developing oil extraction economy around Mosul and Kirkuk.

The question of oil had been a constant though not always predominant theme in British imperial engagements across the Gulf and the Middle East, from the late nineteenth century onward. Imperial interests in Iraqi oil were spread over several different but often structurally related companies and concessions. The early Turkish Petroleum Company was founded with the cooperation and part ownership of the Ottoman sultanate to investigate the prospects for oil in Ottoman Mesopotamia. Germany and the Ottoman Empire surrendered their shares to the Allied powers following their defeat in the First World War, and room was made for increasingly prominent American interests. By the late 1920s it was jointly owned by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Royal Dutch Shell, Compagnie Française des Petroles, an American consortium made up of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Mobil, and a 5 percent share held by an Armenian businessman named Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, who had had extensive dealings before the war with the TPC and had to be placated in the postwar arrangements.³⁰ In 1929, the company—now renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC)—was reengineered to prevent its members from pursuing other oil development in the region (the so-called “Red Line” agreement).³¹ Such arrangements set up the IPC as a producers’ cartel and eliminated national governments’ role in decision-making about the production and refining of oil, placing it in a separate economic sphere controlled exclusively by corporate representatives of the Allied powers.³²

Similar strategies and practices obtained with respect to the question of oil labor. As early as the 1820s, the British had begun quietly to negotiate with local rulers across the Gulf—outside or on the outskirts of the shrinking Ottoman sphere—to construct a series of treaties trading imperial “protection” of ruling elites for British control over foreign policy and oil concessions. By the time of the First World War such agreements were in place all along the Trucial Coast and in Oman, as well as slightly more limited treaties of obligation in the Ottoman-and Persian-adjacent zones of Kuwait and Bahrain. (This situation of course in some ways mirrored the more general British relationship with the Ottoman and Persian Empires, in which imperial debt and gunboat diplomacy allowed for unrestricted and minimally taxed commercial development and investment.)³³ All of these concessions—with Persia as early as 1908, with Iraq in 1925, and slightly later with Kuwait and Qatar in the mid-1930s—dealt explicitly with the question of oil labor and worker nationality, and by the latter period they were beginning to constitute a framework for a regional system of labor migration.

The Kuwait Oil Company’s concession, signed in 1934 with Sheikh Ahmed al-Jabir al-Sabah, opened up the possibility of importing labor and required the government to accept migrant workers if the company deemed them necessary: “If the local supply of labor should in the judgment of the Company be inadequate or unsuitable the Company shall have the right with the approval of the Sheikh which shall not be unreasonably withheld to import labor, preference being given to laborers from neighboring countries who will obey the local laws.”³⁴ The (British) political resident in the Persian Gulf would have the final say over “the importation of foreign native labor.”³⁵ This approach became the model for a number of other similar agreements among Gulf governments, Western oil conglomerates held by a variety of European and American interests, and the British imperial state. Initially the British government was mainly concerned to prevent the hiring of Americans into management positions in the emerging oil conglomerates, but they soon began to use their privileges to engineer the makeup of manual labor in the oil industry as well.

Despite the fact that many of the agreements expressed an explicit preference for Arab workers, the British were eager to hire Indians over locals—an inclination that dated from before the First World War. As early as 1910 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) had begun actively recruiting Indian laborers to work in Persian drilling fields; already by 1914 there were more than 1,000 Indian migrant laborers working for the APOC, and by 1925 the number had grown to nearly 5,000.³⁶ Some were seconded to Persia from positions with Burmah Oil; others were recruited and shipped to the Gulf by a shady liquor company–cum–imperial fixer agency called Shaw, Wallace, and Co., brought to court in 1932 for income tax dodges related to its severance from Burmah Oil and the APOC.³⁷ In both the Persian and the Iraqi oil industries, more Indian workers were brought on following the dissolution of the Indian Labor Corps that had made up the bulk of the British military invasion of Mesopotamia during the First World War. (After 1922, the APOC maintained a formal recruitment office in Bombay.) In Bahrain the British expressed a preference for Persian laborers, many of whom were brought in against the expressly stated wishes of both the Bahraini state authorities and locally stationed British imperial officialdom. Unlike Indians, who were to some degree protected by Government of India rules concerning migrant labor, Persian workers normally “came to Bahrain at their own expense and, having no formal contracts with the company, could be hired and fired almost at will.”³⁸ In other words, it was already clear that migrants were a foreign-owned oil company’s perfect pool of laborers: unprotected, cheap, and essentially disposable.

Few of these workers were refugees in any meaningful sense, though in a practical sense some of them became essentially stateless in the process of their recruitment to this kind of work.³⁹ But they were part of a new international field of mobile labor: one overseen and controlled not by emerging half-decolonized nation-states but by an increasingly formalized collaboration between imperial entities, commercial companies, and a network of international/imperial law, and for which the interests of persecuted refugees and “minorities” served as a convenient site of political legitimization.⁴⁰ Disentangling workers from the question of citizenship offered benefits for the hiring companies, who could deal directly with imperial sponsors (a category that often overlapped with company owners and shareholders) in determining conditions of employment. It offered advantages to elite-run client states, whose rulers were anxious not to foster conditions in which political and civil rights might be demanded alongside labor protections. And it created a field of action and advantage for empires without the appearance, or the expense, of directly monitoring subject populations by military means.

It now began to occur to colonial administrators that actual refugee populations could also fit within this rubric. Like other migrant labor populations, they were heavily dependent on their imperial sponsors, had little access to local political organizing, and felt their political capacities to be sharply limited by external control of their citizenship and migration status. Further, they could easily be moved wherever they would be most useful—to Kirkuk, for instance, which became a new center of oil production beginning with the discovery of a “gusher” at Baba Gurgur in 1927, and where the IPC found it difficult to maintain a workforce. As the personnel adviser to the IPC, one E. A. Kinch, explained in 1957,

The expansion of the oilfields organization called for a growth in strength from a few hundreds in 1927 to 2,500 in 1933 and onwards; similarly the pipeline organization employed some 4,500 workers during the years of construction, though its operational needs were smaller than those of the fields, and fluctuations in strength were generally greater. This was due in large part to the fact that employees from settled areas found it difficult to adjust themselves to conditions in remote and hitherto uninhabited areas crossed by the pipelines and were therefore disinclined to accept long periods of service … Another source of workers who were adaptable to the new conditions of the industry was the as yet unsettled Assyrian refugee groups of the First World War. These could be quickly trained and have stayed with the job and hold good positions in the skilled trades.⁴¹

Just how dangerous this work could be was made evident just after the opening of Baba Gurgur, when the new well spewed oil uncontrollably upon its opening and created flammable gas clouds reaching nearly to Kirkuk. The efforts to control the surge—comprising some 95,000 barrels of oil every day—went on for nine days. “All day long,” one IPC official reported, “men were collapsing and being hauled up unconscious to be revived outside in the comparatively fresh air. Some of the men were gassed two or three times a day, and yet staggered back to their jobs. It was inspiring to watch them, and the courage they displayed.”⁴²

In other words, already-displaced populations represented a valuable source of labor for companies seeking workers who could be coerced into enduring trying, dangerous, and isolated conditions for extremely low pay. And beyond refugees’ apparent willingness to tolerate physical danger, their political distance and spatial segregation from local communities also meant that they could be relied upon not to introduce dangerous ideas about labor organizing or workers’ rights. Employment conditions, for refugees, could be set entirely by the oil companies. “The fact that the country was slowly but surely emerging from patriarchal conditions seemed to be a very good reason for keeping in the forefront as a modern and progressive employer,” Kinch stated, “always sufficiently advanced to be a good example but never so advanced as to create a class consciousness by setting standards that could not be aspired to by industry as a whole.”⁴³

Further, they might also be useful in tamping down various forms of worker discontent presenting challenges to colonial rule. The British government, the Iraqi state, and the IPC alike were anxious about creating too heavy a dependence on Kurdish workers, primarily because some Kurdish interests around Kirkuk (in particular a well-known landowning family by the name of Naftchizada) had long claimed rights over the oil fields of Kirkuk and were now throwing up a variety of legal challenges to the TPC’s and later the IPC’s concessionary claims. But most of the available workers were Kurdish, a pattern reinforced by extensive rural Kurdish migration to Kirkuk driven by the promise of oil work. In the early and mid-1930s, when the British overseers of the IPC began to restrict Iraqi oil production as a way of propping up prices elsewhere, the subsequent layoffs sparked vociferous protest among local communities that the British feared would extend into more general anticolonial action. Facing the possibility of Kurdish protest, then, the British-backed Iraqi government began resettling Assyrian refugees (again) as permanent villagers around Mosul and Kirkuk, on so-called miri sirf lands over which the state claimed development and oil exploitation rights. This practice gradually began to alter the demographic balance of the region in favor of non-Kurds, making use of migratory and refugee communities to assert further state control over the region and open up new spaces for oil development. It was a lucrative tactic in yet another sense: the government, having successfully engaged in refugee population engineering tactics designed to assist the IPC, now demanded repayment in kind by charging the company with the logistics and expense of certain state operations in the area. Historian Arbella Bet-Shlimon reports that in the late 1930s the company—assigned responsibility for the defense of its oil fields against attack—acquired an arsenal of anti-aircraft weaponry.⁴⁴

Through the 1920s and 1930s, then, the Middle Eastern oil economy became a site where refugees were explicitly made into workers whose labor would help entrench colonial and semicolonial state control, not least by making possible oil companies’ development and expansion at the lowest possible economic and political cost. But as was true in so many other interwar scenarios, from Brazil to Russia to France, even refugees’ almost total dispossession did not guarantee their cooperation with such exploitative schemes over the longer term. As labor organizing began to take hold in northern Iraq during the 1930s and early 1940s, Assyrian refugees and Arab migrants—both coerced, in different ways, into collaboration with the British—emerged as community leaders in the rapidly evolving Iraqi Communist Party, which over the subsequent decades would establish itself as far and away Iraq’s most important political movement.⁴⁵ By the dawn of the Second World War, many Assyrian refugees in Iraq were managing to escape their decade-long stint as laborers and soldiers for the IPC and the British-backed Iraqi monarchy and carve out a new role for themselves—this time, as advocates for workers’ rights, Iraqi nationalism, and, sometimes, an Iraqi version of a communist state.

Refugee Labor in Palestine: Jewish Settlement and the Colonial Concept of “Absorptive Capacity”

Finally, of course, interwar Palestine also became a destination where European migrants—often disenfranchised and persecuted, if not legally describable as refugees prior to 1933—were reimagined as migrant labor in the service of European colonial expansion. The Palestine of the 1920s and 1930s operated as a specific kind of laboratory: one where the resettlement of a politically threatening European refugee population could serve not only to create a useful labor pool and colonial market but might eventually erase the indigenous population altogether as a political entity, replacing it with a cooperative client state that could serve as a political ally as well as an economic partner.

The Zionist movement, as we have already seen, had begun to promote the idea of mass European Jewish resettlement in Palestine in the late nineteenth century. Initially, almost no one was interested; settlements were tiny, and those who did come—mainly from Russia and its eastern European borderlands—often found themselves disillusioned with the difficulties of life in the rural Ottoman Arab provinces. (Some historians have suggested that more than half of early European Jewish settlers who came to Palestine ended up leaving again.)⁴⁶ In the early twentieth century, Zionism looked in many ways like a failed nationalist project: riven by internal disputes, flailing after Herzl’s early death, and without a significant presence on the ground in Palestine itself. But the movement’s fortunes were about to change. In November of 1917 the Balfour Declaration proclaimed Britain’s support for the Zionist project in Palestine, and the next month the British invaded and occupied the formerly Ottoman city of Jerusalem.⁴⁷

From 1920 on Palestine, like Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, found itself under European (in this case, British) “mandatory” occupation. But here, mandate rule was premised on a unique legal commitment to the League of Nations and the international community that Palestine’s British overseers would remake the country as a “Jewish national home”—apparently without serious consideration of the political future of the extant population, approximately 90 percent of whom were Muslim and Christian Arabs. Palestinians were of course not alone in their experience of interwar European colonial occupation; in the postwar Middle East (as we have seen) most of the ex-Ottoman Arab provinces, from Lebanon to Iraq, were redrawn as “Class A” mandates and placed under either British or French military rule, and there were “Class B” and “Class C” mandates in Africa and in the Pacific. But Palestine was the only mandatory territory where colonial rule explicitly entailed building up a European settler community, a commitment first articulated in the Balfour Declaration and then enshrined in the founding documents of the mandate. The specifics of this stricture were defended in terms of labor and development as well as the goal of Jewish nationhood. Indeed, a debate over Palestine’s “absorptive capacity” for foreign labor soon became central to the biannual official determination of how many European Jews the mandatory government would admit.

The first high commissioner for British-occupied Palestine, a Jewish Liberal Party politician named Herbert Samuel, developed a schema for mass agricultural and industrial development that he hoped would “allow on the one hand extensive Jewish immigration while advancing the non-Jewish population on the other.”⁴⁸ His development plan included specific provisions for an immigration quota, to be revisited biannually and set with reference to the extant and projected need for workers.⁴⁹ This labor-need basis for Palestine’s immigration allowance, though, came under closer scrutiny as Arab resistance to Jewish immigration mounted. Following protests at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 1929 that killed some 250 people, the British Shaw Commission submitted a report that sharply criticized both the Zionist Organization and the mandatory government for their immigration policies: “It will be observed that it is a cardinal principle of the policy laid down in 1922 that immigration should not exceed the economic capacity of Palestine to absorb new arrivals and that it should not have the result of depriving any section of the present population of their employment … It was strongly urged before us by Arab witnesses that the burden cast upon the tax-payer in consequences of the situation which we have described was the direct result of the admission to the country of a larger number of immigrants than the country could at the time absorb.”⁵⁰ The following year a more comprehensive report appeared from another commission, this time headed up by the British “settlement expert” Sir John Hope Simpson (later famous as the author of the massive 1939 tome The Refugee Problem, inarguably the most important contemporary account of interwar refugee issues).⁵¹ Following a detailed investigation of Palestine’s arable land, its industries, and its available labor force, Hope Simpson stated in no uncertain terms that Jewish immigration had reached a limit: “There is at the present time and with the present methods of Arab cultivation no margin of land available for agricultural settlement by new immigrants.”⁵²

It was a conclusion that many local observers shared, especially as economic resentment festered among dispossessed Arab peasants and protest against the Zionist presence mounted in every sphere of Palestinian Arab life. Still, Hope Simpson did see a way to increase Palestine’s “absorptive capacity,” even if by less than the Jewish Federation considered desirable. Drawing on the work of geographers whose maps, irrigation data, and development ideas he had consulted, he proposed a mass development scheme intended to produce an entirely new landscape of industrial agriculture in mandatory Palestine. “The sole way in which the Mandate can be carried out is by the intensive development of rural Palestine,” he wrote. “Without development, there is not room for a single additional settler, if the standard of life of the fellahin [peasantry] is to remain at its present level. With development that standard could be raised so that it would permit reasonable conditions of livelihood to that backward class of the community and a margin of land could at the same time be provided for additional colonisation.”⁵³

Such an approach explicitly linked suitability for refugee settlement to stage of industrialization, thus permanently exempting western Europe from the need to accept migrants. It also served to articulate the argument to skeptical colonial and semi-colonial governments that foreign refugees could be deployed in service of a rapid industrial development—one that, in an ingenious display of circular logic, would itself increase the colony’s ability to act as a receiver of the displaced. The apparently neutral concept of a scientifically determined “absorptive capacity” thus staked out a more general case for opening up the colonies to refugee labor while doubling down on the closure of the already-industrialized spaces of western Europe and North America to migrants—precisely at the moment when a new European Jewish crisis of displacement was appearing on the horizon.

By the 1930s the League could tout its successes in having settled some refugees in various forms of employment across the globe; but there were clear indications that the system was under strain. Most immediately, it was turning out that despite dislocation, denationalization, and sometimes near-total destitution many refugees were nevertheless capable of resisting their forcible incorporation into the machinery of colonial capitalism. All sorts of refugee populations who came under the League’s purview in the 1920s and 1930s proved unwilling, at a fundamental level, to cooperate with such schemes. From Iraq to France to Brazil, refugees co-opted into these systems began to resist this sort of coerced labor, migration, and military service—by refusing to go, but also by actively seeking assimilation in their host countries and crossing refugee-host lines to join local labor and political movements. Palestine, where settlers viewed themselves as engaged in their own nation-building project, was something of an exception—but even there European Jewish migrants did not always act in the interests of their imperial sponsors. Colonial worries about refugee assimilation to local anticolonial causes proved well-founded; in the event, the colonial strategy of enforced refugee segregation usually proved an insufficient preventive measure.

But the disappointments of the League’s regimes of resettlement were not just a reflection of refugee resistance. They were also indicative of the impending collapse of the very imperial system that rendered “refugee colonization” schemes imaginable. The 1930s saw a new wave of anticolonial activity across the Middle East, South and East Asia, and (in a different imperial realm) Latin America, exemplified by a major revolt in Palestine beginning in 1936. The League itself, premised on the assumption of more or less permanent British and French imperial domination, was in a clear state of decline by the same period, stressed and diminished both by the rise of anticolonial nationalisms across the European empires and by the rise of fascism in Europe itself. As yet few at the League were willing to admit it; but the signs of collapse were clear, and a new refugee crisis was already arriving.

4

From Europe to America

Refugees and the Politics
of “Overpopulation”

By the early 1930s the League was congratulating itself; the “refugee problem,” if not totally solved, seemed diminished to a point of manageability, albeit with considerable assistance from private relief organizations and external investors. The widespread use of the Nansen Passport, the settlement of tens of thousands of Jews in British-occupied Palestine, and the fanfare surrounding the League’s placement of refugees in private employment from France to Iraq to Brazil all served to paper over the fundamental fragility and temporariness of the arrangements Nansen and his office had made. Indeed, in some circles the refugee colonization schemes of the 1920s and 1930s seemed to represent the last gasp of a refugee policy that might soon be unnecessary. As the preeminent refugee chronicler of the era Sir John Hope Simpson wrote in 1939, the obstacles to “the possibility of complete solution of the problem as it existed at the end of 1937 were obviously substantial and important, but the difficulties were not insuperable.”¹

This assessment could hardly have been more wrong. Other, less sanguine voices were pointing out that there were already new waves of refugees, this time fleeing early manifestations of European fascism: in Italy, particularly, where more than 10,000 anti-fascists became exiles during the 1920s. They were not covered by Nansen’s refugee office, which still dealt only with Russian, Armenian, and Assyrian displaced populations as “refugees,” and had to find informal channels of settlement and employment. The severity of this new refugee problem was partly obscured by France’s willingness to take in Italian exiles, many of whom were well educated and politically active and easily found a space in the large population of Italian émigrés already living there. The same would not be true of the new wave of mostly Jewish refugees from Germany who began to flee the Nazi state’s depredations in 1933.

Much to the dismay of the past and future Allies, this latest mass displacement revealed the sharp limits of the League’s refugee-related capacities. Its new High Commission for Refugees Coming from Germany proved totally unable to muster a practical response of any kind in the face of German intransigence. A high-profile meeting of more than thirty countries at Évian in 1938, intended to bypass the League in favor of more directly negotiated refugee “solutions,” had no outcome at all other than confirming the ubiquity of global stonewalling in the face of this new Jewish refugee crisis. But one thing did become clear there: that Europe was handing off responsibility for internationalist refugee policy to the United States, a rising imperial power with its own emerging ideas about how to deploy refugees in the service of global capitalism. It was an opportunity for experiment with identifiably American concepts of refugee resettlement—visions that combined old ideas about refugee labor with a new, modern “science” of global population distribution, and at times bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to Nazi conceptions of reordering the world.

The League’s Last Stand

Following the Nazi Party’s rise to power in the elections of 1933, Hitler immediately began to target German Jews as enemies of the state. His first actions were mainly legal and bureaucratic, though always backed by the threat of violence: purging Jews from the civil service, from teaching, and from professional occupations; removing Jewish students from schools; and stripping Jews (particularly those who had been naturalized during the Weimar years) of their citizenship. Initially, as had happened a decade earlier in Italy, many of the targeted were intellectuals and political activists, individual and visible members of the German intelligentsia. But the regime’s targets soon expanded; violence against Jews intensified, and the German state began to appropriate nearly all of Jewish emigrants’ resources as they fled the country, ensuring that most of the refugees would flee with almost nothing in the way of possessions or money. It was a strategy designed not just to enrich the Third Reich but also to reinforce extant anti-Semitic tropes about the burdens of destitute Jews seeking refuge elsewhere, and it proved remarkably successful. “Before they set the gas chambers into motion,” Hannah Arendt later wrote bitterly, “they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people.”² In September of 1935 the Nuremberg Laws revoked German citizenship for all Jews and enabled the internment of Jewish returnees to Germany in concentration camps.

The League of Nations took up the cause of a small number of new refugees—mainly, again, operating within “mandate” territories over which it had a degree of political control. The Saar Basin, a small valley in Germany bordering France and Luxembourg, was governed by Britain and France under a League mandate from 1920. During the last few years of this arrangement, the Saar became something of a refuge for Jews as well as communists, social democrats, and other dissenters who found themselves having to flee Germany. Upon the expiration of the fifteen-year mandate, the question of its future disposition was to be determined by a plebiscite—which in the event demanded the Saar’s return to Germany, spurring panic and exodus. Some 7,000 refugees left in 1935; most went initially to France, which successfully petitioned the League to allow Saar refugees to qualify for Nansen Passports and League aid. Like so many of the League’s previous charges, these refugees found themselves subject to a special resettlement plan in Latin America: in this case Paraguay, where they were to establish a rural agricultural colony. “The refugees were to be given 30 acres per family,” Sir John Hope Simpson reported, “a well already sunk, a house, the necessary agricultural implements, seed, poultry, pigs, and maintenance for one year.”³ But—as was so often the case—the refugees resisted, preferring settlement in France or Luxembourg. By 1937 only about 200 people had been settled in Paraguay, about the same number who had left for Spain to fight in the war. The majority remained in camps in France, where some of them were placed with the iron and steel industries and in mining work and others were supported by French unemployment benefits—a form of assistance few other types of refugees could claim.

The League made one more formal, if attenuated, effort to address the human disaster spilling out of Germany. In 1933 it created yet another refugee office—bearing the unwieldy name of the “High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and Otherwise) Coming from Germany”—to walk the difficult path of assisting an ever-growing number of exiles from Nazi Germany while refraining from interfering in the internal affairs of a member state. If the Nansen office’s capacities were limited by the circumscribed powers of the League and the national commitments of its members, this new commission faced an even more draconian set of restrictions: no funding or direct instruction from the League, and no permission to claim to be acting as its representative. The new high commissioner was an American former history and politics professor named James McDonald, who would have to run his new organization from Lausanne—not Geneva—and repay the initial 25,000 Swiss francs allotted to his office within a year. It was not an auspicious beginning.

McDonald himself was rather less sympathetic to the idea of mass refugee resettlement than Nansen, not least because unlike the Armenians and Russians of a previous generation these German refugees were (at least initially) not actually stateless. His own position was that the commission’s main role should be not to resettle German Jews but to pressure the Nazi government to reconsider its policies. “The only real solution for the problems of refugees and displaced persons is to eliminate the causes which force these innocent victims from their homes … [This] is the deepest conviction gained during the writer’s experiences with German refugees,” he wrote later, in 1944.⁴ But such a position was not popular in the European political landscape of the mid-1930s, when many British and French officials were still hoping that Germany might rejoin the League and reestablish a balance of power within Europe.⁵ Institutionally, too, the League and the ILO were still profoundly committed to the idea of resettlement as a “solution” to problems of displacement. McDonald’s office received advice from the same organizations that had long advocated for resettling refugees as industrial and agricultural colonists far from Europe: the familiar names of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Colonization Association appeared on its advisory committee, alongside the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the Comité des Delegations, as well as non-Jewish agencies interested in refugee resettlement like the Society of Friends and the International Migration Service.⁶

McDonald tried to play along. One of the first efforts he made as commissioner, in 1934, was a visit to South America to ascertain the possibilities for mass European Jewish colonial settlement along the same lines the Nansen office had imagined for Russians and Armenians. Like his predecessor, he believed that “overseas” countries—in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East—had a greater “absorptive capacity,” to borrow the language used for Palestine, than Europe. In the spring of 1935 he made a trip to Argentina and Brazil in hopes of arranging some kind of refugee settlement there, a scheme frustrated by the draconian requirements of the relevant governments and the rise of a German-inspired anti-Semitism.⁷ Palestine itself he still viewed as a centrally important space for settlement; as he told the Zionist Congress in 1935, “The daily grace in the High Commissioner’s office was ‘Thank God for Palestine,’ ” and his continued support for the Zionist project would eventually lead to his appointment as the first American ambassador to Israel after 1948.⁸ But the reluctance of the League and its main stakeholders to confront Germany directly about the treatment of its Jews led McDonald to quit in 1935, declaring that resettlement—even in Palestine—could not serve as a long-term solution to this new refugee crisis. “In the present economic conditions of the world, the European States, and even those overseas, have only a limited power of absorption of refugees,” he wrote in his letter of resignation. “The problem must be tackled at its source if disaster is to be avoided. This is the function of the League, which is essentially an association of states for the consideration of matters of common concern.”⁹

The League itself disagreed and fell back on an even more limited vision for what the refugee office might be expected to do. McDonald’s British successor, Sir Neill Malcolm, came directly out of a colonial training, having served as the head of the British garrison in Malaya, and might have been expected to be more in tune with the longstanding League commitment to colonial resettlement. But Malcolm’s purview was even more limited than McDonald’s; his office could liaise with private organizations and serve as a kind of legal consult, but it was forbidden to engage with the question of German policy or to receive additional funds from external organizations. Moreover, by this point the League’s own capacities to operate with impunity in colonial spaces had diminished significantly—as can be seen, for instance, in its extremely reluctant decision to recognize Haile Selassie as the Ethiopian representative in 1936.¹⁰ And now even Palestine was coming to appear less than useful as an appropriately far-from-Europe sanctuary for Jews fleeing Germany: it was in 1936 that the Palestinian Arab population began to organize a major revolt against both the brutal British colonial occupation and the large-scale Zionist immigration it made possible, eventually forcing Britain to deploy some 20,000 soldiers (who could ill be spared in this moment of impending crisis) to regain control over the tiny colony.¹¹ Long imagined as a crucial pressure valve for Europe, Palestine had now become a cautionary tale.

For now, the idea of League-directed mass refugee resettlement was quietly shelved; in this moment of impending war, no one wanted to risk further anticolonial uprising by triggering the near-certain antagonism of local populations to the idea of refugee colonization. But the idea was by no means dead. Indeed, it was about to receive renewed attention as both the European powers and the United States sought to ensure that their own borders could remain more or less closed to an ever-more-desperate tide of Jewish refugees.

Évian

The year 1938 was one of disillusionment: not just about the extent and nature of the new refugee crisis, but about the fundamental nature of the regime in Germany. The Anschluss—the German takeover of Austria, accomplished in March—exposed, finally, the true brutality of Nazi intentions towards central Europe’s Jews: now not only financial ruin and public humiliation but beatings, deportations, imprisonments, and massacres. As Jews desperately sought refuge and asylum, Europe closed its doors ever more firmly. Historian Michael Marrus outlines the steps taken as the scope of the disaster became clear:

Each of the European countries that had previously received refugees took countermeasures to reduce earlier rates of acceptance or to shut out the refugees altogether. Neighboring Hungary and Yugoslavia immediately closed their frontiers as we have seen. Fascist Italy, which had received about 5,000 German refugees in the preceding period, swung sharply against the Jews in mid-1938, closing off one more avenue of emigration. A decree of September of that year ordered foreign Jews out of the country in six months, provoking an emergency for some 20,000 who had come since 1919. The Dutch, Belgians, and Swiss admitted only small numbers of refugees and reinforced frontier guards. Several countries, including Britain, imposed special visa requirements to screen out refugees … “Shall All Come In?” asked the Daily Express in a leading article on 24 March 1938. In one European country after another, authorities worked out how to say no.¹²

It was in this context that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dismayed at the thought of European Jews fleeing en masse to the United States, called a meeting of thirty leading countries to consider the question of refugeedom and find some solution that did not involve any participating country being forced into accepting more immigrants than its current national law allowed. Delegates met at the southern French resort town of Évian-les-Bains in July. The American delegate Myron Taylor—appointed, in keeping with the accepted international vision of refugeedom as above all a problem of employment, because of his past position as head of the US Steel Corporation—presided over the events.

All the countries attending the conference, including those (like France and the Latin American states) who had often served as refugee destinations over the past two decades, came to the negotiating table loudly declaring impending limitations on their acceptance of stateless migrants. The United States led the way. Taylor opened the proceedings by recommitting to the League of Nations’ long-held position that statelessness—rather than displacement—was what defined refugeedom: “Millions of people … are, actually or potentially, without a country.” He also reaffirmed the centrality of the employment issue to the question of refugee policy: the increase in refugees was occurring “at a time when there is serious unemployment in many countries, where there is a shrinkage of subsistence bases and when the population of the world is at a peak.” He declared that this state of affairs had been deliberately produced to upend not only the lives of the expelled but the security of the receiving states: “Now, we have a form of compulsory migration, artificially stimulated by governmental practices in some countries which force upon the world at large great bodies of reluctant migrants who must be absorbed in abnormal circumstances with a disregard of economic conditions at a time of stress.” He finished with self-congratulation, praising the United States on what he depicted as its generosity towards migrants: “The American Government prides itself upon the liberality of its existing laws and practices both as regards the number of immigrants whom the United States receives each year for assimilation with its population and the treatment of those people when they have arrived. I might point out that the American Government has taken steps to consolidate both the German and the former Austrian quota so that now a total of 27,370 immigrants may enter the United States on the German quota in one year.”¹³ (Critics would point out that this did not actually represent an expansion of earlier numbers, and moreover that during the years of Nazi government the United States never once filled its own self-declared quota of migrants from Germany and Austria; in the crisis year of 1938 it allowed in fewer than 18,000 refugees.)¹⁴

The British government representative was one Lord Winterton, a career diplomat known for his longtime opposition to Zionist settlement in Palestine—an issue he was instructed not to mention as Britain tried quietly to recalibrate its colonial occupation in response to the intensifying revolt there. Like Taylor, Winterton offered a position more or less in line with the League’s approach over the past two decades: European countries that were “highly industrialized and thickly populated,” like Britain, could not be expected to absorb large numbers of refugees “within the present economic framework.” Immigrants to the UK, he declared, “would eventually have to proceed to a country of final settlement overseas.” Fortunately, it was imaginable that resettlement could be accomplished elsewhere, in the colonies—he suggested East Africa, that old shibboleth of the territorialists of a previous generation. Winterton summed up the shared assumptions of all the major powers in his assessment of the British position: “No thickly populated country can be expected to accept persons who are deprived of their means of subsistence before they are able to enter it. Nor can the resources of private societies be expected to make good the losses which the emigrants have suffered.”¹⁵ France too declared itself unable to house any more refugees. Having admitted some 200,000 “exiles and refugees from all quarters … the highest figure that can be claimed by any country,” delegate Henry Berenger announced, it had now reached “the extreme point of saturation.” The French goal henceforth was to “discuss how [refugee] emigration can best be controlled and their settlement effected,” through a careful study of “various territorial, shipping, financial, monetary and social measures.”¹⁶

Even more distressing was the way the proceedings at Évian appeared to set new limits on Latin America as a destination for refugees—an enormous disappointment to Roosevelt and to the European powers, who had long regarded places like Brazil and Argentina as a useful valve for relieving the pressure of unwanted immigrants in Europe. To be sure, some discussion revolved around the continuation of earlier resettlement efforts to place refugees in rural areas for the purpose of industrial development. The Argentinian representative, a career ambassador named Tomás Le Breton, declared that the “slogan” of his country was “To govern is to populate,” and allowed that immigration might continue to some extent if it were “directed towards agricultural work and certain specialized forms of employment.”¹⁷ Paraguay, its delegate Gustavo Wiengreen agreed, “favours in every way the immigration of industrious individuals capable of developing her great natural wealth … [If] Paraguay can provide the elements of a happy existence for a large number of farming families, she will be gratified to have made this contribution.”¹⁸ Ecuador, too, reaffirmed its willingness to participate in certain restricted forms of refugee resettlement with the purpose of tightening state control over rural areas and developing new lands for industrial agriculture. Though it was undesirable to admit “an influx of intellectual workers,” agricultural immigrants could continue to be allowed in “so far as [Ecuador’s] possibilities and her legislation on immigration and the settlement of aliens permit.”¹⁹ The representative from Uruguay echoed these limits, with a further amendment: the country could accept immigrants for assimilation into “the country’s farming and stock breeding communities with some financial assistance not exceeding that yielded by the soil, which could be purchased on favorable terms … [but such] immigration must be financed by private organizations in their respective countries.”²⁰

In general, though, it was becoming clear that the foreign corporate enthusiasm for the importation of cheap workers into Latin America—led by American-and European-owned companies with labor needs and considerable political room for maneuver —was being assailed by the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment on the ground, everywhere. The 1920s and especially the 1930s had brought rising inequality and falling wages, leading to a widespread perception across Brazil, Argentina, and Latin America more generally that the expansion of the workforce through the introduction of low-wage, unskilled immigrants—precisely the demographic that these states had encouraged and incentivized in recent years—posed a serious threat to the conditions and wages of local workers.²¹ In Brazil potent anti-immigrant feeling had triggered large-scale xenophobic campaigns, especially targeting the large Japanese communities who had emigrated to Brazil from the late nineteenth century to work in the coffee plantations and now constituted a significant presence in São Paulo and its surrounds.²² In 1934 Brazil for the first time introduced an immigration quota, set for each country at 2 percent of the number of immigrants who had arrived from there in the previous fifty years. Hélio Lobo, the Brazilian representative at Évian, told the conference that even this measure was creating undesirable demographic changes in the country: “The old sources of immigration failed to exhaust the quotas fixed for them, whereas in the case of the new sources, the limits were almost always insufficient … [so] the traditional racial background showed a certain tendency to change.”²³ The minister of Peru, too, warned of perilous demographic changes: “An unorganized influx would be dangerous … We must avoid creating minorities of different origins which would lead to future conflicts.” (Rather trenchantly, he related his recommendations to the ongoing American restriction on immigration, analyzing it as a “defence of their Nordic heritage and of the Anglo-Saxon race against invasion by other peoples.”)²⁴

Across Latin America, worries were mounting around precisely the kinds of labor market disruptions about which Europe had long been concerned. The Peruvian representative summed up the Latin American approach generally: “If traders or workmen came, it might disturb [Peru’s] economic system or create problems similar to those which other countries have had to tackle. In the same way, to prevent the growth of an intellectual proletariat, restrictions would be laid on the settlement of large numbers of lawyers or doctors.”²⁵ A similar joint statement made by the countries of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama to the conference firmly declared that no one “engaged in trade or intellectual work can be accepted as immigrants by our countries, as their occupations are already overcrowded.”²⁶ Such diplomatic positions reflected the popular anti-immigration sentiment that was bringing Latin America closer to the formulations of Europe and the United States. It also reflected the limitations of European policy vis-à-vis Latin America, which was by and large not a formally colonized space over which the future Allied powers could exert real control.

That left the colonies themselves. The Colombian representative at Évian, one Jesús María Yepes (who had himself served as a legal adviser at the League of Nations and thoroughly understood the nature of its approach to refugees), made explicit the long-discussed and sometimes-implemented strategy of using colonial territory to settle refugees en masse:

It is not enough to assert that France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have, in their home territories, already reached saturation point as regards political refugees and can no longer receive any more. These three countries are also American countries, inasmuch as they possess rich colonies—the French West Indies, the British West Indies and the Netherlands West Indies—in the New World … Therefore, the appeal which was addressed here to the American republics should be regarded as applying also to those European nations who still possess colonial territories in America.²⁷

Such an appeal of course could not be made to apply to the “White Dominions,” which at Évian were, one after another, declaring themselves unwilling to accept refugees. They, too, made the colonial suggestion; as Irish representative Francis Thomas Cremins put it, “We can make no real contribution to the resettlement of refugees … [which would have to be accomplished via] the opening-up of new or underdeveloped territory.”²⁸ In other words, refugee resettlement was now possible only in regions where local objections would be rendered meaningless by virtue of the power of an ongoing colonial occupation. Palestine might no longer fit that bill (though the jury was still out); but there were other places that could, even in this era of dwindling imperial power.

In the end, then, Évian offered no answers for the refugees themselves. Its only discernable outcome was the establishment of an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR), empowered primarily to negotiate with the Third Reich on behalf of expelled Jews trying to retain at least some of their property and resources as they left the country. Indeed, the conference’s accomplishments were so meager that the Nazis viewed it as an international validation of their emerging policies of Jewish expulsion. (The German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter famously declared that in its confirmation of the European and American refusal to admit Germany’s fleeing Jews, Évian had amounted to “an intentional legalization of German antisemitic policy.”)²⁹ Nevertheless, it had clarified the situation in important ways. First, the conversation at Évian confirmed that the issue of refugeedom—however different it looked in both numbers and geography from the refugee flows of the post-WWI era, and however dramatically the numbers of the displaced rose—would for the foreseeable future continue to be regarded as above all a problem of worker surplus, to be addressed mainly through global mechanisms of industrial employment. Second, it reaffirmed the essentially colonial landscape of the global labor market and the absolute unwillingness of the Allied powers to accept refugees in general and Jewish ones in particular.

This state of affairs arose from a toxic stew of different and sometimes contradictory factors. On the one hand there was general determination, here at the tail end of the Depression, to prevent a further fall in wages and rise in unemployment that many saw as having been key to the political successes of Bolshevism in Russia, fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany. There were also worries about the rise of a leftist politics of labor resulting from the introduction of large numbers of workers seeking employment, a view that dovetailed with longstanding anti-Semitic tropes about “Judeo-Bolshevism.” While rarely acknowledged openly, at least in the Évian negotiations, the idea that Jewish refugees acted as carriers and vectors of Bolshevik thought (the metaphor of disease was common in such anti-Semitic vitriol) had reached into every corner of European and American politics by the late 1930s.³⁰ A more general form of racism and anti-Semitism pervaded domestic politics as well, in the United States as elsewhere; Roosevelt was electorally conscious of the influence of such “home-grown Nazis and anti-Semites” as Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio show advanced support for Hitler and Mussolini on anti-Semitic grounds and boasted some 30 million listeners on a weekly basis.³¹ And anti-refugee positions were not limited to the right; some labor unions—though workers were broadly divided on the issue—objected to the admission of refugees on the grounds that migrant labor might weaken their political clout, depressing workers’ wages and undermining unions’ bargaining power.³² Together, these factors brought about a general sense that the admission of large numbers of Jewish (or for that matter any other) refugees was basically a nonstarter. Sir Neill Malcolm, from his position as head of the fundamentally ineffectual High Commissioner on Refugees from Germany, put it in measuredly general terms to the conference: “In the present condition of labour markets in the countries of the world, any large-scale scheme of migration could only arouse hostility.”³³

So: Europe, North America, and South America alike all doubled down on their refusal to admit more refugees in the aftermath of Évian. The IGCR was not inclined to intervene in such internal policy decisions; its focus remained almost solely on negotiating with the Reich over the particulars of the refugees’ departure and what they would be allowed to take with them. France, long the most generous of the European nations towards refugees, now established border guards. Its new government under socialist prime minister Édouard Daladier built detention camps in which to incarcerate anyone trying to enter, and subjected refugees to military service and forced labor. In Switzerland, the government gave the police new powers of enforcement at the borders and came to an accord with the Reich that all “non-Aryan” German passports would be stamped with a J for ease of tracking. Holland and Belgium began to deport all illegal immigrants immediately. Colombia and Venezuela explicitly restricted Jewish entrance; Argentina and Bolivia imposed an entrance fee; Mexico forbade the entrance of any immigrant looking for work.

In the United States policy was slightly more mixed, as Roosevelt extended German visitor visas and began to move towards filling the already-established but never-met quota of immigrants from Germany and Austria. But the Wagner-Rogers Bill that would have allowed for an additional 20,000 German refugee children to enter the country was defeated in Congress, and the country’s basic commitment to its system of ethnonational quotas remained firmly in place despite a growing awareness of Nazi atrocities. The United States, judged by its performance at Évian, was proving to be Europe’s imperial successor in refugee matters just as in other realms of global politics.

American Empire and the New Science of Geography

We have by now thoroughly examined the heavy-handed processes by which the European imperial powers imagined engineering populations and resettling refugees as a mode of shoring up their increasingly tenuous grip on territories around the world (and particularly in the newly acquired Middle East) while also protecting their own countries from what many perceived as dangerous forms of mass politics and labor activism. As international leadership vis-à-vis refugee policy passed to the United States, these same tactics would be deployed to serve a rather different imperial end: an American global domination focused on the world economy rather than its formal political geography. It was within this particular neoimperial frame that Roosevelt’s administration would begin to conceive of its answers to the question of an appropriate American response to the increasingly pressing issue of European Jewish displacement.

Roosevelt himself had a long and checkered history of dealing with the “Jewish question.” He had for years considered Jewish communities to be one of his reliable electoral constituencies. Still, he remained cautious in his relations with them, “carefully walk[ing] the line between retaining Jewish support and exploiting upstate [New York] anti-Semitism,” as one historian puts it, during his senatorial race in 1928.³⁴ On the question of Jewish immigration Roosevelt was ambivalent at best. Already in the 1920s he had begun to think about controlled immigration as a mode of engineering the demographics of the country—and indeed the world—to dilute and perhaps obviate the political threat that migrants, and especially Jewish migrants, might pose to a stable world order. In a column he wrote for the Macon Telegraph in 1925, he was expansive about his views on desirable and undesirable immigrants and immigration policies:

It goes without saying that no sensible American wants this country to be made a dumping ground for foreigners of any nation but it is equally true that there are a great many foreigners whom if they came here, would make exceedingly desirable citizens. It becomes, therefore, in the first place, a question of selection …

[Canadian] policy is to prevent large groups of foreign born from congregating in any one locality. In other words, they seek distribution of their immigrants throughout every portion of Canada. When the individual or family in the European country applies to the Canadian agent for permission to come over he must agree to go to one of the sections of Canada which is not already too full of foreigners. If, twenty-five years ago, the United States had adopted a policy of this kind we would not have the huge foreign sections which exist in so many of our cities.

This suspicion of foreign “sections” in cities and the political demands that they might make led Roosevelt early on towards the idea of making use of immigrants as rural agricultural workers, both to protect the metropole from the cultural and political challenges of collective populations of immigrants and to make the best use of cheap and available labor for the purpose of developing land. “Taking it by and large,” he wrote,

I agree that for a good many years to come European immigration should remain greatly restricted. We have, unfortunately, a great many thousand foreigners who got in here and who must be digested. For fifty years the United States ate a meal altogether too large—much of the food was digestible, but some of it was almost poisonous. The United States must, for a short time at least, stop eating and when it resumes should confine itself to the most readily assimilable foodstuffs. In the meantime we can all help in this digestive process by encouraging these foreigners to break away from their own little foreign groups in our large cities. Many of them, in our cities, come of good, sound stock and would make thoroughly acceptable neighbors in the farming communities. We would be helping not only them, but ourselves, also.³⁵

Such commentary followed on a longstanding suspicion of urban immigrants, especially Jews; it demonstrated a commitment to the settler model of assimilating white migrants via the experience of physically claiming land for the white settler nation; and it reflected an interest in finding new pools of cheap labor for the purposes of industrializing rural areas. As Roosevelt put it none too subtly, only the “right type of emigrant” could act as an improving influence.³⁶ This idea of colonization in remote areas—whether domestic or external—as a solution to the problem of global mass migration had had any number of British and French incarnations over the previous two decades; Roosevelt now began to develop a new version that drew on a specifically American conception of settler colonialism along a rural frontier. In developing his ideas further, he would turn to an emerging school of American geographical thought that considered how the United States could dominate the world without the cost—and, perhaps, the moral opprobrium—of actual colonial occupation.

The idea of economic globalization as the primary mode of American imperialism was formulated around the beginning of the twentieth century. It started, as geographer Neil Smith has noted, with the era’s notable shift from the “acquisitive, classically colonial wars” in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico to Woodrow Wilson’s expansive modern vision for “a new world order premised on a global Monroe Doctrine.”³⁷ In part, this recalibration was a reaction to the end of the age of exploration and a sense that American power would henceforth have to rest on some other mechanism than continuous territorial expansion. As the influential British geographer Halford Mackinder put it as early as 1904, “From the present time forth in the post-Columbian age, we shall again have to deal with a closed political system, and none the less that it will be one of world-wide scope … Probably some half-consciousness of this fact is at last diverting much of the attention of statesmen in all parts of the world from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency.”³⁸

Such an analysis would not have surprised Lenin, whose Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism noted that “in the future only redivision is possible”; or the Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg, who saw in the end of imperial territorial expansion the inevitable end of capitalism.³⁹ Indeed, it has been under-recognized how closely Wilson’s view of the post-WWI era hewed in certain respects to Lenin’s.⁴⁰ Both viewed the apparent end of European imperial territorial expansion as a watershed, one that would require a new vision for the “surplus capital” absorbed for so many years by imperial conquest. For Lenin this moment marked the end of capitalism and the rise of a new communist system of distributing global wealth, while Wilson’s vision retained capitalism as an organizing principle: “A new and higher stage of international society—a beneficent brotherhood of capitalist nations competing economically but peacefully while advancing the global good.”⁴¹ The United States, Wilson hoped, would be ideally positioned to lead such a charge. In the event, though, the American absence from the League of Nations (following Wilson’s illness and the US Congress’s subsequent refusal to ratify the agreement) meant that this first effort to rebuild the world as a seamless global network fostering an unfettered American economic expansionism failed. Instead, the 1920s and early 1930s saw a tense and incoherent, but nevertheless influential, academic-cum-political argument about migration and resettlement that encompassed anxieties about population growth, racial admixture, labor activism, and the ever-present dual threats of anticolonial nationalism and Bolshevism in this post-exploration (though not postimperial) era.

Questions of population and demography preoccupied official minds from both sides of the liberal/fascist divide during this period. Weimar-era German geopolitical philosophy and postwar Anglophone schools of geographical thought both engaged with the concept of Lebensraum: “living room,” a term that the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel derived from British Darwinist conceptions of population, adaptation, and territory. Ratzel’s biopolitical take on the state as a living creature perpetually and necessarily seeking to expand its own power and territory appealed to both British and American commentators, who found much to like in Ratzel’s legitimization of imperial expansion as not just a natural process but a biological imperative.⁴² His American student Ellen Churchill Semple declared that the strongest national ideas necessarily “outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.”⁴³ Even those less sympathetic to unrestrained racial imperialism often deployed the concept of shrinking geographical space; the British economist John Maynard Keynes, for instance, had already identified what he called “the diminishing yield of Nature to man’s effort” as a key reason for the upheavals of the First World War era.⁴⁴

In other words, the idea that an overpopulated Europe required space for expansion in order to avoid war and famine was a common premise in interwar fascist thought; both Hitler and Mussolini, of course, repeatedly declared the necessity of territorial expansion to counter overpopulation. But it also had roots in British and French imperial philosophies, and in contemporary American geographical thinking. In 1927 the World Population Conference addressed this problem directly, with a series of discussions devoted in large part to the concept of “density”—shades of the earlier conversations around Palestine’s “absorptive capacity.” Ideal densities of population could, the gathered experts thought, be arrived at via consideration of soil and agricultural output of a space on the one hand and (racially differentiated) expectations for living standards of various communities on the other. Overpopulation and settlement of “surplus” peoples was thus simultaneously a scientific and a political question, concerning the practicalities of things like industrial agriculture but equally bound up in philosophical issues of race, immigration, and social and economic expectation.

Questions like these took on a particular urgency for the man who would eventually become the United States’ best-known architect of midcentury refugee resettlement schemes. Isaiah Bowman—a Canadian-born Michigan farm boy turned Yale geographer—had served in Wilson’s delegation to the Paris peace talks, where he was charged with drawing a new map of central eastern Europe that would render ethnic, national, linguistic, and religious feeling—as well as newer threats of communism, anarchism, and socialism—into a logical modern geography making national identifications clear. The British and French hoped that such a reordering would allow for the maintenance of older imperial forms, including a territorial zone of defense against Russia, via the “international” enforcement of the new political principle of national sovereignty. Wilson, by contrast, was increasingly intent on a new kind of global economic domination divorced from colonial territorial occupation. For him and for Bowman, this neatening of European borders represented what Bowman’s biographer called “a means to an end”—that end being the production of a global economy “in which political squabbles could be regulated to prevent the disruption of trade.”⁴⁵ In other words, their shared goal was an American economic empire decoupled from the expense and political difficulty of actual territorial occupation.

In 1921, following his star turn in Paris, Bowman published a kind of manifesto of his emerging views on the possibilities for this new kind of American empire. Aptly titled The New World, the book expressed a vision for a post-exploration form of imperial domination, less reliant on actual territorial possession than on a dominant global role for what he described as a benevolent American capitalism. So, although Bowman was broadly critical of European imperialism for its exploitation of land and resources, he wrote of American actions in Latin America as entirely defensible in economic terms: “Only under the stimulus of necessity and through the influx of the agents and capital of temperate lands are the tropical products of weak countries made available. With the importation of aggressive men and capital into the tropics goes the importation first of economic then of political systems.”⁴⁶ In this vision of American economic expansionism, it remained to be worked out exactly what the relationship between “aggressive capital” and local populations would be. Noting the likelihood that such spaces would provide cheap labor for industrial exploitation, Bowman nevertheless acknowledged that such a relationship would be necessarily unstable, both because of ongoing competition among imperial powers for “trade privileges, raw materials, and strategic zones” and because the “natives” would eventually be making their own kinds of political and economic claims.

This inchoate concern with the place of labor and workers in the American imperial enterprise, left mostly undeveloped in The New World, reemerged a decade later as Bowman turned his attention to migration. Inching towards the issue of refugees, in 1925 Bowman wrote up a proposal for a research project on the possibilities of what he called “pioneer zones”—places that, with the proper scientific study of climatic, irrigation, and other geographic characteristics, might serve as a kind of valve for the release of population pressures elsewhere. In the early 1930s he became further preoccupied with the idea of pioneer settlement as a way to extend the reach of American economic power. His ideas took shape in two books, The Pioneer Fringe (1931) and The Limits of Land Settlement (1937), in which he developed the thesis that—as his biographer puts it—“pioneer belts represented practical alternative regions of development that could absorb widespread population increases and capital surpluses.”⁴⁷ Such regions would become especially crucial in an era of upheaval and revolution in an overpopulated Europe. Over the course of time, then, it might be possible to redistribute population in such a way as to bolster both global political stability and American private investment, while also protecting the metropole from the surge of urban migrants that both he and Roosevelt so feared. The links between these philosophies and those of Nazism and fascism were of course crystal clear. Indeed, Bowman himself expressed active support for Mussolini’s expansion overseas on the grounds that Italy was “overpopulated at home and on human grounds absolutely required a place in the underdeveloped territories of Africa.”⁴⁸ In their intellectual architecture, it seemed, such plans appealed to nearly every form of imperial government, from the racialized liberal imperialism of Britain and France to the hands-off, economically focused American version to the militant territorial and ethnic expansionism of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

But between the publications of The New World and The Limits of Land Settlement, Bowman had (as his latter title suggested) come to think that there was no longer enough “empty” land available for the kind of frontier settlement that had once allowed for successful mass migration to places like the United States and Canada. The remaining possibilities for settlement he labeled “marginal”—limited in agricultural terms, with undesirable climates, or simply too far away from global markets and global transport. Consequently, he argued, any resettlement of this sort now had necessarily to be tied to industrial development, which would remake and link all sorts of remote spaces into the global economic sphere increasingly dominated by the United States—shades of the unfolding parallel conversation about Palestine’s “absorptive capacity” depending on its rapid industrial development.⁴⁹ “The earth’s tolerance,” as Bowman put it in The Limits of Land Settlement, “has been vastly widened by modern science”; it was the only way forward in a world running out of empty land.⁵⁰ In this view, “rational” modern schemes for refugee colonization would now have to be realized within a broader frame of large-scale global industrial development—one that might, conveniently, also be made to serve the emerging goal of reinventing the United States as a novel form of economic empire.

Just months after Évian, a young German Jewish exile named Herschel Grynszpan whose family had recently been deported to Poland assassinated an official at the German Embassy in Paris, prompting the Nazi government’s most flagrant attack yet on Germany’s Jews. During Kristallnacht, as it became known, nearly a hundred Jews were murdered and more than thirty thousand were arrested and shipped to concentration camps, alongside the destruction of some 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses. The brutality prompted yet another panicked Jewish exodus from central Europe: one that the other European powers had already demonstrated would be met with an intense public expression of concern, matched by an equally intense private resolve to keep the refugees as far from their own borders as possible.

Roosevelt had known Bowman for some years through his own membership in the American Geographical Society and Bowman’s increasing public profile in the Council on Foreign Relations. Now, in the aftermath of the disastrous failure at Évian and facing a dramatic expansion of the European refugee crisis, he approached Bowman for advice. “Frankly,” he wrote, “what I am looking for is the possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to which Jewish colonies might be sent.”⁵¹ Bowman, inspired by any number of contemporary plans for “scientific” refugee colonization—for instance, the Jewish-led Refugee Economic Corporation, which had bought 50,000 acres in Costa Rica for this purpose and hoped to expand its purview to other places—began to think through the possibilities. In collaboration with two other geographers, Karl Pelzer and Leo Waibel, he produced ninety-three reports for the organization describing potential settlement sites across the globe, carefully excluding Europe and the United States.⁵²

Bowman was well aware that this kind of settlement planning had come under criticism for its echoes of simultaneous Nazi schemes to expel Jews to faraway places—most famously to Madagascar, a plan Heinrich Himmler had supported in 1940.⁵³ Indeed, his own proposal to the Refugee Economic Corporation to make use of Angola as a settlement space precisely paralleled a different Nazi plan to (forcibly) transport Germany’s Jews there, and met with firm rejection. Still, Bowman and Roosevelt remained committed to the idea Bowman had articulated to Roosevelt in 1938. “The refugee problem must be solved by settlement planning on a world scale,” he declared, requiring “special study of many areas, wise selection of groups to fit particular areas, and economic backing that will make each settlement project a sound business undertaking.”⁵⁴ As the extent and degree of Nazi crimes became more apparent—the first reports of the mass extermination of civilians appeared in the United States in the summer of 1942—the old concept of turning refugees into colonial laborers appeared to be getting a second wind.

5

Zionism Goes Global

Refugees and Roosevelt’s M Project

Évian had failed; Europe was in chaos; the refugee problem, once thought solved, had again become a crisis. In Roosevelt’s and Bowman’s minds, it was the moment for a new reboot of an old idea. Declaring with alacrity that “a request from the President is an order,” Bowman now began to work towards a broader, deeper, and more comprehensive investigation of refugee resettlement: an updated version, perhaps, of the “Inquiry” group that Woodrow Wilson had put together in advance of the Paris peace negotiations to recommend ideal borders for postwar Europe.¹ This time, though, study would focus not on the physical division of territory but on the subtler question of how to incorporate people (and resources) across the globe into a new American imperial economy.

Others would be involved as well. In 1942 the federal government tapped the prominent anthropologist Henry Field to head up a new office to investigate the possibilities for postwar resettlement on a mass scale. Field, formerly a physical anthropologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, was well known for his work on “the races of mankind,” the subject of a permanent exhibition he had organized in 1933. He had a special interest in anthropometrics, the science of people’s physical capacities, which had taken him a few years earlier to Iraq for research on the physical and ethnographic characteristics of “Marsh Arabs,” various Bedouin communities, and Kurds.² This background endeared him to Roosevelt, interested as he was in the old colonial idea of “scientifically” matching populations to their surroundings; and Field’s subsequent research proposal on how to make “the examination of world-wide settlement possibilities … profitable in connection with political decisions” met with visible presidential enthusiasm. Roosevelt ordered Field to connect with Bowman and with another anthropologist, a Czech scholar named Aleš Hrdlička, for strategizing. “A few weeks later,” Field recalled, “ ‘M’ [for Migration] Project was under way financed out of White House unvouchered funds … The President emphasized that ‘because we would be dealing with political dynamite,’ the utmost secrecy concerning the establishment and the work of ‘M’ Project must be observed.”³

The Wartime Context for the M Project

The M Project came out of precisely the same European imperial assumptions governing displacement that had produced the Évian conference and its Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Prior to the outbreak of war, the IGCR had proposed recognizably related plans for the extraction of at least some of Germany’s Jews and the funding of their resettlement somewhere outside Europe. The first, known as the Schacht Plan after its main architect (the Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht), assessed Jewish capital in Germany at about six billion marks and proposed putting one and a half billion of this into a trust fund. Once this amount was matched with an equal sum in foreign currencies from Jewish donors elsewhere, it would become available as a borrowing fund for Jews emigrating from Germany. Schacht imagined that such a plan would make possible the emigration of some 150,000 Jews over three years, with another 250,000 to follow once the first wave of emigrants was settled. This would leave 200,000 mostly elderly Jews in Germany, who were to be promised amnesty from persecution. George Rublee, the American international lawyer at the head of the IGCR, proposed a slightly modified version of the plan that would have established a fund consisting of a quarter of all German Jewish capital, to be spent on German-manufactured goods and equipment for use in various refugee colonization enterprises outside Europe.⁴ Decried as a plan to “barter human misery for increased exports,” as Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles would later put it, it nevertheless received strong support from Roosevelt and continued to serve as a basis for negotiation between the Nazi government and the IGCR for the next six months.⁵

To Rublee it appeared that this agreement, whatever its shortcomings, represented the best available approach to the German Jews’ increasingly dire situation. As one supporter put it, “It is easy to tell people inside a fortress to die for a principle rather than to accept compromise.”⁶ Plans for implementing the proposal went ahead in the months before the war. Both the IGCR and the US State Department issued formal approvals, and Roosevelt’s Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees began to set up the corporation that would be charged with the reception of the funds and their use to purchase relevant goods and supplies. But its formation moved very slowly in the face of American Jewish reluctance to create an entity with the appearance of representing some kind of “international Jewry,” as well as a growing Nazi determination to appropriate Jewish resources in toto rather than allowing them to leave the country.⁷ By the time the corporation actually came into being at the end of July 1939 Europe was on the brink of war, and the Rublee Plan crashed and burned six weeks later with the abandonment of cooperation between the Allies and the Reich.⁸

Similar assumptions, approaches, and problems marked American and British governmental visions for refugee assistance as the war approached. Even as the IGCR’s Myron Taylor expressed skepticism, the State Department pressed forward with its own refugee colonization plans—approaching not only the Portuguese colonial government in Angola but also Mussolini himself about possible refugee resettlement in Ethiopia. When Mussolini responded with the suggestion that the United States could open up its own vast territories to European refugees, the American ambassador retorted that “we Americans seem already to be doing our part in that we had already a large Jewish population.”⁹ By 1940, Herbert Hoover was predicting the rise of a refugee state in central Africa with as many as ten million European inhabitants. The United States also continued to press for refugee settlement in the Middle East, urging Britain not to limit immigration to Palestine in this crucial moment. In Britain, the government’s list of colonial spaces in which refugee resettlement might be accomplished reflected its past history of white settlement attempts, refugee and otherwise: British Guiana (where Assyrian colonization had been envisioned), Tanganyika (like Palestine a mandatory holding), and Rhodesia (one of the British Empire’s most notable venues for white settlement).

The failure of every one of these endeavors did not prevent Roosevelt from expressing his continued commitment to the principle of using refugees as colonists in “empty” corners of the world, especially as—per Mussolini’s suggestion—it appeared that the alternative was to open the borders of the United States itself to European Jews fleeing Nazism. The IGCR, too, continued to promote settlement options far from Europe—in Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Kenya (likewise an old site of interest for turn-of-the-century territorialists), the Philippines, British Guiana, and the Dominican Republic, with whose government the IGCR opened negotiations in 1938 for the settlement of anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 refugees. The Dominican administration, under the leadership of General Rafael Trujillo, found the prospect of refugee settlement appealing largely because it would increase numbers of the white population in the country; but when in 1939 the President’s Advisory Committee sent a commission to investigate the practicalities, they estimated the total number of possible settlers to be no more than 29,000. A subsidiary of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee called Agro-Joint, which had contributed to settling 50,000 Jews in Russia over the past decade, agreed to fund a small experimental version of the project. Trujillo provided the property from his own personal holdings: a parcel of land amounting to some 26,000 acres including some agricultural land and a harbor, where fewer than 500 people were settled over the next three years. The settlement at Sosúa eventually became little more than a cautionary tale about the practical difficulties and expense of arranging mass refugee colonization, even with a willing host government and substantial funding from the United States.

Like Roosevelt, Field was undeterred by these disappointments. His enthusiasm for the concept of global population engineering via refugee resettlement remained undimmed throughout the years of the M Project—even as Bowman himself, rapidly withdrawing into what he considered more politically advantageous work in the State Department, was showing signs of uncertainty about its practical prospects.¹⁰ Together with White House liaison John Carter, Field now constructed a team of geographers, anthropologists, and demographers to propose possible sites for refugee settlement and offer detailed information on climate, agriculture, costs, and the “racial” characteristics of both the refugees themselves and host countries’ extant populations. He hired several of the scholars who had participated in Bowman’s earlier project at Johns Hopkins, including the China expert (and later suspected communist sympathizer) Owen Lattimore; Karl Pelzer, Bowman’s original partner in the resettlement studies; and Robert Bowman, Isaiah Bowman’s son, alongside the archconservative Central America scholar Leo Waibel. He also added some new figures, including the Austrian geographer Robert Strausz-Hupé, whose 1942 book Geopolitics closely tracked Bowman’s vision for the postwar world. “[As] the era of overseas empires and free world trade closes,” Strausz-Hupé wrote, “… the national state is also a thing of the past, and the future belongs to the giant state. Many nations will be locked in a few vast compartments. But in each of these one people, controlling a strategic area, will be master of the others.”¹¹

Other historians, geographers, and engineers joined the project on a rolling basis. Across its three years of operation some thirty researchers were associated with the M Project, a number of whom were themselves displaced European refugees but who otherwise had notably little in common. Field also put together a staff of research assistants (all of whom had to be vetted by the FBI) to investigate the settlement possibilities of various regions across the globe. Some of these were assessments of earlier efforts at resettlement and analyses of their successes and failures. Others were investigations of what Field called “surplus populations” now coming out of Europe, with special reference to “their racial and religious composition and their nationals’ potential skill and adaptability as emigrants.”¹² Most, though, identified specific areas deemed possible venues for mass resettlement of refugees and—just as in earlier iterations of this idea under the British Empire and the League of Nations—devoted much of their commentary to detailed descriptions of criteria like climate, agricultural promise, irrigation, extant development, industrial potential, and (very much last on the list) host population openness to the idea.

Over the course of the war Field’s staff produced more than 600 such studies, “making sixty-six volumes, each three inches thick, as well as many special maps and a large atlas showing world-wide population pressures plus lack of food,” wrote Field, “the result pointing menacingly at World War III.”¹³ These documents were disseminated to Roosevelt himself, to Bowman, to the relevant cabinet secretaries, to the Library of Congress, and to “certain U.S. specialists on Refugee problems.”¹⁴ Field complained that the reach of the M Project was limited by its status as a classified operation: “Access was granted only to those who had adequate Government clearance … [so] the practical application of the results determined by these Studies was far less than planned.”¹⁵ And indeed few paid much attention to its grandiose but often wildly impractical ideas; as one historian puts it, it was long widely regarded as a “rapidly obsolescent database of often obscure research.”¹⁶ But in its architecture, its political philosophy, and its determination to view the question of refugeedom as one of the scientific and racially conscious distribution of labor in a neoimperial world, the M Project became a telling link between the interwar world’s explicitly colonial refugee policy and the more implicitly imperial Cold War version.

Influences: Settlement, Transfer, and Zionist Population Engineering

Like earlier League visions for large-scale refugee resettlement across the globe, the M Project’s vision of remaking the world through a racially conscious “scientific” distribution of populations owed a significant intellectual debt to Zionist thought, even as not a few of its participants expressed active opposition to the actual project of Jewish nation-building now playing out to disastrous effect in Palestine. Zionism’s vision of remaking geopolitical territory and claiming land for empire through racially conscious settlement practices and intensive industrial development represented a central model for this American-led vision of population engineering—just as it had both reflected and influenced the basic assumptions for the League’s proposals to resettle Anatolian Christians in Greece, Armenians in Syria, and Assyrians in Brazil.

In this particular moment, Zionists were revisiting the question of removing local Arabs to make space for European Jews in Palestine—an especially dramatic form of demographic remaking, but one whose appeal was by no means limited to extremists. Indeed, internationalist refugee politics had shaped the idea in the first instance: Zionist thinkers understood the 1923 Greek-Turkish exchange, cited as a model in the Peel Commission’s plan, as a crucial legitimization of subsequent forms of forcible expulsion.¹⁷ Chaim Weizmann, the doyen of mainstream Zionism, had discussed partition and transfer with the head of the Permanent Mandates Commission at the League, with Mussolini, and with the British Colonial Office.¹⁸ Labor Zionists like David Ben-Gurion, future first prime minister of Israel, spent much of the interwar period quietly exploring practices that could combine Jewish resettlement and Arab expulsion as modes of building a Jewish majority. Others were building more philosophical defenses of mass expulsion: the Labor Zionist Yitzhak Tabenkin, for instance, whose concept of “massive colonization (supported by immigration) on collectivist principles” tied the right of residency to agricultural industrialization. Palestinian Arabs, in this view, were not working the land to its fullest capacities and therefore had no legitimate claim to it —a view closely related to the League-era premise that refugees’ industrial development of land would legitimize their presence.¹⁹ When in 1937 the British Peel Commission proposed the forcible ejection of some 300,000 Palestinian Arabs from their lands as part of its vision for partitioning Palestine, Ben-Gurion was privately delighted.²⁰ “In my opinion this is the solution,” he told a closed meeting of party leaders. “Establishing two states in Eretz Israel, an Arab and a Jewish state … This is not a solution under all circumstances. But if the minimum land necessary for our growth in the near future will be set aside for the Jewish state, then this is the solution.”²¹ Expulsion combined with resettlement was, for much of the Labor Zionist leadership, not just the quickest possible route to the all-important Jewish majority but also a legitimate—even a technocratic—mode of modern state-building.

By the mid-1930s there was another, more militant voice in Zionist politics in Palestine interested in such ideas. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, originally from Ukraine, had founded a new “Revisionist” party in 1925, advocating for an armed expansion of Zionism into Jordan and the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. For most of his early career, despite his desire to encourage mass Arab movement out of Palestine, Jabotinsky opposed the principle of forcible population transfer for fear of what might happen to the remaining Jews in Europe if transfer became an internationally legitimized practice. “From a Jewish point of view,” he explained, “[transfer] is nothing short of a crime. While the Royal Commission babbles about the ‘instructive precedent’ [the Greek-Turkish exchange] … it toys with concepts that none of its members have any idea about.”²² Jabotinsky was, without a doubt, committed to colonizing Palestine in ways that would necessarily displace large numbers of Arabs. Like Ben-Gurion and other Labor Zionists, he repeatedly drew on the longstanding colonial conversation about Palestine’s “absorptive capacity,” which by including Transjordan he estimated to be 18 million people on the premise that the region could successfully be settled as densely as Belgium.²³ Still, he remained convinced that a Jewish majority Palestine would continue to include an Arab “minority,” to be protected by the same kinds of elaborate guarantees that the League of Nations had mooted for Jewish minorities in eastern Europe. He was committed, in other words, both to a maximalist territorial footprint for a future Jewish state and to some provision of minority rights for the Arabs left within it.

His schemes, though, were being overtaken by events. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Jabotinsky began to recalculate the numbers behind the Zionist state-building project in light of the Nazi occupations of eastern Europe. In 1936 he had proposed an “evacuation plan” envisioning 1.5 million Jews migrating to Palestine over ten years; by 1940 he was declaring that 2 million would require transfer in the first year after the war, and that they could only be supported if property and shelter were made available to them by the removal of local Arab communities.²⁴ Jabotinsky’s change of heart was finalized with the announcement of Hitler and Mussolini’s agreement on a population exchange involving the German-speaking population of South Tyrol. Henceforth, Jabotinsky decided, the minority rights regime of the interwar period—which had now to be acknowledged as a failure—would give way to a new era in which European nation-states would engage in a series of population exchanges to homogenize the continent and solidify their own national bases.²⁵ In many ways it was an acknowledgment—coming just before his death—that Labor Zionists had been right all along: forcible transfer was the wave of the future. By the late 1930s, then, it was not just the earlier refugee resettlements in Greece and Armenia and Syria that were providing fodder for conversations about the use of refugee populations to remake states and markets together. Labor and Revisionist Zionists alike were providing both political legitimizations and practical templates for this kind of thought as well. And even as some of the M Project’s participants expressed hesitancy about the specifics of European Jewish settlement in Palestine itself, they would continue to draw on Zionist concepts and models to demonstrate the necessity, viability, and legality of moving populations around the globe to create a stable world order that would serve the economic and political interests of the global superpowers.

Joseph Schechtman, Eugene Kulischer, and the Question of Palestine at the M Project

The M Project’s connections with the always-thorny issue of European Jewish settlement in Palestine were close and complicated. Bowman himself—rather like FDR—was both a committed anti-Semite and a mild anti-Zionist. Asked for advice on the question of Palestine, Bowman echoed British imperial language of the period about the limits of the region’s “absorptive capacity” and proposed that any decisions about its final disposition be postponed until after the war. His reservations about turning Palestine into a settlement space for European Jews were rooted, essentially, in the vociferous objection of not only local Palestinians but the entirety of the Arab world, and the likelihood that a forcibly created Jewish settler state would have to be militarily backed by both the United States and the British. In 1942, facing down Eleanor Roosevelt’s vigorous pro-Zionism, he outlined his views in no uncertain terms to Arthur Sulzberger, editor at the New York Times, declaring that such a commitment would require facing down 90 million Arabs in service of a program morally equivalent to Hitlerian Lebensraum. “This may seem like a harsh characterization,” Bowman wrote. “But is it not true? Is it not putting power behind a nationalist program in such a way as to take away land occupied by one people and give it to another.”²⁶ Such a position in no way indicated political support for the Palestinians themselves; Bowman’s racism extended to what he called “lousy Arabs” as well.²⁷ Rather, it reflected his commitment to resettlement only as a useful arm for extending the reach of an American neoimperial capitalism across the globe. In Palestine, the interests of America’s oil partners and the likelihood of Zionism placing an intensive financial and military burden on the United States meant that this particular plan for resettlement—influential though it was in the abstract—was a practical nonstarter.

Zionism itself, though, remained a crucial point of reference, comparison, and suggestion—and not just for Bowman, whose simultaneous commitments to the concept of a racially informed global population distribution and to a position of staunch anti-Zionism were perhaps less incompatible than they might appear. Two intellectually prominent thinkers, Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtman (both themselves European Jewish refugees, on paths to parallel careers as prominent historians and analysts of wartime European displacement), participated in the M Project during the war years. As the two contributors to the project whose work arguably enjoyed the longest intellectual and political lives, their approaches to the questions of displacement, resettlement, and transfer have been analyzed and compared by other commentators—most prominently historian Mark Mazower, who finds in their discussions of population movement and the question of Jewish displacement some origin points for the postwar international abandonment of minority “protection” schemes in favor of legal schemes focused around emerging concepts of individual human rights.²⁸ But a comparison of their contributions to the M Project suggests something else as well: the profound if complicated influence that the Zionist movement had on broader conversations around the wartime issues of refugee expulsion, refugee resettlement, and refugee labor in service of the state.

Joseph Schechtman, born in Odessa in 1891, became actively involved as a student with the Zionist movement as well as Ukrainian nationalism. He viewed the two causes as potentially connected and mutually reinforcing.²⁹ By 1917 Schechtman was serving as a delegate to the All-Russian Conference of Zionists in Petrograd and, the next year, to the All-Russian Jewish Congress in Moscow; he also held an elected position on the Jewish National Council of Ukraine and an appointment in the Jewish National Secretariat. Amid the violence of the Bolshevik wars, Schechtman left Russia for Berlin, where he found a new political home in the Federation of Russian-Ukrainian Zionists. Sympathetic to the Revisionist cause, Schechtman collaborated with Jabotinsky on a number of projects: first the Paris-based Revisionist journal Rassviet, a project of exile published in Russian and with little reference to the Parisian surroundings of its editors and contributors, which eventually served as a ground for the establishment of the World Union of Zionist Revisionists in 1925 in Paris. By 1929 he was the chief editor of a new Yiddish-language revisionist journal called Nayer Veg, and served later as Jabotinsky’s ambassador in Warsaw, where he lived for most of the 1930s. In the summer of 1939 he left Poland for France, and in 1941 he migrated to the United States. His first position there was as a fellow with the Institute of Jewish Affairs, where he proposed to study the practicalities of population transfer. It was a lifelong preoccupation that, combined with his longstanding commitment to Zionism, would inform the M Project and related initiatives throughout the project’s lifespan.

Schechtman operated at a slight remove from Field’s office; although a number of his studies ended up in M Project reports and files and he was frequently cited as a contributor, his primary government appointment was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA) in 1944–45, and most of his work was conducted under the auspices of the New York–based Research Bureau on Population Movements that he founded in 1943. In his own background as a refugee, his commitment to Revisionist Zionism and to the concept of Jewish resettlement, and his deep conviction that mass population transfer could create a more stable political order, he represented both an ideal participant and a somewhat uneasy presence in the M Project. Schechtman’s work for Field overlapped to a significant degree with his work for the OSS and for the Institute of Jewish Affairs; he produced a number of reports on various population transfers in Europe—ranging from the League of Nations–sponsored Greek-Turkish exchange to Himmler’s plans for German resettlement—which he repurposed at different moments for different agencies. In 1946 he published a collection of his studies under the title European Population Transfers, 1939–1945, in which he made the case that the minorities regime under the League had failed and that instead it would be necessary to eliminate the minorities problem altogether via population engineering. Quoting the Czech nationalist Edvard Beneš, Schechtman wrote that it would be impossible “to create states which were linguistically and nationally homogenous, except by extensive transfers of population.”³⁰ Schechtman proposed an intellectual genealogy of this idea of mass transfer, jointly crediting the French anthropologist George Montandon (whose memo on the topic served as a basis for conversation at the first Conference des Nationalités at Lausanne in 1916) and the Zionist territorialist Israel Zangwill with the initial concept of “race redistribution.” Noting the wide range of enthusiasts for the idea, from Fridtjof Nansen to Herbert Hoover to Winston Churchill, Schechtman acknowledged that it had its detractors as well—while making a frequently drawn medical analogy to argue for its necessity: “As one observer has said, ‘to cut out the cancer from a sick body is not cruel, it is necessary.’ Only false sentimentality or blindness to the best interests of the patient would permit pity to outweigh sound medical judgment.”³¹

Following the M Project’s commitments, though, Schechtman warned that careful economic and logistical planning would be necessary to make any transfer a success. Having carefully outlined German population transfers both before and after 1939, he noted the “extremely careful organization” that marked some of the Nazi government’s later “evacuations” and suggested the virtues of a specially trained force to enact the transfer: “The first [less successful, in Schechtman’s view] evacuations from Estonia and Latvia were entrusted to local German bodies, but for almost all later major transfers specially trained resettlement squads were sent by the Reich to conduct operations … This experience indicates that a reasonable and elastic combination of a small but highly trained evacuation personnel with certain qualified elements among the prospective transferees possesses considerable advantages.”³² Other lessons, too, could be drawn from Nazi successes: the requirement of speed and of the consideration of hygienic requirements and medical care, the desirability of exchanging populations over merely expelling minorities, and—above all—the absolute necessity of making the transfers mandatory. “If population transfer is deemed unavoidable,” Schechtman wrote, “there must be no trace of the collective minority existence left, no stuff for the resurgence of the minority problem. There is no third solution.”³³ This exterminatory approach not only informed his understanding of European ethnopolitics but also extended to the Middle East, where he envisioned a series of mandatory exchanges creating an exclusionary Jewish state in Palestine and a surrounding set of Arab states from which all Jewish elements had been totally removed.³⁴

Along with his Revisionist Zionist colleagues Benjamin Akzin and Eliahu Ben-Horin, Schechtman now began to produce what would eventually be a substantial body of work advocating for mass population transfer—in and out of Palestine, to be sure, but also elsewhere, with the goal of making use of this most self-consciously modern of all strategies to produce a functional, stable, and economically productive postwar order. Tellingly, he saw the Nazi example as an important model and experiment. “In one form or another,” he wrote in 1942, “transfers of population will be an organic part of the rebuilding scheme of the postwar world … In this regard the numerous and varied transfers of German minorities inaugurated by Hitler’s Reichstag speech of October 6, 1939, may be considered a sort of laboratory experiment, enabling us to study and appraise the feasibility and expediency of various transfer methods and procedures, as well as the solidity of the expectations and hopes connected with the transfer of population as a solution to the problem of ethnic minorities.”³⁵ Schechtman, in other words, was ever more committed to the radical principle of remaking the world into a series of ethnically homogenous nation-states, to be accomplished through forcible transfer organized from above—a solution drawn from some combination of liberal imperial, Zionist, and Nazi thought. Much as Bowman shared assumptions about the ordering of populations with Nazi geographers even as he publicly decried their politics, Schechtman too demonstrated the short distance between fascist and liberal visions for a globally enforced geography of ethnically demarcated borders—and the close relationship Zionism had with both. As a much later review of Schechtman’s work would note, “One gets a sense that only authors of the time could write as objectively and calmly as Schechtman did of the Third Reich’s population transfer policies, dealing with each case on its own merits.”³⁶

His was a position that fit in certain respects with the M Project’s desire to remake the globe along “scientific” lines using refugees, but did not entirely constitute or represent it. The other major intellectual to appear in the annals of the M Project, the historian and demographer Eugene Kulischer, came to a radically different set of conclusions about the viability and legitimacy of enforced population transfer despite a very similar background and intellectual training. Kulischer too was originally Ukrainian, born in Kiev to a high-achieving academic family. He trained in law in St. Petersburg, but shortly thereafter—having acquired a wife from one of the leading Ukrainian republican families—he returned to Ukraine, where he briefly headed up the Committee Against Anti-Jewish Pogroms. In 1920 he left again, this time as an exile, and settled in Berlin for more than a decade. There he continued to collaborate with his brother Aleksandre, now living in France. Aleksandre Kulischer—also a lawyer by training—wrote extensively about the Russian revolution and the subsequent civil wars that had displaced him and his family; but he too became deeply involved in Revisionist Zionism, writing in Jabotinsky’s journal Rassviet that the Zionist project in Palestine should be reconceived as a British dominion. In 1936 Eugene joined his brother, and the two of them continued to work together—most notably on an unfinished manuscript detailing European population movements, some of which would eventually appear as material in Eugene Kulischer’s magnum opus Europe on the Move. Aleksandre Kulischer did not survive the war; the Vichy Milice captured him as he was trying to flee France, and he died in a concentration camp in 1943. Eugene managed to escape, entering the United States in 1941 and almost immediately landing work with the ILO and then the OSS.

Kulischer’s interest in the historical phenomenon of migration—including but not limited to the forced variety—led him to a more skeptical view of the viability, and the legitimacy, of transfer. He saw the phenomenon of mass deportation as part of a longer and broader history of population movement, fundamentally stemming less from national, ethnic, or religious tensions than from the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. “In the course of the last decade,” he wrote,

the population of eastern Europe underwent a radical change, through causes which long ago had become obsolete: mass extermination and mass expulsion. Since Tamarlane, history had not witnessed such a mass slaughter of unarmed people as was perpetrated by the German invaders. The liberation of eastern Europe was followed by the expulsion of local German populations which had settled there in successive waves since the eleventh century. This movement, in its turn, engendered shifts of the non-German populations.

However, from the comprehensive view of history, the population changes which resulted from these cataclysms were essentially an acceleration of a long-range demographic process already existing … The direction of migrations is determined by relative economic, not physical, density.³⁷

Like Schechtman, then, Kulischer considered externally organized mass resettlement—particularly of already-displaced refugees—as a crucial tool for the creation of a viable state order: “Providing for migratory outlets is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the preservation of peace.”³⁸ But he was far more equivocal about the prospects for transfer and ethnic homogeneity as a principle of the new global order, and horrified at the particular form it had taken under the Reich. “The assumption is,” he wrote of transfer plans, “that political and ethnic borders should coincide. Where this cannot be achieved in view of the intermingled habitat of people of various ethnic nationalities, plans are advanced to shift hundreds of thousands of persons from one country or another … This extensive transfer of population is the last emanation of the nineteenth century idea of ‘ethnic nationality’ as a basis, not only of cultural life, but also of political organization.”³⁹ In other words, the idea of transfer was not a new, modern scheme; it was an atavistic holdover from the previous century, whose application had proven more or less impossible and whose political justification was weak. The phenomenon of migration—central to the twentieth-century world—would inevitably erase the homogeneity achieved through transfer. “No artificial ethnic segregation can be durable,” he declared, in direct opposition to Schechtman. “Migration will subvert the dearly bought ethnic uniformity.”⁴⁰

In alignment with Bowman over Schechtman, Kulischer’s analyses were ever conscious of the colonial histories of migration and resettlement and presented the issue of resettlement as above all one of capital and labor. The development of capitalist industry in non-Western spheres had, he thought, fundamentally changed the prospects for mass migration: “Exports lagged, European industry was no longer capable of finding new outlets, and consequently the purchasing power in the home country diminished rapidly.”⁴¹ The possibility of relieving the pressures of “surplus” populations in Europe through migration to the colonies, then, had unfortunately diminished; but there were still undeveloped parts of the world that could serve as venues for mass resettlement, to the benefit of all involved. Kulischer outlined his ideas in language that tracked the goals of the M Project perfectly:

Nowadays people with low living standards can no longer count on creative colonization for economic progress as their more fortunate Western neighbors have done since the eighteenth century. A modern expanding economy which would assure on a world scale a rising standard of living means substantially a fuller utilization of the already occupied areas. In other words, it requires production of goods in the most appropriate places and in a most rational way and their exchange for other goods which can be obtained elsewhere more advantageously. It means the investment of capital in areas where natural resources are waiting for development, abolition of exclusive tariffs, and migration of labor to places where it can be more productively employed …

Viewed from this angle, migration is definitely a requisite for expanding world economy [sic], since it directs labor to sources of raw materials and power and to fertile soils in underdeveloped areas. However, even more important is the role of migration for overpopulated countries, where it promotes the demographic adjustment of a population to its means of subsistence.⁴²

From this angle, then, the ethnic homogeneity that could be achieved through mass transfer—Schechtman’s dearest ambition —was less important than the directed-from-above use of migration to balance the global economy from both a capital and a labor perspective: precisely the M Project’s vision for American economic hegemony.

Their very real differences of opinion aside, both Schechtman and Kulischer viewed Zionism as a success story and a viable model for resettlement of both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees outside Europe. Indeed, Kulischer’s assessment of Zionist immigration’s impact in Palestine itself was little more than a rehashing of Labor Zionist propaganda, including its complaints about Arab immigration into Palestine. “Immigration into Palestine has been a great success, as a result of the combined agricultural and industrial colonization,” he wrote. “Nearly half a million Jews have found homes and opportunities in the Holy Land … In times of the greatest need for new homes, the immigration of Jews has been grudgingly limited by the British administration and was strictly controlled at the ports of entry; that of the Arabs was neither supervised nor controlled.”⁴³ Critiquing the immigration limitations put into place following the revolt of 1936–1939—a decision that indicated a belated and reluctant British acknowledgement of the mass dispossession and impoverishment of Palestinian Arab peasants resulting from British-sponsored Jewish settlement and land acquisition—Kulischer added, “A continuation of the White Paper policy of 1939 would be a serious blow to postwar Jewish migration. In view of the happy experiences of organized Jewish settlement in Palestine, there should be no fear concerning the ability of the Jews to continue successful planned immigration, if given the opportunity by the makers of the postwar world.”⁴⁴

Virtually all the M Project’s information on Palestine came from Zionist sources—unsurprisingly, given its dependence on the scholarly talent coming from institutions like the Institute for Jewish Affairs—and its approach to Jewish settlement there exhibited an almost total lack of acknowledgment of the presence of an indigenous Arab community comprising a substantial majority of the population. It rested instead, almost equally, on ancient histories of Judaism in Palestine and on contemporary narratives of Zionist industrial development. Most of the M Project’s reports on Palestine relied on information published by the Palcor News Agency in London—the news branch of the Jewish Agency—and by the Zionist Organization of America. A report by Field on settling the Negev made no mention of the Bedouin populations who had long inhabited the region, focusing instead on a vaguely defined ancient history of settlement: “Since there were numerous villages in historical times within our selected area, it should be possible with modern mechanical equipment to provide catchment basins and to control the seasonal supply of rainwater for irrigation.”⁴⁵ Walter Lowdermilk, whose pro-Zionist writings likewise drew on the long tradition of claiming expanded “absorptive capacity” on the basis of claims of large populations in ancient Palestine, wrote a memo for the M Project in which he declared that “archaeological and historical evidence indicates the Palestine in Graeco-Roman times supported a population of 3,000,000–4,000,000, or more than twofold the present total … full utilization of the Jordan Valley depression will in time make possible the absorption of at least four million Jewish refugees from Europe”—a vision that suggested the expansion of the Zionist project into neighboring Transjordan.⁴⁶ In a plan he developed with Chaim Weizmann’s help, Lowdermilk also suggested a large-scale irrigation and hydroelectric development project in the Jordan Valley to be undertaken by private American engineering firms operating as a “Jordan Valley Authority”—comparable in scope, he declared, to the Grand Coulee or Boulder Dam developments, with the purpose of being able to “double or treble the present total population.”⁴⁷ Such visions constituted a constant refrain in the annals of the project, which featured endless articles and reports declaring that “the development of the Jewish national home in Palestine, which is one of the outstanding achievements of our times, will in all probability be continued on a still larger scale after this war, thus greatly contributing to the task of Jewish rehabilitations.”⁴⁸

Zionism’s successes in the realm of industrial development and refugee productivity also featured heavily in the M Project’s vision of Palestinian settlement. One report detailed a “Freedom Village” for refugees and its vision for intertwined economic and political development:

The purpose of this village was divided into an asylum for Refugees and the development of an industry … The Refugees should be given an opportunity almost immediately to work and earn; they should remain independent as regards their wishes to remain or leave; they should assume the responsibility eventually of conducting the affairs both of the industry and the Village; they should each pay for their maintenance, shelter, food, clothes, amusements once they begin to earn; and they should receive all the other normal benefits of the country through the national agencies, for improvement physically and culturally. Finally, the industries will succeed through good management and particularly if they are started soon so that you have the “jump” on the market for those products which have been imported. The machinery can easily be acquired and shipped and installed at a very small cost.⁴⁹

As had happened so frequently in earlier refugee thought, humanitarian assistance, the provision of refugee employment, and the development of capitalist markets appeared as one and the same. Such Zionist development schemes therefore constituted valuable experiments: examples of refugee resettlement practices that had successfully accomplished removal from Europe, industrial modernization of a colonial territory, and the remaking of the displaced as productive laborers in a capitalist economy all at once.

Both Kulischer and Schechtman, then—different as their conclusions were on the questions of transfer and nationhood—understood Zionism as a successful model of a refugee policy that made use of the displaced for the purposes of developing an industrial global economy, a conception that served to shape the M Project’s recommendations more generally. Even Bowman himself acknowledged the importance of Zionism, which he wrote had successfully made use of Palestine “as a laboratory experiment” for refugee policy.⁵⁰ Above all, Zionism alone seemed to have made some progress towards solving the ever-vexing conundrum of financing mass resettlement by making efficient use of British-occupied imperial territory. As another Zionist contribution to the M Project noted, “The Colonization Department of the Jewish Agency estimates that to settle one family on the land an investment of £P [Palestine pounds] 500–600 is required excluding the cost of land. When the latter is included, this would be about £P 900. For comparative purposes, it may be noted that the cost of settling a family in farming in Australia is figured at about £P 2000.” Apart from its other contributions to internationalist thought about refugees, then, Zionism had demonstrated that using colonized territory for this kind of developmentalist resettlement could under the right circumstances be cheap, efficient, and effective. And if Palestine ran out of “absorptive capacity,” the M Project showrunners thought, the model deployed there could potentially be made to work elsewhere.

Beyond Palestine: The M Project’s Middle East and Latin America

The Middle East played a special role in the M Project’s vision for a scientifically remade world: because of the intellectual influences of these various forms of Zionist thought in its philosophies and Palestine’s importance as a case study for mass resettlement and economic development, but also because Roosevelt himself saw the Middle East—beyond Palestine—as the key part of the world for these imaginaries. The project’s contributors’ extremely basic knowledge of the region, though, rendered their actual proposals for the Middle East largely unrealizable. In the event, the M Project eventually shifted its proposals for mass refugee resettlement to a space where American knowledge and power were both more thoroughly developed: Latin America.

The Middle East held a special place in Roosevelt’s febrile imagination, as a ground for experimentation that both recalled the region’s ancient past and now envisioned remaking it as a laboratory for the most modern forms of agricultural industrialization and mass settlement. (“Somewhere in Roosevelt’s quicksilver mind,” historian Mark Mazower writes, “the fate of the Jews, peace in Europe, and the development of the Middle East were interconnected.”)⁵¹ Henry Field himself recorded this romantic imagination in his account of the anthropologist’s first encounter with Roosevelt’s Middle Eastern plans:

One spring morning in 1940 … a visitor, who proved to be a Presidential representative, requested my estimate of the maximum population of Iraq “provided water control of the Tigris and Euphrates is established with irrigation projects and barrages, agricultural development, and improved public health measures.” … The question in the President’s mind was that if the ancient irrigation canals, together with modern flood and irrigation controls, were put into effect as well as agricultural and public health improvements, how many additional millions could this antique land support?

He added, “My informant also told me that the President had initiated studies on the future possibilities of utilizing the Karun River in Persia, the Khabur in Syria, the Jordan in Palestine, and Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, and other rivers in Southwestern Asia.”⁵² Such language and ideas corresponded strongly with the Zionist vision, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, of recovering an ancient fertility with the purpose of supporting an ever-larger modern settler population. It was shortly after this encounter that Field was whisked from his position to serve in a new capacity. Assigned the grandiose title “Anthropologist to the President,” he was given orders to “familiarize myself with every source of data and the key personnel on Southwestern Asia … [I] thus acquired a fair working knowledge of sources and a card index of specialists on the Middle East,” including its ancient history.⁵³

These specialists, though, were able to offer only the most abstract accounts of what sorts of resettlement projects might be possible in the Middle East. They provided statistical information on population growth and density across the Gulf, Iran, and the eastern Mediterranean. A number of their studies focused on Egypt (a space where thousands of European refugees had, in fact, been temporarily settled in wartime refugee camps)⁵⁴—not as a space for settlement, but as a place where uncontrolled population growth meant that birth control would have to be deployed alongside economic development.⁵⁵ One report extended this analysis to the rest of the Middle East as well: “Egypt is in a demographic jam. With limited room for expansion and no early prospect for substantial decline of fertility, she faces mounting population pressure. Yet, in some respects, her problems are simply accentuations of those confronted by the vast Mohammedan world. Obviously, the implications of these problems are not confined to Egypt nor even to the Moslems. The importance of such a situation of mounting population pressure extends beyond the boundaries of any single country or religious group, for such pressure forms a constant threat to world peace.”⁵⁶

For M Project thinkers, an undifferentiated and struggling Middle East was little more than an abstract case study in how industrial modernity would serve as a solution to any number of social problems. “The 250,000,000 inhabitants of the Moslem world,” one report began, “are essentially agricultural people, relatively untouched by modern technological innovations, living for the most part in poverty, ill-health and ignorance of the written word … Increasing urbanization and industrialization would probably set in motion or accelerate those forces that have in the West resulted in lower levels of fertility and mortality. Such modernization is necessary if the Mohammedan world is to break the bonds of poverty, illness and political impotence.”⁵⁷ At moments the reports noted specific resources that represented investment opportunities: iron and copper in Jordan, for instance, in a report that accounted the country as “probably one of the most backward territories in the Ottoman Empire at the time it came under British Administration.”⁵⁸ But in general, the M Project’s focus on the Middle East remained inchoate, abstract, and theoretical, limited by its dearth of practical knowledge and its reluctance to engage with the particulars surrounding Palestine. Instead, the imperial role passed from a British Empire whose control over the Middle East made the region an obvious venue for the redistribution of unwanted populations to an American one whose colonial backyard was elsewhere. In these interwar schemes, Latin America emerged as a new Middle East: a place where large numbers of unwanted refugees could be moved to promote a project of industrial capitalism undertaken for the benefit of the United States and its corporate representatives.

The M Project staff, often equivocal about the practical application of the Zionist model in Palestine, wholeheartedly embraced its foundational assumptions for Latin America. Field’s writers and researchers filed dozens of reports on Argentina, Brazil (“Southern Brazil as a Theater of Postwar Civilization”), Venezuela, Chile (“a tremendous amount of reliable land for simple colonization … climatic range and variety of soils offer openings for diversified European immigration”), Mexico (“possibilities for settlement by European small farmers are proven by the Mennonite colonies in the municipio of Canatalan”), Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, the Virgin Islands, British Guiana, Costa Rica, Barbados, and Panama.⁵⁹ Field’s team was especially enthused about places in which foreign corporations had considerable economic influence and a need for cheap manpower. “Paraguay is a potential paradise warped by poverty,” one analysis ran. “Considerable territory has been acquired by foreign interests and in some parts of the country large foreign-owned holdings dominate the economic scene … When questions of population movements arise, Paraguay and its great potentialities will command immediate attention.”⁶⁰ The conditions for “great potentialities” were laid out repeatedly: a sufficiently cool climate, “suitable for White settlement if modern sanitary methods are applied” (in a report on Honduras); arable land and good soil; and adequate rainfall or irrigation. Over and over, the M Project staff returned to the accounting of climate, soil, and water, with the purpose of settling farmers to develop and industrialize agriculture in their new spaces. It was an unapologetically racialized vision in which white settlers would set into motion the incorporation of previously marginal areas into a global industrial economy.⁶¹ “In contrast to the native farmer,” the same report on Honduras explained, “the White farmer needs a cash crop in order to raise his standard of living above that of the native”—to the benefit of both the settlers themselves and the commercial investors in the territory.⁶² It was the nineteenth-century Zionist territorialist vision for resettling Europe’s Jews—stripped of its nationalist commitments, transplanted to American colonial territory, and set in an explicitly capitalist key.

Like Palestine—and, for that matter, the territorialist destinations of Argentina and Uganda—Latin America was of course already occupied, with populations and governments who might object to its use as a ground for the mass settlement of Europe’s so-called surplus populations. There was greater consciousness of this possible host country resistance in the M Project files than of similar local resistance to Zionist settlement in Palestine. “Latin America,” one report cautioned, “came to be considered more and more as a haven for refugees and a dumping place for surplus population, as one of the world’s open spaces … However, a realistic consideration had to take into account the desires and interests of the countries of Latin America themselves. The fact that there are human beings anxious to migrate and that there is room available in Latin America does not lead to a direct synchronization.”⁶³ Some of the staff writers blamed this reluctance on Nazi propaganda and a consequent rise in Latin American anti-Semitism (while, of course, utterly failing to acknowledge the profound anti-Semitism that was keeping Jews out of the United States and western Europe).⁶⁴ More to the point, they also understood that the global economic interests driving their own proposals were fueling similar concerns among Latin American governments, already evident at Évian: “The restrictive and controlling trends in Latin American immigration policy may be explained and justified as a part of that general tendency toward controlled economy.”⁶⁵ And eventually, the M Project’s enthusiasm about Latin American resettlement would be scuppered by precisely this regional reluctance to participate combined with an American acknowledgement of its need for Latin American buy-in to the postwar project of American global hegemony. As Bowman put it delicately to the State Department in 1945, “We may need the full support of Latin-American countries in the settlement of postwar problems … [It might be] undesirable to water down their enthusiasm by insisting that they admit into their countries people that they may not desire to have.”⁶⁶

Two of the fundamental premises of the M Project survived as visible pieces of postwar internationalism. The first was the eventual establishment of the International Refugee Organization, which (as we shall see) made the concept of matching displaced people with far-flung jobs into a basic premise of its postwar approach. The new agency’s philosophical and practical determination to excise the refugee population from Europe and position them in gainful employment elsewhere clearly echoed the M Project’s unrealized call for an “International Settlement Authority” and seemed in some ways to represent a satisfactory legacy of the shuttered project, helping to create (as one former staff member put it) “the lasting peace envisaged by FDR.”⁶⁷ The second form in which the M Project’s territorialist visions survived was a still more durable one: Allied (and especially American) support for the new Jewish state of Israel as a “solution” to the refugee crisis.⁶⁸ The idea and practice of Jewish resettlement in Palestine had been an intellectual linchpin—or, at least, an important point of reference —for the League of Nations’ interwar refugee schemes as well as the wartime M Project’s territorialist fantasies. After 1948, it would represent a central and permanent feature of the postwar political order.

As such, the new state of Israel was now charged with solving one of the fundamental problems with tying refugee resettlement to labor: the question of what to do with displaced people who could not work. It was, undoubtedly, a practical recognition of postwar geopolitical realities—likely alongside a sense of relief at abandoning of one of Roosevelt’s more fanciful schemes—that led Truman to close down the M Project following his predecessor’s death in 1945. But the closure was also a response to the dawning postwar realization that many of the survivors left in the camps after the war would be unfit as laborers of any kind, anywhere; for them, work-related settlement schemes were meaningless as a “solution.” And indeed, it proved that even Zionists eager to grow their numbers for a sovereign Jewish state and generally willing to accept any Jew for future citizenship in the new Israel viewed these remaining internees as more or less useless. In the battle for Latrun during the 1948 war, the Israel Defense Forces deployed just-arrived Holocaust survivors in battle with as little as three days’ military training, dooming many of them to instant death. In postwar reckonings, critics would charge over and over again that even Ben-Gurion—even Israel—had seen these remaining Jewish refugees as little more than “cannon fodder.”⁶⁹ The national solution to mass displacement, it was transpiring, could be every bit as inhumane as the imperial one, at least for those who could not contribute as workers.

6

Workers of Another World

Soviet Resettlement Policy

As M Project personnel homed in on the Middle East and Latin America as neocolonial spaces where international authority could potentially resettle refugees with impunity, they also looked with intense curiosity to another sphere in which their powers to enact population redistribution were virtually nonexistent. “The USSR needs men,” declared one report. “Only by immigration can war losses be replaced and plans for future development be carried out … Technical competence and spiritual adaptability will be the best passports to admission.”¹ In the European and American circles concerned with wartime refugee policy, the Soviet Union came up again and again as a space where a different kind of mass labor resettlement was taking place—one from which the Western bloc might be able to draw some lessons. Indeed, the M Project staff’s interest in Soviet models of mass resettlement as an answer to labor needs—and their potential applicability to the global expansion of American imperial interests—stands as a striking instance of continuity across the impending Soviet-American Cold War divide.

In some ways this interest was unsurprising. Resettlement policy constituted a central piece of the Soviet toolkit for political control over its borderlands and the transformation of a largely rural empire into a massive industrialized power in the space of a few short decades—a project that the Western powers grudgingly admired in other contexts as well. The development of large-scale resettlement policies designed for the dual purposes of labor distribution and political control fascinated interwar observers in the League of Nations, British and French imperial officialdom, and the United States alike; and the Soviet project of resettling Jews in a kind of Bolshevik version of Palestine attracted not just curiosity but active support in certain European and American Jewish activist circles. Further, refugee policy constituted an area in which the Western powers engaged directly, if not always civilly, with Bolshevik and then Soviet officials. In the early days after the First World War, the League and its showrunners negotiated directly with the Bolshevik regime over the fate of “White Russian” and Armenian refugees, even before formal recognition of the state. Later, at the end of the Second World War, the United Nations Relief and Reconstruction Administration (funded mostly by American money) worked in Soviet territory to provide aid and help with the rebuilding effort. And, of course, at the end of the Second World War the fledgling United Nations actively assisted the Stalinist expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans as the price of a newly stabilized world, viewing the Soviet deportations as an aspect of their own postwar plans to move Europe’s refugees around the globe.

In other words, the interwar Soviet state constructed an active policy of resettlement that for all its peculiarities and specificities often reflected and even paralleled labor and resettlement schemes underway in the West. Far from existing in some separate political universe, it was very much part of the ongoing conversation about displacement, resettlement, and requirements of labor in the international sphere—at the League of Nations, and later at the UN. In some respects, it would appear, the imperatives of imperial capitalism bore at least a passing resemblance to the imperatives of industrializing communism; and during the interwar years, as historian Stephen Kotkin has written, “The USSR looked to many contemporaries to be well positioned on what they viewed as the historical curve.”²

The League-Soviet Refugee Nexus: White Russians as a Problem of Nationality and Labor

Refugees were one of the first sites of encounter between the emerging League of Nations and the equally nascent Soviet state. Indeed, Nansen’s first title bore specific reference to Russia: High Commissioner for Russian Refugees. His appointment resulted partly from his success negotiating the repatriation of central European prisoners of war, and partly from his reputation as a Western diplomat capable of extracting promises from a generally uncooperative Bolshevik government. When he took over as high commissioner there were some 800,000 Russian refugees scattered throughout still-occupied Istanbul and Europe whom the Allies, via the League, wanted to see “liquidated”—the first assigned task of this new humanitarian endeavor.

In the main the refugees were so-called White Russians—sympathizers (not always actually Russian) with the anti-Bolshevik movement, and sometimes former or active participants in its “White Army.” The best solution to the problem they presented, the British and French showrunners at the League thought, would be to encourage their return to Russia, an approach that many of the refugees themselves vociferously opposed.³ Failing that, they needed to be placed somewhere they would not constitute a threat to the delicate labor market in western Europe. The first negotiation between the Bolshevik regime and the League took place in 1921, over the return of prisoners of war. It was a sensitive moment in Soviet-Allied relations; the new regime remained unrecognized, and the western European powers were still arming White Russian troops against the Bolsheviks. Even as the League of Nations banned Russian participation, Nansen took the decision to maintain relations and communications with Bolshevik representatives—“bypassing the high politics of ideological polarity,” as one historian has it, in favor of an ongoing conversation about the fate of the millions of displaced people inside and outside the emerging Bolshevik state.⁴ In the summer of 1922 Nansen moved beyond the POW question to conclude a formal agreement for the return of 2,000 Russian refugees from Bulgaria each month under a promise of amnesty, even for those who had served as officers in the White Army. It was the first instance of a long-term trend: throughout the interwar period, refugee policy would serve as one of the few areas of practical encounter and negotiation between an otherwise disconnected and often mutually hostile Soviet Union and western Europe.

The League and the Allies were particularly interested in Russian refugee children, of whom there were many thousands, both as venues for public relations and for the labor they represented. Russian refugee organizations like Zengor and the Russian Red Cross likewise assigned disproportionate importance to children as representatives of the nation and eventual returnees to a postrevolutionary state. In 1921 Nansen’s office arranged for Istanbul’s relief organizations to evacuate the children in their care to Bulgaria, which (despite its defeated enemy status) had recently enthusiastically joined the League of Nations in hopes of reducing its postwar debts. This separate removal of refugee children was designed to encourage their parents to accept repatriation; there was a Soviet repatriation office in Sofia, and Nansen hoped that refugees would “agree to return to the work of the reconstruction of their country … if they knew that their children were being safely educated and cared for in a locality not too far distant from their fatherland.”⁵ To this end, his office adopted a carrots-and-sticks approach: refugee parents who refused to relinquish their children would no longer be able to access League assistance. In the event, the surrendered children themselves were herded into a British education system designed to mold them into an “economic army” for the reconstruction and eventual reintegration of Russia into the postwar European system.

This tendency to view refugee children as potential laborers had other, even more dramatic manifestations. In 1922 a French charity called Placement Familial contacted Nansen’s office with an offer to take some 900 male refugee children off the office’s hands and place them with farming families in France. The organization, whose head had previously been imprisoned for violating child labor laws, made a practice of removing impoverished or abandoned children from Paris and placing them in rural areas with farm families needing labor. Nevertheless, Nansen viewed this as a plausible opportunity to be rid of nearly a thousand children and eventually render them self-sufficient—and it was far from the only such scheme to remake Russian refugee children as workers. Historian Elizabeth White has unearthed a number of such plans:

Several businessmen had arrived [in Istanbul] in search of child labour or to “save the children”—the two enterprises were still mixed in inter-war Europe. Léonard Rosenthal, a wealthy jewel merchant known in France as the Pearl King, originally from the Caucasus of a Russian-Jewish background, had recruited fifty Russian adolescent males. A Bulgarian rug manufacturer also took away a large group of boys to work for him. The Russian press carried stories of the misery and exploitation that was apparently their fate, but the HCR showed no curiosity about these developments.⁶

In fact, the high commissioner apparently sent a number of Russian children from a British school for refugees in Constantinople to France without their parents’ consent or knowledge, making no apologies when parents protested or children ran away.

Such approaches to child refugees and the labor they could provide fit within already-extant narratives across both Western and Soviet spheres about the use of impoverished populations in service of the nation’s development. “The activities of an organization like Placement Familial,” White writes, “were the result of an established French [and indeed broader European] discourse and practice that foundling children should be used by and for the nation either for work, colonisation or the military.”⁷ It was an approach that fed into an emerging consensus across the Western-Soviet divide that refugees could—indeed should—be deployed as laborers for the nation, and protests against such treatment constituted unreasonable rejections of the requirements of modernity, development, and financial reality. Soviet objections to these removal schemes were strong, but they were based primarily in the parallel assumption that refugee children should serve as laborers not for the French nation but for the Russian. The Bolsheviks and the League, especially in the person of Nansen, agreed that refugee repatriation was not just stabilizing but (literally) constructive.

In his dealings with Bolshevik authorities on the question of refugee return—including the question of Armenian return discussed earlier—Nansen agreed to allow the regime to vet all incoming repatriates, a concession intended to reassure the state that the newcomers would not represent a security threat. But the state did, in fact, need labor for its schemes of mass industrialization in a short time frame—plans that Nansen and the League more generally endorsed. The League representative charged with supervising the practicalities of refugee return reminded repatriates of their duties to the state: “I asked them to show their gratitude for the great work done re: their repatriation by Dr. Nansen and the Soviet authorities by doing their utmost for the benefit of their country.”⁸ The refugees’ role was, quite literally, to rebuild Russia; and they did. As we have already seen, the aftermath of the war saw some 300,000 Armenian refugees resettled in Soviet Armenia; Karelia received 20,000 former Russian subjects from Finland in the 1920s; and tens of thousands of Ukrainians from the eastern reaches of Poland became residents of the new Ukrainian SSR.

This moment of Soviet openness to refugee resettlement, though, was short-lived. The mid-1920s saw the beginnings of a closure of Soviet borders as Stalin came to power and began to enact his vision for an inward-looking, economically self-reliant Soviet state, with few ties and little dependence on outside actors for goods, markets, or investment. Rising worries about the impact of refugees and immigrants on already-difficult domestic labor markets may have also played a role in this inward turn. The Council of Labor and Defense—which had, just a few years earlier, advocated mass recruitment of Armenian and other immigrants to bolster the Soviet labor force—now, in 1924, told the government that “because of unemployment in the USSR, the return of Russian emigrants should be limited to the smallest possible scale … it was necessary to take all measures to ensure that their return faced the maximum number of obstacles.”⁹ The new Stalinist state would henceforth turn towards migrants and expellees within the state to serve its labor needs, and shut its doors to those without.

Internal Labor Resettlement in the New USSR

Still, Soviet thinkers continued to consider the question also consuming European and American observers: How could migration be made to support state power rather than undermining it? As the nascent Soviet state closed its borders to the war’s refugees, it nevertheless began to construct an enormously ambitious if not always thoroughly imagined state-level resettlement policy. Unlike Britain and France and the United States, theirs was directed mainly towards populations already in Soviet territories; but like their Western counterparts, they were above all designed to use displaced people as laborers in underdeveloped imperial spheres. This was, strictly speaking, not a practice of refugee resettlement; the Soviet state made use of what scholars have called “population politics” in many different contexts as part of its vast design for modern state-building and mass industrialization, and few of those moved were refugees in a legal sense (although they might now qualify as what the international refugee regime calls IDPs, internally displaced persons). Still, the Soviet use of removal and resettlement with an eye to labor needs had some notable commonalities with interwar Allied planning and population engineering vis-à-vis refugees, and became a topic of considerable interest for the M Project (and some other Western thinkers and planners as well) before and during the Second World War.

Throughout the 1920s Soviet leaders were perpetually engaged with the problem of how to access, extract, and deploy the many natural resources of some of their most remote territory, where labor was scarce and working conditions were extremely difficult. This question intersected with a politics of ethnicity in which the much-vaunted Soviet commitment to maintaining its populations’ sub-nationalities not infrequently clashed with its serious suspicions of certain identifications. The state, then, engaged in a number of removals designed both to solve labor shortages and remake regional demographics: moving agricultural settlers from the western Soviet Union to Central Asia to bolster the number of Slavs in these frontier zones, for instance, or deporting large numbers of non-Russians (Chechens and Koreans prominent among them) who were deemed to constitute security threats. Soviet population policy, then, tended to combine interest in creating viable labor pools for state projects of development with practices of population engineering for purposes of political control.¹⁰

One such scheme, implemented from the early 1930s, was that of “colonization villages.” In these, laborers were placed in settlements “of two hundred to three hundred households each that would provide a permanent labor force in forestry, mining, and other industries in remote territories, while supporting themselves through farming”¹¹—a vision that had a great deal in common with contemporaneous League of Nations plans, both realized and unrealized, to settle refugee families on coffee plantations in Brazil and agricultural concerns in Syria. And although this punitive Soviet policy had no real parallel with internationalist refugee resettlement schemes that (however ill-conceived) did not normally aim actively to punish the displaced, both faced essentially the same problem: that it was always more expensive to move and maintain such settler workers than the outcomes justified. “The policy, as a whole,” one Soviet historian comments, “was not only costly in human lives, it was economically irrational, incurring far more expense for the upkeep and supervision of the special settlers, who never really became self-sufficient, than profit from their labor.”¹² It was a problem the League would instantly have recognized.

Still, the Soviet state under Stalin recommitted to such labor resettlement again and again through the subsequent two decades, creating a system of detention, expulsion, and forced labor that by the 1950s encompassed nearly 500 camp complexes and imprisoned as many as 14 million people in the decade between 1934 and 1944. The Gulag system (the name comes from the Russian acronym for the “Main Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”) killed one and a half million people and became the main apparatus of population control for Stalin’s increasingly powerful secret police. In other words, this massive system of resettlement in the Stalinist context was above all designed for political and territorial control over an enormous and often unmonitored geopolitical sphere. But it was also part and parcel of more general plans for rapid industrialization that had clear parallels, highlighted by any number of Soviet leaders, with western Europe’s (and, later, America’s) industrialization and development of their colonial holdings. Rural labor of the kind that was deployed first in the “special settlements” and then in the Gulag was understood as an “internal colony”: one to be exploited and “civilized,” just as the British were doing in India and the French in Algeria. And like the Western-run refugee spaces of the 1930s and 1940s—from villages for Assyrians in Iraq to the DP camps of postwar Austria—Soviet “settlements” were, theoretically, spaces of extreme social control described in rhetorical terms of scientific best practice. “On paper,” one historian writes, “the special settlements exhibited all the traits of ‘scientific planning’ from on high, ranging from centrally imposed schedules for everything from transportation to village construction, from detailed reporting to blueprints for homes, barns, and bathhouses, and intricately precise schedules for the ‘liquidation’ of epidemic diseases”—the developmentalist language so familiar from narratives of interwar refugee encampment in the West.¹³

This regime of resettled labor was an object of intense fascination for an emerging body of population “experts” in the West, who—in the absence of concrete knowledge about its brutalities, which became widely known only after the eventual publication in the 1970s of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s shocking exposé The Gulag Archipelago—not infrequently viewed it as a possible model for their own schemes. Despite the clear signs of future Cold War conflict, M Project thinkers were continually fascinated by the Soviet Union’s use of transfer as a tool of border regulation, top-down industrialization, and control of ethnic minorities and political dissidents. Soviet resettlement schemes came to the attention of the M Project again and again; its reporters regarded the Soviet model with wary interest and sometimes admiration, admitting little of the tremendous violence involved in Stalinist demographic engineering. “Notwithstanding many changes in policy,” one M Project staff contributor wrote, “the transcendent goal of the Soviet policy has remained the same, namely, the redistribution of the productive energies and the strengthening of strategic defenses by means of planned migration … The unique feature of the Soviet picture is the monopoly of the State which plans all colonization activities, reducing individual initiative to a minimum.”¹⁴

In general terms, then, the idea of mass resettlement as a mode of industrializing the Soviet Union’s easternmost reaches struck the M Project staff as a valuable point of reference. Contributors reported on Soviet reclamation of deserts in Turkestan (“to exploit these opportunities, it is necessary to ‘occupy’ the desert”); on rubber development in Kazakhstan; and on industrial agriculture and fertilizer in Karakum. A report on Soviet Turkestan noted the renewed emphasis on settler policy for Central Asia:

The Tsarist policy of Russification [has been] replaced by a policy for mobilizing the economic potential of local populations. Only Kazakhstan is an exception to this rule, the indigenous population having proved numerically and occupationally incapable of reaching the goals of the Second Five-Year Plan. The Kazakhs had to give way to masses of immigrant settlers from European Russia. Similarly, the development of the advanced bases in the Soviet Far East required the settlement of large numbers of Great Russians … Soviet settlement policy in Central Asia would result in the enhanced participation of that area in Soviet economic and cultural life.¹⁵

Such presentations of Soviet resettlements in places like Kazakhstan as an example of a largely successful deployment of displaced labor indicated not so much an inchoate sympathy with the Soviet project as the nature of broader intellectual and political commitments that transcended the Soviet-Western divide. The Gulag, as historian Steven Barnes has pointed out, “was a product of a new modern political ethos that extended throughout the Euro-American world, [which] saw society as a subject to be sculpted, and rejected limitation on the application of state power to this goal.”¹⁶ And not all Western observers condemned the violent excesses of Soviet policy, sometimes depicting it as a regrettable but necessary aspect of modernization—even, perhaps, an advance on the forms of control deployed in the capitalist world.¹⁷ As one American economist (later an operative for the OSS) wrote in 1931, the Soviets’ “impressive record of fear, force and terror cannot obscure the degree of economic success which has been achieved.”¹⁸

Another Palestine? Soviet Cooperation in the Sphere of Jewish Resettlement

There were other confluences between Soviet and Western policies vis-à-vis state displacement and resettlement, especially of Jews. At the same time that the British and the League of Nations were envisioning a mass resettlement of European Jews (refugee and migrant alike) in occupied Palestine, where they could simultaneously exercise Jewish nationalism and support the project of the colonial industrialization of the occupied Middle East, the Soviet state engaged in its own project of Jewish colonial resettlement in border areas in need of a turbocharged form of state-sponsored industrial development. In undertaking this project, Soviet officials worked closely with some of the same private organizations that supported the British effort in Palestine through financial assistance, practical support, and political lobbying.

The idea behind the Soviet Jewish colonies—most famously the Jewish Autonomous Region in the eastern region of Birobidzhan (on the Soviet-Chinese border), but also organized Jewish colonies in Crimea and in southern Ukraine—was threefold.¹⁹ First, it would remake the economic life of the Soviet borderlands by providing them with a new influx of laborers. Second, it would colorfully illustrate the possibilities inherent in a Soviet “nationality” policy that imagined the USSR as a collection of ethnic nations enjoying a degree of autonomy under the umbrella of Soviet rule. And finally, it would help to secure the always-uncertain Soviet-Manchurian border by bolstering the number of acknowledged Soviet loyalists in the region. The project of Jewish settlement in Birobidzhan, then, was first mooted in 1928 under the slogan “To the Jewish homeland!” The Central Executive Committee’s first act was to try to recall Jewish workers—engineers and agronomists in particular—from all over the globe: Argentina, Poland and Lithuania, Germany, and the United States. This first stage of the project brought more than 800 people to the remote territory by 1932; two-thirds of them left again within the year. It was an inauspicious beginning, not totally dissimilar from the large-scale abandonment of the earliest Zionist settlements in Palestine.

Still, this project of creating a “Jewish homeland” on the edges of the Soviet empire had the backing of any number of prominent Jewish thinkers and advocates both within and outside the Russian sphere. Over the subsequent two years, as the emerging threat to Germany’s Jews became clearer, the idea sparked interest throughout Jewish and philosemitic circles across Europe and North America, and the Soviet Union actively encouraged external funding of the project. When the Jewish Autonomous Region was formally inaugurated in 1934, it had support not just from internal Soviet functionaries but from any number of international organizations promoting mass Jewish resettlement and development as a way of responding to the burgeoning European refugee crisis. In the United States, the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union (a communist front organization based in New York) was declaring as early as 1928 that Birobidzhan represented a project of historic significance for Jews and deserved American support: “With modern American technical methods and facilities the task can be made much easier.”²⁰ The World Union of Societies for Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews (ORT), a large and active multinational association founded in 1921 in Berlin, became a stalwart ally of the Soviet effort to resettle Jews in Birobidzhan. With associates and branches in France, Britain, and the United States, it allied with the old “territorialist” movements to advocate for envisioning Jewish migrants as useful labor in the industrialization and development of remote areas across the globe. “The ORT-trained worker,” an adulatory article ran, “is always welcome … [ORT] studies the needs of immigration, and special classes are organized to train people in whatever may be the needs of particular countries.”²¹

The Soviet authorities had a rather different vision of what might drive this particular kind of Jewish resettlement. Though the era of Soviet engagement with the formally recognized “refugees” of the First World War had mostly ended by the mid-1920s, a new era of mass displacement was now beginning—one whose victims were mainly deployed as laborers within the empire rather than outside it. “For a brief period there would be few refugees in the Soviet Union,” historians Lewis Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch write, describing the context for this new Jewish settlement project. “Then, with war-like ferocity, agents of Soviet power descended on the villages … [and] millions of peasants fled, becoming refugees in their own country … Unaided and uncounted by the state, they are hard to get to as refugees.”²² Many of the first migrants to Birobidzhan moved under precisely this kind of sufferance: pushed not only by the regime’s active encouragement and financing of the travel but also by economic desperation brought on by regimes of deliberate impoverishment. They were joined by a small number of Jewish engineers and agricultural specialists fleeing Germany and eastern Europe, who numbered perhaps 1,500 by 1937, when the Soviet Union abandoned its cooperation with such external refugee advocates in the face of the coming war.

Soviet Jewish settler colonialism, then, though it bore some superficial resemblance to what was happening in Palestine, was distinct in a number of ways from the League and Allied vision of accomplishing the imperial industrialization of mandatory Palestine via Jewish settler labor. In any case, the settler project at Birobidzhan proved considerably less durable than its British-backed comparator. By the late 1930s this project to create some kind of Yiddish-speaking Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet-Chinese borderlands had reached its apex at something like 50,000 resettled Jews, and would henceforth go into sharp decline as a project of both Soviet resettlement and Jewish nationalism. Tellingly, M Project observers interpreted the failure of the settlement as a consequence not just of Soviet governmental inadequacies but also of the “negative psychological attitude of the settlers.”²³

From War to War: Soviet Engagement with Allied Internationalism and the Project of UNRRA

As the Soviet Union experimented with deploying internally displaced people as laborers, it was also acting as a member of the international family of nations—albeit a somewhat estranged one —and coming up with its own contributions to the conversations swirling around the various European refugee crises. Soviet interactions with internationalism during this period, especially vis-à-vis questions of refugee policy and refugee resettlement, again indicate a kind of convergence of practice and thought between imperial capitalism and Bolshevik communism—revolving especially around the need to control global labor movements and direct displaced people towards projects of industrialization. During the course of the interwar period the USSR’s approach to the League went from a more or less absolute rejection of the concept of internationalist cooperation with the Western powers to a wary collaboration.

The League’s communication with the Soviet Union was fraught but constant. From the decision taken by the Allies in 1919 not to invite revolutionary representatives to Versailles, the Bolshevik leadership had viewed the League in terms ranging from suspicion to open hostility. The League, Lenin declared, was nothing more than “an alliance of world bandits against the proletariat”; his foreign minister, Chicherin, called it a “league of capitalists against the nation”; and in 1920 the refugee question became the first site of active Soviet opposition to the League when the government barred Nansen from entering Bolshevik territory for the purposes of relief work as long as he was representing the League’s offices.²⁴ This was not to say that Soviet administrations saw no advantage in internationalism of other sorts. Indeed, in its early years of power the USSR repeatedly explored the idea of creating an alternative, Soviet-led international organization of states, committed to the “broad economic program of peaceful [economic] rehabilitation” and a global distribution of resources. (Crucially, Chicherin’s vision for this scheme revolved around a form of global industrialization that he thought could also appeal to the capitalist nations: as one chronicler of this moment reports, he thought it might be possible “to propose to the capitalists of the advanced countries to build a superrailway between London, Moscow, Vladivostok and Peking (Beijing) and to explain that it would open up the untold riches of Siberia for general use.”)²⁵ In the meantime, the Soviet leadership came to think that it might be desirable to subvert the more anti-Soviet and anti-Bolshevik aspects of League policy by participating to some limited degree, particularly in its “technical” commissions such as the League Health Conference. From 1926 onward, then, the Soviet Union joined in some conversations at the League, particularly those related to disarmament—though Soviet representatives continued vociferously to denounce the organization as an arm of Western imperial expansion.²⁶

As in Nansen’s early engagement with the Bolshevik authorities, the questions of refugees, labor, and development remained a space where Soviet and Western interests could sometimes coincide. Soviet representatives attended six Economic and Financial Conferences held by the League between 1927 and 1932, at which, as one contemporary observer wrote, they took a twofold approach: “First, to inform the workers of the world of the errors of capitalism; and, collaterally, to persuade the capitalists to invest in the Soviet Union and its plans for development.”²⁷ By 1933—worried by the rise of Germany and by military threats across both Europe and Asia—a Soviet representative was cautiously sounding out the possibility of a more active form of Soviet membership in the League: “To some slight extent the League, despite all its imperfections, is able to check aggressive tendencies … If the Soviet Union felt sure that such conditions could be fulfilled it would not hesitate to cooperate with the League in order to consolidate and strengthen their organization of peace.”²⁸ In other words, when the Soviet Union eventually joined the League in 1934—following the German abandonment of internationalism and aware of the potential for Nazi aggression—it was moving down an already-established path of identifying economic and political areas where communist and capitalist interests and tactics might overlap.

On the refugee crisis that was rapidly becoming one of Europe’s most pressing issues, though, the Soviets remained largely silent. Having closed their own borders in the early 1920s—indeed, at more or less the same time that western Europe and the United States had instituted their own stringent immigration regimes—they were not now inclined to revisit the question of refugees and refugee labor. Unlike the Allied powers, their imperial borderlands were not overseas, and such spaces were already receiving the forcibly displaced: in this case not from other nations but from internal practices of removal and resettlement that would only intensify over the next decade. The USSR, then, participated as an ornery but active interlocutor in the League’s conversations about Germany, about disarmament, and about economic development; but despite its new membership in the League and heightened level of participation in internationalist discourse, it did not send a representative to Évian and declined to offer up support or ideas for “solving” the burgeoning European refugee crisis. If the Allied approach to European Jewish displacement was an anguished refusal to act, the Soviet response was one of more or less total silence.

Still, the Soviet Union could not stay out of international refugee issues forever. The war itself significantly intensified Soviet domestic removal and resettlement practices, now often described as “evacuations.” Upon the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the newly formulated Council for Evacuation began to roll out plans for removal and resettlement on a scale never before seen: at least 7.5 million, and perhaps as many as 20 million, relocated from zones of occupation in a span of less than eighteen months. It was a torturous experience, made no less terrible by the ostensibly protective rationale for the removals. “Despite the very different associations we may have with these other state-organized displacements,” as one account has it, “their logistics, procedures, and vocabulary shared an essential similarity. Indeed, at times evacuees could not distinguish their treatment from that of political exiles and deportees.”²⁹ By the end of the war multiple types of migrations—forced, coerced, evacuative, punitive, voluntary, returnee—had blended into what Eugene Kulischer (observing from the United States, just off his post at the M Project) called a “flood of migrants”—leaving, returning, moving, crossing Soviet territory from all directions.³⁰ The Soviet state, trying to reestablish its apparatus of surveillance and control following years of near-total chaos, doubled down on its own processes of state-directed deportation and resettlement; but its subjects naturally had their own ideas as well, and what Kulischer called their “spontaneous” movement also featured heavily in the general mayhem of the Soviet postwar condition.

The Soviet experience with migration and refugeedom, then, remained mostly contained within its own (enormous) territory and generally resisted incorporation into the emerging international machinery of refugee direction. But there was an exception: Soviet involvement with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which operated two country missions in the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics in the late stages of the Second World War. A brainchild of the Roosevelt administration and largely funded with American money, UNRRA—founded in 1943—was charged with providing relief and assistance to people in zones liberated from Axis occupation. “Being determined that immediately upon the liberation of any area by the armed forces of the United Nations or as a consequence of retreat of the enemy,” its founding document declared, “the population thereof shall receive aid and relief from their sufferings, food, clothing and shelter, aid in the prevention of pestilence and in the recovery of the health of the people, and that preparation and arrangements shall be made for the return of prisoners and exiles to their homes and for assistance in the resumption of urgently needed agricultural and industrial production and the restoration of essential services … here is hereby established the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.”³¹ The formulation of UNRRA had been the subject of considerable back-and-forth between the USSR and its wartime allies, and the eventual Soviet agreement to an American plan for a nonpartisan relief agency came only with the stipulation that UNRRA would have to obtain the agreement of any country in which it was operating.³² But in 1945, as one historian has put it, “Soviet scepticism became opportunism” with a Soviet request for some $700 million in relief funds from UNRRA to be used in Ukraine and Byelorussia.³³ It was a demand met with some dismay in the United States, which eventually bargained the number down to something closer to $250 million.

American UNRRA officials were utterly unprepared for what they saw upon arrival in the Soviet Union. Nazi soldiers had removed everything they could from the territory as they retreated, leaving Minsk and Poltava 80 percent destroyed and with no access to water or electricity. In the region of Vitebsk, in Byelorussia, a third of the population was dead and “all hospital equipment, lumber, construction materials, industrial plants, and every automobile, bus, and tractor had been taken.”³⁴ There were some 300,000 war orphans in the Soviet Union, mainly placed in government-run homes; many had been repatriated from concentration camps and some did not remember their places of origin. Nearly everyone the UNRRA team met had lost close relatives. The American head of the UNRRA expedition in Byelorussia, a lawyer from New York named Richard Scandrett, reported that having endured the murder of spouses, parents, and children was such a universal experience that “everyone in Byelorussia is surprised when you are shocked. To them it is like ‘dog bites man.’ ”³⁵ For Scandrett, UNRRA’s task went beyond the provision of supplies; it also encompassed serving as a witness to the destruction, and committing to telling the story of Soviet suffering to an American public who had not had to bear—indeed, who could hardly imagine—the brutality, destruction, and privations of the Nazi occupation.

Still, UNRRA’s presence on Soviet soil was contentious both on the ground and in the halls of Congress. In the United States, advocates for UNRRA were perpetually having to answer the charge that they were aiding and abetting communists with American money. (Similar objections came from other quarters, like Canada, whose representatives objected to Canadian products like wheat being sent to enemy populations.) The argument over whether UNRRA should be providing food and supplies to people living under Soviet rule clearly demonstrated that even those who advocated for the program’s continuance and defended it as a humanitarian enterprise also took a distinctly instrumentalist view of this sort of intervention. Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York turned UNRRA director, told critics that “UNRRA food is eaten by communists as it just so happens that there are many more communists than others in some countries [and] UNRRA’s purpose is to feed hungry people,” but added that abandoning the UNRRA project would “increase the suspicions of US foreign policy.”³⁶ Some defenders pointed to UNRRA’s activities in the Soviet Union as a way to undermine the Soviet government’s official messages of anti-Americanism. Others noted that allowing the USSR to sink into a penury comparable to the plight of the defeated would stoke precisely the sort of economic chaos that had led to the last war.

There were other sites for similar UNRRA programs of development designed to recreate shattered war zones as postwar overseas markets for American goods. In China, in the context of war between the republican government and Mao’s revolutionaries, UNRRA continued its stratagem of putting people to work creating the infrastructure for a putative industrialized postwar state: building roads, constructing railway lines, and manufacturing modern hygiene and sanitation capabilities. In Poland, as one historian puts it, “The UNRRA ‘spark plug’ ignited, as a future basis for modern industry, electrical power generation, coal mining, and a semblance of self-sustaining mechanised agricultural economy.”³⁷ In Austria, UNRRA distributed American farming materials—seeds, tractors, fertilizer—to establish an industrial agriculture inextricably tied to American commercial interests. In Italy, too, industrialization was a primary target: UNRRA provided mass quantities not just of food and medical supplies but fuel and agricultural machinery, with an explicit political goal: “To jump-start Italian industry, to rehabilitate agriculture, to prevent hunger, to dampen inflation, and to forestall political unrest and a possible drift towards socialist revolution.”³⁸ In other words, UNRRA was not merely—arguably not even primarily—an institution of humanitarian relief. Rather, it was an outgrowth of the new idea that, as a representative of the organization’s mission in Italy put it, “the rehabilitation of a country’s stricken economy was a form of world insurance”³⁹—even when that rehabilitation was of an enemy in a new cold war.

It was a view shared (minus the anti-socialist agenda) by the Soviet Union, which understood its permission to allow UNRRA activity in Soviet territory as a hardheaded economic decision made in the hope of restoring the country’s shattered economy and ushering in a new era of economic prosperity, or at least viability, alongside a postwar reorganization of populations. But the same was true of the United States, which provided nearly three-quarters of UNRRA’s funding and nearly all its personnel. One historian sums up the American pro-UNRRA arguments thus: “The US economy in coming years would require revived overseas markets, sustained by confident societies capable of absorbing US investment capital and goods produced in US factories and farms … Clout in that organization [UNRRA] should reinforce Washington’s global leadership while fostering conditions conducive to long-term US advantage.”⁴⁰ Communists and capitalists alike, it would appear, negotiated the specifics of relief and refugee work with a view to their longer-term economic outcomes: investment, development, and industrialization.

The Stalinist state undertook one more major refugee-related innovation in the years immediately following the war: along with the Soviet-aligned Polish and Czech governments, it forcibly expelled some 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1950.⁴¹ Observing this Soviet version of nation-making via ethnically organized mass expulsion, Western governments adopted attitudes ranging from serene equanimity to active encouragement. The deportations received support from Britain and the United States, both of whose leaders saw them as consistent with earlier Western internationalist practice and especially the “successful” precedent of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. Addressing the House of Commons in December of 1944, Churchill declared his belief that “expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting … A clean sweep will be made.” Roosevelt echoed the sentiment, telling Anthony Eden that “the Prussians will be removed from East Prussia in the same manner as the Greeks were removed from Turkey after the last war.”⁴² There was nothing especially new, or especially Soviet, about the practice of mass removal as a mode of building a viable postwar nation-state—just as Soviet practices of resettling displaced people as laborers in imperial borderlands bore some notable similarities to Western policies of refugee resettlement in overseas colonial employment.

Tracking Soviet refugee and resettlement policy from its inception through the 1940s, during which the Soviet Union went from bitter rival to fractious friend to active enemy of the Western bloc and especially the United States, tells us that there were meaningful confluences between communist and capitalist approaches to the question of refugees. In both political spaces, the project of rapidly industrializing colonized and semicolonized territory was seen as not just a modern good but a moral and political imperative; and in both spaces displaced populations appeared simultaneously as a high-level threat to the state and as a godsend to remote projects of neoimperial development. The difference between the communist and capitalist blocs with regard to refugee policy was partly one of sphere: in the Soviet Union refugees were to be deployed within the borders of the empire, and in the West they would develop the conquered spaces without. Of course, it was also a difference of level of brutality; and the apparent allure of Soviet resettlement schemes for the M Project’s architects betrayed not just an essential sympathy with the Soviet goal of rapid industrialization, but also a kind of fascinated admiration for a state that seemed (at least from the outside) to have a near-absolute power to overcome the resistance of those targeted for removal and resettlement and an astonishing capacity to realize even the most grandiose plans. Surely something could be learned from them, even while acknowledging their enemy status. “Anything may happen—even the running of a redesigned economic machine by those most competent to run it,” the American economist Stuart Chase wrote in his 1932 book A New Deal. “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking the world?”⁴³

7

Refugees versus “Palestine Refugees”

Race and the Postwar International Regime

As the Second World War ground to a grim halt, the world did indeed seem to need remaking. The epic displacements of the war remained unresolved; huge swathes of Europe were in ruins; and another mass dispossession was already unfolding in the Middle East. This time it was the rising American empire that would take the lead in constructing internationalist “solutions” for the era’s multiple refugee crises—like its predecessors, with a perpetual eye to supporting its own imperial expansion.

At the end of the war Europe was home to millions of refugees, many of them detained in what were designed to be temporary camps under the auspices of the wartime United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. With the cessation of hostilities, the question of what to do with the refugees became ever more urgent—and proved as difficult as ever, since the Allied countries were no more eager to take in homeless European Jews now than they had been before the war and the Holocaust. UNRRA therefore dealt with most of the displaced people under its remit through the controversial practice of repatriation, sometimes undertaken against the will of the refugees themselves. Still, there remained a so-called “hard core”—a not inconsiderable population of some one and a half million people—who were still stranded in camps when UNRRA closed its doors. Its successor, the new International Refugee Organization (IRO), took its inspiration not from UNRRA’s repatriation approach but from earlier interwar refugee policies. Over the next few years, the IRO’s primary strategy for disgorging the remaining refugees from the European camp system would be the construction of a racially conscious global employment scheme that connected refugees—privileging the able-bodied white Christian variety—with assorted kinds of menial labor, inside and especially outside Europe.

The racial consciousness in evidence at the IRO was becoming ever more central to an increasingly formalized internationalist refugee regime, a development supremely evident in the response to the next major global crises of displacement. First, the new United Nations managed to avoid any consideration of the brutal forced migration marking the aftermath of Indian partition by declaring it a mere domestic political problem producing internal migration but not refugees. Then, in 1948, Zionist forces seeking to establish a demographically Jewish state expelled some three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs from what was now Israel, following Britain’s announcement that it would relinquish its mandate over Palestine to the newly formed United Nations. Facing a new non-European refugee crisis—which the UN, given its central role in the making of this particular calamity, could not simply evade—another legal solution presented itself. The next few years witnessed the construction of an international legal system that differentiated between normative “refugees,” defined as those displaced in Europe during the war years who required some form of legal recourse, and “Palestine refugees,” in perpetual limbo pending some political settlement and therefore eligible for material aid but not legal assistance, asylum, or political advocacy.

It was an innovative distinction that would serve as foundational for the global refugee regime under construction in two different ways. In the first instance, this establishment of the legal category of the “Palestine refugee” had the practical effect of keeping Palestinians confined to Arab host states and opened up new possibilities for the regional use of refugee labor—this time, mainly in the interests of American economic advancement. The mostly American-funded United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established in 1949 to provide on-the-ground assistance to the “Palestine refugees,” pressed hard in its early years for mass Palestinian employment in American-backed industrial work across the Middle East, using displaced people as laborers on foreign-backed projects of “Third World” development in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf. It was a new iteration of the old League and IRO schemes for refugee employment, now keyed to the political and economic goals of a Cold War–era “Third World” developmentalism.

Even more crucially, though, the delineation of Palestinians as a distinct legal category in this emerging international system suggested an intriguing possibility: that the international community might be able to effectively control refugee resettlement, while plausibly claiming to defend refugee rights, simply by legally distinguishing among different types of refugees. This scheme of legal segregation served as a crucial premise for the much-lauded 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which formally defined the parameters of refugeedom and established a set of rights for those who qualified—carefully constructing the rights of a presumably normative European “refugee” over the lesser protections offered to the “Palestine refugee.” The convention was billed as a humanitarian triumph for its guarantees to the displaced—“one of the outstanding achievements of the 20th century,” as High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata would put it decades later.¹ But its distinction between types of refugee offered something less salubrious: a valuable procedural model for differentiating between displaced Europeans entitled to resettlement and non-Europeans subject to more or less permanent containment, without openly acknowledging the increasing centrality of race to the practice of international refugee assistance.

From UNRRA to the IRO: Postwar Resettlement Schemes for European DPs

We have already investigated the operation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the Soviet Union, where—limited by Soviet suspicion and restrictions—it was mainly concerned with providing supplies to already-extant institutions. But elsewhere UNRRA’s primary institutional manifestation was the refugee camp, and its main mandate by the end of the war included not just spearheading relief efforts for recently liberated populations but also figuring out what to do with its displaced charges. It was a task made infinitely more difficult by the political context of intense resistance to immigration from virtually all the places that Holocaust survivors and other victims wanted to go.

By the time its mandate expired in 1947, UNRRA comprised nearly 800 camps holding some seven million people. Most of these were in the liberated zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy; they included the notorious “displaced persons” camps where the liberating Allied armies had interned Holocaust survivors, sometimes in the very spaces the Nazis had used to intern or exterminate their victims.² UNRRA’s reach also extended into regions of European colonial occupation. In the British-occupied Middle East, it took over camps previously run by the British organization MERRA (the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration), which had interned Yugoslavian, Polish, Albanian, and Greek refugees across Egypt and Palestine. In Algeria and Morocco, too, UNRRA undertook to place people in camps as a way to relieve refugee pressure at a safe distance from Europe. In other words, during the war itself European detainees were subject to precisely the same kind of aid-as-containment that would later come mainly to characterize refugee policy towards nonwhite, non-European refugees. But at the end of the war, UNRRA was faced with the task of emptying these camps and finding somewhere for their inhabitants to go. It was a job that would not be fully accomplished for another twelve years.³

UNRRA itself was an institution of wartime, and its strategies were dictated mostly by the conditions of warfare and the military needs of the Allies, especially the Americans. As we have already seen, its leaders wanted above all to reestablish economic functionality in Europe and restore the continent’s capacity to serve as a market for American goods as soon as possible. As such, the agency’s main strategy for dispersing the people it had accumulated in its camps was the relatively quick one of repatriation—not infrequently carried out against the will of refugees themselves, particularly the many who were sent back to the Soviet Union to face the fury of the Stalinist regime. Between the spring and fall of 1945 UNRRA managed to repatriate between six and seven million people, mainly from German territory. This left about one and a half million still in DP camps who were regarded for one reason or another as unrepatriable, and in the main demanded resettlement somewhere other than their countries of origin. (Some UNRRA officials did not cover themselves in glory in dealing with these leftover DPs, many of whom were Jewish Holocaust survivors; the British D-Day military planner Frederick Morgan, seconded to UNRRA to lead the DP operation in Germany, decried the organization’s attempt to provide humanitarian assistance to the refugees as mere weakness, telling his listeners that “our bureaucrats just haven’t got the guts to shoot or gas these people as our late enemies had.”)⁴ In late 1946, as UNRRA was winding down, it began to appear that some other organization would have to take on the task of disposing of this remaining “last million.”⁵

The M Project—quietly but thoroughly shut down in 1945, with Harry Truman voicing fears of its “dangerous aspects”—was clearly manifest in this post-UNRRA stage of American-led internationalist refugee policy. In 1946 the new International Refugee Organization (IRO) prepared to take over UNRRA’s remaining operations under precisely the assumptions of Henry Field’s office: that “genuine” refugees should be resettled by an international authority intent on putting them “to useful employment in order to avoid the evil and anti social consequences of continued idleness.”⁶ The IRO would, it declared, be wary of helping those who “are unwilling to return to their countries of origin because they prefer idleness to facing the hardships of helping in the reconstruction.” It promised, too, to be cognizant of anti-immigrant opinion in any putative host space, “exercis[ing] special care in cases in which the re-establishment or re-settlement of refugees or displaced persons might be contemplated, either in countries contiguous to their respective countries of origin or in non-self-governing countries … [and giving] due weight, among other factors, to any evidence of genuine apprehension and concern felt in regard to such plans, in the former case, by the country of origin of the persons involved, or, in the latter case, by the indigenous population of the non-self-governing country in question.”⁷ The IRO, then, drew less on its immediate predecessor UNRRA than on well-established earlier modes of imagining international refugee resettlement as a global labor exchange dictated by the imperial powers.

Its officials imagined first deploying the remaining “hard core” of DPs—mainly, of course, central and eastern Europeans—to rebuild the shattered landscapes and industries of western Europe: France, Britain, and Belgium, in particular. In 1946 and 1947 the IRO midwifed the birth of a “French Metropolitan Scheme” to lure Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian DPs to industrial and agricultural work in France, alongside a similar British immigration plan dubbed “Westward Ho!” and a Belgian one called “Operation Black Diamond.”⁸ All of these plots conceived of DPs as a pool of (white) laborers among whom the receiving countries could pick and choose, selecting for age, gender, physical capacity, and political inclination. “It will be easy,” one French minister noted, “to examine the refugees regrouped in the camps according to their professional ability, physical shape, social background and behavior.”⁹ In fact, these early plans for refugees-as-laborers unleashed a kind of hysterical competition in some of the camps for the best workers. As the IRO’s work got underway, historian Daniel Cohen writes, “the search for suitable ‘human material’ was conducted by dozens of governments interested in the productive and ethnic value of DP immigrants.”¹⁰

The IRO thus became a new sort of international capitalist labor exchange, operating on a principle the League had articulated twenty years earlier in Greece and Syria and the M Project had tried to expand across the world: that refugees could foot their own costs of entrance into a global labor market. By October of 1948, the organization boasted a fleet of twenty-five ships—mainly converted US Army and US Maritime Commission vessels—taking DPs to ports around the globe for resettlement. “It is now expected,” warned the IRO’s American office in Geneva, “that costs of inland transportation will be met by relatives or prospective employers of the displaced persons admitted.”¹¹ By 1949 the IRO was also chartering spaces on regular passenger ships, running trains, and taking over ports from which DPs could be sent out to their new employment. British representative Arthur Rucker described the practicalities of such dispersals:

We [the IRO] are now the largest mass transportation agency in the world. By November 1948 we shall have a fleet of twenty-five ships on whole-time charter. In addition we charter much space on many of the other ships sailing on normal services about the world. Thirty trains a month are run for us in Europe. We can now move, or shall be able to move in November 1948, 19,000 persons per month at a daily cost of just under $160,000. We have staging camps near the ports in Bermerhaven and Hamburg; a staging camp is being set up for movements from Italy. We are about to establish a large holding camp in the British Zone of Germany where people may be collected and sent up to the ships … We want to send [some of] the refugees by air from Europe to Eritrea, place them in a staging camp there, and take them all by ship from Eritrea to Australia. If we can do that we shall halve the turn-round of the ships, economize in shipping time, and, we believe, do it at about the cost of shipping all the way.¹²

Though the initial IRO plans had focused on using refugees to rebuild western Europe, it was quickly becoming clear that the Allied countries would not absorb enough DPs to clear out the camps. Indeed, Rucker himself was already championing alternatives, telling his audience at Chatham House that refugees from the Caucasus whom he had encountered in Tehran in the early 1940s and were now in a camp in Tanganyika “may go to the Argentine or to Australia.”¹³ The schemes under discussion at the IRO began to be shadowed with worries—especially in the early days of conversation about European integration—about the overpopulation of the European continent and the political threat of (again echoing the M Project) “surplus populations.”

The IRO closed down in 1952 after having moved more than a million people into employment, “fourth-fifths of them outside Europe.”¹⁴ Other bodies continued its work along the same lines. The ILO, long a proponent of externally directed, labor-oriented mass migration, continued to advocate for its own refugee resettlement schemes. A new body, the American-run International Committee for European Migration (ICEM), likewise pressed for the old idea of mass European emigration to North and South America and to Australia. But by the late 1950s the idea of turning European refugees into non-European labor migrants had more or less lost steam. “The organized exit of ‘excess’ displaced persons and refugees,” one historian writes, “marked the final episode of the Great Atlantic Migration.”¹⁵

Despite its brevity, this moment of population resettlement had two major features that would carry over into subsequent refugee policy. First of all, it emphasized the resettlement of refugees as menial laborers, to be employed in industry, agriculture, and rebuilding, but never in the professions. Even the IRO came to see this overwhelming emphasis on low-level, low-wage labor as something of a problem, arguing for a more generous approach to displaced professionals in a propaganda pamphlet called The Forgotten Elite:

In camps of the International Refugee Organization today are approximately 26,000 of the ablest, best trained men and women in Europe … Ruefully, they have watched hundreds of thousands of their fellow refugees gain acceptance for immigration as manual workers and leave the camps to take up new lives in scores of countries around the world, while they—the forgotten elite—have been passed over. Some of the professionally trained, of course, have made their way to new homes, but often it was at the expense of acquiring new manual skills and trying to forget that once they were respected in their professions …

It would be easier to explain this apparent “ban on brains” if the world had no more bridges to be designed and built by engineers, no more sick people to be healed, no more work for agronomists and soil chemists to do to improve food supplies. If the world were sick of music and painting and books, it could afford to toss on the junk heap its musicians and painters and writers.¹⁶

Despite such occasional weak protest, the IRO remained essentially sympathetic to the receiving countries’ insistence that refugees should enter as manual laborers and nothing else and that labor should be mandatory for all refugees capable of it. It ran vocational schools with an overwhelming emphasis on work of what it called a “basic nature”: elementary construction, mechanics, machine shop production, farming, bricklaying, and (for women) cooking, baking, and typing.¹⁷ The premise of making refugees into productive workers—long a key aspect of European refugee policy, as we have seen—was a sine qua non of postwar resettlement, as was a deep-seated suspicion of the professional classes. Refugees were to start at the bottom in their new societies—an assumption that would become a permanent aspect of the refugee regime of the post-1945 era.

It was also increasingly a racialized regime, one that saw refugee resettlement in the West—even as menial laborers—as something reserved for white Christians. The early refugee regime in the form of UNRRA had already encouraged a racialized approach through its management of Jewish-only DP camps, its decision to treat all interned Jews as automatically eligible for UNRRA assistance and DP status, and its categorization of Jewish DPs as stateless wards of the United Nations. And although technically Jewish DPs were as eligible for labor resettlement schemes as their non-Jewish refugee compatriots, many observers noted the emergence of a striated approach to recruitment that disadvantaged Jews in practice. UN officials reported that despite a theoretical commitment to equitable recruiting, “the various missions invariably reject all the Jewish candidates.”¹⁸ Britain remained especially determined to keep Jewish refugees out of both the metropole and British-controlled colonial territories; Australia privileged refugees of “white stock,” which did not include Jews; Latin American officials frequently expressed not just a preference for Catholic workers but a vocal anti-Semitism. Sometimes, even Nazi collaborators and war criminals who had been part of the SS or had worked as guards in concentration camps were given preferential resettlement as non-Jews in places like the United States.¹⁹ By contrast, the IRO committed itself without reservation to Jewish resettlement in Palestine—directly arranging transport and reimbursing private organizations for moving Jewish DPs there directly. For able-bodied non-Jews, the future lay in sponsored employment in UNRRA-and IRO-chosen destinations across the globe. For able-bodied Jews, the future in the main involved labor in service of the new Jewish state. It was a development that pointed to a modern international refugee policy in which ethnicity, nationality, and race would be a crucial determining factor for the process and outcome of resettlement for displaced people.

The Birth of the “Palestine Refugee”

The racialization of the refugee regime, already evident in the divergence between the destinies of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, now became obvious in a still more dramatic way. In the 1948 war that birthed the new state of Israel, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were made refugees—not only by military strategies of expulsion during the war but also, perhaps more to the point, by the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow them to return.²⁰ The attempts of the newly established “international community” in the form of the United Nations to deal with this new refugee problem layered on top of the older one revealed, above all, the extraordinary nonuniversality of the emerging refugee regime. The fact that different types of refugees were to be treated differently had, of course, been an evident aspect of the system from its early days in the 1920s, when the League explicitly declared that not all displaced or stateless people would qualify as refugees. Now, as the new Israeli government—backed by the UN, the IRO, and any number of private humanitarian organizations across Europe and the United States—moved Holocaust survivors out of European DP camps and into the towns, neighborhoods, and houses of exiled Palestinian Arabs, this long-acknowledged truth would become a formal legal commitment; indeed, the basis for a permanent legal premise that some kinds of refugees were entitled to more rights than others.

The emergence of Palestine as a test case for a racialized international refugee approach was, in part, a consequence of the UN’s own central role in the simultaneous birth of Israel and of the Palestinian refugee crisis. In November of 1947, following the British declaration of intent to give up its mandate over Palestine and turn the problem over to the UN, the General Assembly voted in favor of partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab “territories”—a decision whose implementation, as many at the time recognized, would necessarily involve the forcible expulsion of enormous numbers of Palestinians from the mooted Jewish nation. (At the time of the vote, Jews owned between 6 and 7 percent of Palestine’s land and constituted approximately 35 percent of the population; a previous British proposal for partition in 1937 had acknowledged that such a “solution” would require the removal of about 300,000 Palestinian Arabs, to create a much smaller Jewish state than the one being proposed now.)²¹ With the outbreak of war, this eventuality came to pass very quickly. In the first stage of the war, the so-called civil war that took place between December 1947 and May 1948, Zionist militias forced more than 300,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages. The second stage, in which the surrounding Arab countries declared war on the newly established state of Israel, saw the expansion of Israel’s borders well beyond the area proposed in the UN’s partition plan and the expulsion of a further 400,000 Palestinians. By the time of the armistice in 1949, a majority of the prewar Palestinian Arab population—some three-quarters of a million people—were refugees.

The United Nations, because of its own role in the conflict and because Palestine’s prominence made it a useful venue in which to assert the importance of this new form of internationalist authority, positioned itself in the war’s aftermath as the primary arbiter of the Palestine-Israel question. In December of 1948 it established something called the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which was intended to take over the tasks of the former United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte (murdered in September of 1948 by Zionist terrorists) and work towards a “final settlement” of the Palestine question. With respect to the refugees, the commission declared that those “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” To this end, the UNCCP was instructed to facilitate their “repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation … and the payment of compensation.”²²

This first showdown between the new state of Israel and the newly formulated United Nations clearly demonstrated, and not for the last time, the total impotence of internationalist rhetoric in the face of Israeli intransigence. The Israeli government refused utterly to entertain the idea of Palestinian return, declaring not only that they would constitute a security threat but that “the reintegration of the returning Arabs into normal life, and even their mere sustenance, would present an insuperable problem.”²³ Given the realities on the ground (quietly supported by the UN’s power brokers in the form of the United States and the Soviet Union alike), officials turned their attention instead to the question of relief. In late 1949 the UN created a new agency it called the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to assist Palestinian refugees with the practicalities of their displacement. This organization—established as a temporary one whose mandate would have to be re-upped every three years—essentially marked the abandonment of the political project of a “final settlement” in favor of basic material relief for the displaced. The UNCCP, charged with representing Palestinian interests in the search for a political settlement, slowly withered into invisibility. UNRWA, charged with the nonpolitical provision of practical aid on the ground, was serving nearly a million people by 1951.

The introduction of these two organizations, representing an approach to Palestinians that purported to believe both in the necessity of immediate assistance and in the possibility of an eventual political solution, provided cover for the United Nations to make the decision—as one legal scholar has put it—“to exclude Palestinians from the ‘universal’ refugee regime incorporated in the 1950 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention.”²⁴ This exclusion rested on two separate legal bases. The first was through the Refugee Convention’s definition of the “refugee” specifically in terms of the Second World War, as someone who had had to leave his place of residence as a result of “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951” (one option for signatory states) or “events occurring in Europe or elsewhere before 1 January 1951” (an alternative option) and now could not return “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted.”²⁵ It was a definition whose application to refugees from a now-disbanded or ethnically reconstituted former colony was not at all clear—a circumstance Palestinian refugees shared with any number of other non-European displaced populations; for instance, the millions of people displaced almost simultaneously in the violent expulsions of Indian partition in the summer of 1947 and totally ignored by the makers of this new refugee regime. The second, arguably more functional basis for Palestinian exclusion was that no one could claim the protections of UNHCR who was receiving aid from another UN organization—so, in practice, the prior existence of UNRWA rendered impossible aid from UNHCR or protection under the convention.

Though it was by no means a unique experience for a displaced person to remain unrecognized as a refugee and therefore ineligible for UNHCR protection, some specificities of the category of “Palestine refugee” gradually emerged. Apart from the short-lived United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency, disbanded in 1958, UNRWA was (and remains today) the only UN agency to deal solely with refugees of a single nationality. Its mandate did not really clarify who counted as a refugee or what their rights might be, and in the first years after the war relief providers often found themselves having to make essentially ad hoc decisions about who did and did not qualify for aid. As one Quaker worker in post-1948 Gaza noted, “We now feel the necessity of broadening our definition of refugee to include a considerable number of people who still live in their own houses but have been completely deprived of any source of livelihood due to the fact that their land is in the hands of the Jews.”²⁶ Gradually, though, the UN began to enforce a procedural approach to Palestinian refugeedom that echoed its practical approach to the Refugee Convention from which Palestinians were formally and legally excluded: enforcing restrictions on the UNRWA rolls of refugees, limiting registration to those who had been physically displaced (rather than denationalized in place, as had happened to many Palestinians in Gaza), and requiring legal demonstration of claims of expulsion. By 1951 UNRWA had a serviceable legal conception of a “Palestine refugee,” which it began to use to determine eligibility for registration: “Persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”²⁷ Palestinians who fell under this rubric were ineligible for UNHCR assistance or protection—partly because the UN did not want to confront Israel over its refusal to allow the refugees reentrance, but also because its Arab delegates feared that UNHCR resettlement practices would strip Palestinians of their right of return. “The refugees should be aided pending their repatriation,” the Saudi delegate declared, “repatriation being the only real solution of their problem.”²⁸

In other words, something truly important was happening here: the international community, in the form of the United Nations, was actively making the decision that there could be different categories of refugee, based on place of origin and method of dislocation. No one at the UN seriously disputed that the million or so displaced, denationalized, dispossessed Palestinians filing for international assistance by the early 1950s were, by any contemporary measure, refugees. But because they were not Europeans, and because they had been expelled as a consequence of a political project strongly supported by the UN’s main showrunners, and because admitting the permanence of their expulsion would anger so many in the rest of the Middle East and beyond, they could not be given the same political status as—for instance—the European Jews now being ushered into Israel with the approval and help of the IRO. The solution, then, was to subdivide the concept of refugee into different, distinct, particular legal categories, and to limit the possibility of seeking asylum in the West to only one of them. In the first instance, the concept of separate and unequal refugee status would apply almost exclusively to Palestinians, under the specific metrics of the 1951 convention. But the more general idea of differentiated refugee status based on point of origin and cause of expulsion would eventually come to dominate global systems of refugee law—not least because, as the Palestine case had now demonstrated, it offered a way to maintain a theoretical commitment to humanitarianism and the principles of the Refugee Convention while in practice closing off access to asylum, citizenship, and political rights to all but a select few.

UNRWA’s Worker Schemes: The Emergence of Cold War Developmentalism

Many relief workers within and without the UN, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and not infrequently hostile to the Israeli state that had violently expelled them in the name of ethnonationalism, understood refugee return as the only real and just solution to Palestinian exile. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker relief organization based in Philadelphia that had a history of activity in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East dating from the First World War, was among the first NGOs to be given “consultative status” at the United Nations and agreed in 1948 to head up a program of emergency relief in Gaza. The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) took on a similar UN-supported role for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel itself. The AFSC volunteers, in particular, prepped their charges in Gaza for an eventual return and laid plans for Quaker assistance to those coming back to their homes in what was now Israel.²⁹ Outside Gaza, too, the sense that return was the only just option pervaded the Red Cross’s efforts in the camps, though it did not seem to extend into the volunteers’ home territories. (The wife of an American member of the UNCCP, touring refugee camps in Lebanon and Jericho in 1949, confessed in her travelogue that she learned only from an IFRC worker that Palestinians had been forcibly expelled from their homes.)³⁰ By the end of 1949, the Quakers were beginning to think that their aid efforts were actually injuring the refugees they were intended to help by making a political solution less pressing. “Action [that] was merely palliative,” an AFSC report to the General Assembly in 1949 declared, “would have disastrous consequences upon the refugees.”³¹

But the UN, and especially the Americans, had very different ideas. In April of 1949 Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson went on a tour of the Middle East. He was preparing, on the president’s instruction, to put together a new scheme for the mass resettlement of Palestinian refugees across the Middle East: a solution that would help stabilize the new Israel and guarantee its demographic future as a Jewish state, but also provide invaluable labor for various regional development schemes. To this end, he put together a new commission and called it the “United Nations Middle East Economic Survey Administration,” a name that subtly but clearly reflected the intent not only to disburse refugees across the whole of the region but to do so with an eye to American-backed economic development and labor needs. When the UN’s formal negotiations with Israel broke down over Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return, George McGhee—the new assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs—convened his own meeting, to which he invited not only the main refugee relief agencies but also commercial enterprises with interests in the region: “Oil companies, construction firms, a steamship line, and State Department personnel.”³² To the disappointment of AFSC representatives, the conversation revolved not around repatriation but resettlement: in Iraq (an idea proposed earlier by the OSS and the M Project), in the Sinai, in the Jordan Valley, and in Syria. As in some earlier American proposals, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, Roosevelt’s 1930s-era project to harness the Tennessee River as a source of energy for comprehensive rural development across much of the American South) served as a kind of model for developmentalist schemes that might now be deployed in Jordan and Syria—to the mutual benefit of the American companies charged with their execution, the commercial enterprises around the region who required political stability for continued profit, and the impoverished refugees who would populate the area in lieu of going home.

The Israeli military government set up its own formal committee on transfer almost immediately upon consolidating its grip on its territory. Its refugee-related goals were very clear: to prevent refugee return, devolve responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem onto the surrounding Arab states, move refugees away from the newly created border, make the preservation of a Palestinian national identity impossible, and moderate the diplomatic pressures on the Israeli state from external actors.³³ Though there was overlap between these goals and those of some American administration members and hangers-on (Joseph Schechtman, for instance, moved from the OSS and the M Project directly into a position with the Israeli Cabinet Transfer Committee where he advocated for a mass transfer of Palestinians into Iraq), the Israeli and the American positions were not the same. For Israel, the rationale for and commitment to enforcing continued Palestinian exile was clear. For the United States, the priority was to stabilize the region enough to permit unencumbered commercial and strategic development, a goal that could encompass any number of different approaches to the refugee problem and did not preempt irritation with what Truman, at least, often viewed as uncooperative behavior on the part of Ben-Gurion and his new administration.

Still, given the immovability of the Israeli position and their own political commitments to the project of the Jewish state, American administrators began to work within and around Israeli interests. Increasingly, and for the same reasons, so did the United Nations. The AFSC, disenchanted with the desultory international efforts to ensure Palestinian return and believing that ongoing aid would serve only to draw out the crisis, withdrew from its commitments in Gaza in 1950. The UNCCP too melted away; through the subsequent decade it provided little more than an increasingly attenuated effort to document refugee property losses, and was eventually abandoned though never formally dissolved. (Technically still an extant organization, the commission issues an annual testimonial that it is unable to carry out its mandate due to the relevant parties’ unwillingness to commit to the requirements outlined in UN Resolution 194.)³⁴ UNRWA, then—with its emphasis on immediate assistance over political dealmaking, its institutional separation from the UN’s other institutions of refugee policy, and its mostly American funding and leadership—soon had the field to itself; and its showrunners saw opportunity in the huge numbers of displaced Palestinians over whom UNRWA now held sway.

After 1950, UNRWA turned back to the Economic Survey Mission to formulate plans for what to do with the refugees. In 1949 the mission’s first interim report (known as the “Clapp report” after its head Gordon Clapp, himself a former director of the TVA) had recommended making active use of the refugees as an agent for American-led developmentalism throughout the eastern Mediterranean. “A higher standard of living must grow out of the application of human skill and ingenuity,” the report declared in the developmentalist language of the day. “The administration of the relief and public works programme for refugees … can, in the considered judgment of the Economic Survey Mission, become a contributing factor for peace and economic stability in the Near East.”³⁵ To this end, UNRWA in its first years tried hard to deploy its charges as a labor pool for various grandiose regional development projects. Its architects drew inspiration from Rooseveltian visions of the 1930s in which technological development, particularly in the form of mass electrification and large-scale irrigation of rural regions, served as the key to a new kind of modern global industrial capitalism directed by American economic and political authority.

The TVA, which had been received with adulation in the United States and abroad in the late 1930s and during the war, seemed to offer a model for meeting the challenges of postwar reconstruction in a number of different contexts. British authorities thought of a similar “Danube Valley Authority” to rebuild a shattered European landscape, and Canada commissioned a study on how to apply its principles abroad; as the American journalist John Gunther wrote ecstatically, the TVA’s “horizon could be illimitable.”³⁶ This over-the-top enthusiasm from all quarters arose at least partly from the hope that the TVA model might offer precisely the kind of quick, effective, top-down industrial modernization that the Soviet Union was apparently providing to its “Third World” client states, distinguished from its communist competitor by a (theoretical) commitment to democratic process and local buy-in.³⁷ As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in his 1949 book The Vital Center, “The Tennessee Valley Authority is a weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for the support of the people of Asia.”³⁸ Truman thought so too; he made the TVA a central point of reference for his new “Point Four” program to provide technical assistance to the developing world.³⁹ The Middle East—with its American-owned oil companies and its strategic centrality—was prime real estate for this model of fast, thorough industrialization. Further, in centering refugees as the site and labor for such projects, the question of local democratic participation in the process of development could be put off more or less indefinitely since those involved were not citizens and had no formal political standing in their host countries.

UNRWA’s early proposals thus combined earlier League-and IRO-style refugee resettlement practices that emphasized resettlement via employment with a newer form of American-led developmentalism. As the Clapp report put it, “For the immediate future, the refugees are viewed as a reservoir of idle manpower; of greater service to themselves and to the lands giving them asylum, if given work.”⁴⁰ Under its first director, a Canadian former major-general named Howard Kennedy, UNRWA was charged with effecting mass Palestinian resettlement (without calling it that) via employment in large-scale agricultural endeavors across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and Syria. Four “pilot demonstration” projects, designed as dramatic instances of technologically sophisticated land reclamation that would also employ large numbers of refugees, were mooted to begin “solving” the Palestinian refugee crisis while simultaneously stabilizing and modernizing a large regional economy through American commercial and technical ties:

The Mission suggested one [pilot project] in Syria, a project to reclaim the large swamps on the Orontes River in the Ghab Valley; a dam and all that goes with it in Jordan on the Wadi Zerka which flows out of the high desert plateaus of Jordan into the Jordan River from the East; and another is proposed for the Wadi Qilt which flows into the Jordan River from Arab-Palestine in the West. The Mission also suggested a complete engineering and geological survey of the beautiful and powerful Litani River in Lebanon to discover how that river should be developed as a whole, like the Tennessee River, for the benefit of the farms, villages, and cities of Lebanon … [These projects] will employ labor and lead to the permanent employment of other labor when completed, through the settlement in newly opened areas of families engaging in agricultural pursuits.⁴¹

The immediate institutional goal of such plans was to provide enough employment locally to cut refugees from the rations lists, thus saving the agency money and pointing the way to a future when UNRWA would be unnecessary. Initial calculations were that this first round of works projects in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt could drop some 100,000 people from UNRWA rolls.⁴² But it soon became clear that it was far cheaper to provide aid directly to refugees than to fund such major development projects; as Howard Kennedy himself told the General Assembly, “Sober appraisal must record that … it cost five times more to keep a man at work than on relief.”⁴³ Further, there was reluctance on all sides to participate; the refugees were suspicious, and Arab governments hosting them “could co-operate only if the projects undertaken would not conflict in any way with the General Assembly’s Resolution 194(III) safeguarding the refugees’ rights of repatriation or compensation.”⁴⁴

Still, UNRWA pressed on. In 1951 it proposed its own dissolution via a three-year plan to integrate refugees into their new host states and transfer responsibility for relief efforts to the host governments. With this goal in mind, in 1953 the UN came to an agreement with the Jordanian government to earmark $40 million of its $200 million “rehabilitation fund” to finance a major water and power development project in the Yarmouk and Jordan Valleys. With additional money from the US Operations Mission in Jordan, UNRWA hired a private engineering firm to complete a survey and estimate the costs of irrigating more than 500,000 dunums of land in the Jordan Valley and providing 167 kWh of power to the region.⁴⁵ Its officials also proposed plans for further water development, buildings, and highways, all to be built with refugee labor.⁴⁶ Other schemes mooted the same year included a massive proposal to irrigate part of the Sinai with water from the Nile, on which the newly established Nasserite government and UNRWA agreed to collaborate, and another in Gaza where UNRWA undertook to “reclaim certain sandy areas by afforestation,” planting four and a half million seedlings over the next few years.⁴⁷ Such projects, UNRWA estimated, could successfully remove between 150,000 and 200,000 refugees from the relief rolls. It also hoped that some local “self-support” projects—mostly offering loans to refugees to build small businesses—could turn refugees into settled, productive workers. The Jordan Development Bank, founded in 1951 with UNRWA assistance, made about $2.8 million in loans to 685 small enterprises; an individual grants program similarly offered funding for about 700 projects in “agriculture, housing, industry and trade,” as well as another eighty-four “family projects” in the Jordan valley.⁴⁸ But by 1955 the agency had spent only about $5.6 million on preliminary work (out of a projected budget of $200 million) with no prospects of being able to move forward on any of their main development proposals.⁴⁹ Two years later UNRWA was reporting that no progress had been made on either of the major irrigation projects proposed for Jordan and Egypt, “in the absence of acceptance by the governments involved.”⁵⁰

Of course, the barriers to this sort of development were not solely governmental. The refugees themselves largely refused to participate in this sort of externally funded labor, which they saw (quite correctly) as an underhanded effort to force their permanent resettlement without acknowledgement, recompense, or the restoration of their political rights. By the early 1950s UNRWA aid—and especially UNRWA registration and ration cards—had come to seem the only documentation of the losses Palestinians had suffered, and the only available path to their eventual recovery. Recognizing this reality, in 1955 UNRWA director Henry Labouisse told the General Assembly that the UN’s current approach was doomed to failure in the absence of refugee participation. “Until the refugees are given the opportunity of choosing between distinguishable alternatives, namely, on the one hand, repatriation the true nature of which is clearly understood at the time of choice and, on the other, the amount and form of the compensation that would be offered instead,” he wrote, “the unrequited demand for repatriation will continue to be an obstacle to the accomplishment of the objective of reintegration and self-support.”⁵¹

By the end of the 1950s, then, the United Nations, United States, and UNRWA alike had tacitly admitted the failure of these schemes to use refugees to spearhead a TVA-style redevelopment of the Arab Middle East. They blamed these failures on refugee and host government intransigence (“the restrictive and sometimes even uncooperative attitudes both on the part of some governments and many refugees”),⁵² while doubling down on the basic principle that refugee policy should insist on the reinvention of refugees as productive workers. In the General Assembly in 1959, the secretary-general declared that it was ever more necessary to commit investment funds to developing the industrial workforce across the Middle East, including the refugees: “The present refugee population represented a labour force of approximately 380,000 which would increase to 500,000 by 1970 … The more rapidly the refugees could be productively employed, the greater the contribution they would make to national income and thus also to the availability of domestic capital.”⁵³

Despite UNRWA’s evident failures, then, the idea of refugees as an untapped labor pool persisted. From the 1960s onward, even as UNRWA itself moved towards operating as a strictly limited aid organization with a focus on educational services, smaller and less formalized schemes to remove refugees to serve as labor migrants in various capacities around the Middle East and North Africa proliferated. In the early 1950s, sensing both a political and an economic opportunity in the vacuum left by UNRWA’s failures, Abd al-Aziz al-Saud (the ruler of Saudi Arabia) ordered Aramco to hire some thousand Palestinian refugees into its ranks, resulting in large-scale Saudi recruitment of Palestinians in Beirut and the hiring of 3,000 Palestinians in Aramco production and refinement.⁵⁴ UNRWA also retained a “Placement Service” not unlike the IRO’s employment matching scheme, which “maintained close contacts with government and other major employers in the Middle East and collated the resulting information on vacancies and job prospects.” It sent some thousands of workers—initially mainly teachers and medical personnel—to the Gulf and North Africa, and indeed beyond. “Although the Agency did not seek to involve itself in or to encourage emigration,” an official UNRWA history recorded, “it was able to perform a valuable ancillary service by meeting the entire or partial travel costs of refugees who had arranged work or settlement abroad, especially in the USA or Latin America”; it reported having sent about 3,000 workers to the Americas prior to its shutdown in 1961.⁵⁵ More locally, UNRWA tried hard to tie its much-vaunted educational services to opportunities for regional employment. The vocational training centers established at Kalandia, Gaza City, and Beit Hanoun, and eventually expanded into Lebanon and Syria, shaped their offerings around the results of UNRWA surveys about local labor needs and markets.

Increasingly, though, host governments were facing their own employment issues; and from the mid-1950s they were already working with UNRWA not to provide but to restrict employment, refusing work permits to refugees and constructing a regime of aid designed to confine and enclose refugee populations. The makeshift tent camps established during and after the war were now made into more or less permanent settlements, the main goal of which was to close down refugee attempts to move around in search of their homes, property, or relatives. In Jordan, the Hashemite monarchy instituted a punishment of six months’ imprisonment for this offence.⁵⁶ In Lebanon, refugees were subject to fines for trying to move around the country, even from camp to camp, and endured all sorts of immobilizing regimes from curfews to police repression.⁵⁷ In Gaza, the Egyptian government established military rule and refused to allow refugees to travel into Egypt proper. It was in no one’s interest, apparently, to allow Palestinian refugees even a modicum of freedom of movement or unmediated access to a regional job market.

Facing this reality, UNRWA itself gradually came to decide that the primary rationale of its educational program was not to prepare refugees for jobs but to maintain and preserve a distinctly Palestinian form of exile. By the early 1980s, the organization was self-reporting that although its schools worked towards making refugees self-supporting, it had another, equally central purpose: “The preservation of the cultural identity of a displaced and dispersed people.”⁵⁸ Such a vision reflected a shift in personnel, with UNRWA’s staff increasingly composed of the refugees themselves; it also reflected a shift in host governments’ expectations and fears. With financial support for massive works projects withdrawn, the rise of domestic unemployment as a primary political challenge for postcolonial governments from Syria to Egypt, and refugees’ insistence on retaining their claims to their homeland and their nationhood undiminished, UNRWA’s new raison d’être of preserving Palestinian national culture and political claims rather than ensuring local economic and social integration represented a tough bargain struck by a new generation of actors on all sides.⁵⁹ In essence, UNRWA was allowed to commit to the long-term maintenance of Palestinian nationalism in return for enforcing an indefinite confinement-in-exile.

It was a bargain its American funders were happy to take. While many US officials were disappointed in the collapse of their original grandiose development plans, the assurance of more or less permanent confinement had now come to seem a crucial and valuable outcome in itself. As UNRWA’s own representatives put it, “There would appear to be little doubt that the services which UNRWA has rendered, with the co-operation and assistance of the host Governments, have contributed to maintaining the precarious stability of the area, and perhaps to the creation of a climate which may enable the forces which are shaping the future of the Middle East to work in a more orderly, evolutionary manner.”⁶⁰ In other words, even if they were not to become self-supporting productive workers after all, the active containment of refugees remained a crucial element of the rapidly developing American economic and political relationships with postcolonial governments across the Middle East. By 1961, the State Department was explaining its financial backing for UNRWA by pointing out that at a cost of nine cents a day the organization had been “remarkably successful in keeping the potentially explosive refugee problem under control” across the region.⁶¹ The American head of UNRWA John Davis perhaps put it most clearly: “UNRWA was one of the prices—and perhaps the cheapest—that the international community was paying for not having been able to solve with equity the political problems of the refugees.” He added, “It was surely well worth the cost.”⁶²

The Impending Cold War and the Racialized Question of Refugee Definition

It was not until 1951 that the UN ratified its Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which formally asserted the basic international principle of non-refoulement: that is, the right of refugees not to be forcibly returned to their countries. The convention defined who qualified for this protection very specifically: anyone who “as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”⁶³ In other words, only those displaced by the war (in practice, mostly those displaced in Europe) were eligible for this new form of international protection.

The idea of restricting the formal category of refugee was of course not new; the League had long ago insisted that “refugee” was a specific label applying to particular populations rather than all displaced people, and the UN’s new definition represented a kind of continuity with these earlier, heavily circumscribed definitions of the “refugee.” But it also clearly reflected the emerging imperatives of the Western bloc as the Cold War took shape. The Soviet Union, furious about the resettlement of displaced people whom it wanted repatriated, understood this definition—with its central concept of “persecution”—as a rhetorical and legal weapon squarely directed at the communist world. As legal scholar Guy Goodwin-Gill has written, “Against the Western view of the refugee as someone in flight from persecution stood that of the Soviets: You can only be a refugee from fascism, the USSR is not fascist, therefore anyone who flees or will not return is not a refugee, but a spy, saboteur, traitor, or criminal.”⁶⁴ Soviet anger against UNRRA and then its subsequent refusal to participate in the IRO stemmed from a sense—arguably not entirely incorrect—that Soviet repatriation “was being frustrated by the efforts of capitalist States in search of cheap, exploitable labour.”⁶⁵

Still, this strict delimitation of the “refugee” on the part of the UN and its main Western bloc showrunners had another, more important ramification: it prevented most migrants from across the globe from claiming refugee status and its associated internationally guaranteed rights, an imperative that would only become stronger as the dislocations of decolonization multiplied and proliferated. As one chronicler has written, the convention was a Cold War instrument “intended to be used by the Western states in dealing with arrivals from the East,” not for other types of displaced people.⁶⁶ Above all, the specifics of the 1951 Refugee Convention ensured that most of its beneficiaries would be Europeans fleeing fascist and communist states and that victims of colonial displacements would find themselves relegated to other categories of migrant with many fewer benefits. In other words, the ad hoc category of the “Palestine refugee” established the premise that the emerging system of refugee aid could loudly proclaim the rights of the refugee to asylum and resettlement—casting a flattering light on the ethics of the capitalist world—while in practice denying such protections to expellees who fell outside this narrow set of parameters and could therefore be legally categorized in other ways. In the event, then, one of the accomplishments of the much-vaunted convention was to ensure that most of the world’s displaced people would fail to qualify for the rights it purported to guarantee.

The near-simultaneity of the European and Palestinian refugee crises turned up a crucial, central new idea for dealing with the world’s displaced: it would be possible to maintain the humanitarian frame epitomized by the 1951 Refugee Convention while also limiting its reach by making convenient distinctions—political, economic, legal—among different kinds of refugees. The idea of a separate category of “Palestine refugee”—eligible for care, aid, and short-term menial employment but not permanent asylum, political advocacy, or legal protection—provided a crucial procedural example for the modern refugee regime’s upcoming struggles over how to deal with nonwhite refugees displaced by decolonization. It was a profoundly useful workaround; for as the postwar negotiations around the question of displacement had clearly demonstrated, the primary requirement of this new international refugee regime would be that it not offer too many rights to too many people. Through the ingenious mechanism of categorical distinctions among the displaced, the emerging racialized international refugee regime could claim the moral high ground while remaining cheap, efficient, and protective of Cold War client governments as well as their superpower patrons.

If the populations confined under this new regime could be used even occasionally as cheap labor regionally, so much the better; and indeed, the idea of refugee employment abroad would continue to be a prominent feature of UNRWA’s approach across the coming decades. But by the time its leadership abandoned its TVA-style works projects, anxieties about scarcity of employment and refugee threats to local labor markets in their host countries—always a threat, but previously in the background of superpower imaginaries—were beginning to play a more significant role in policy conversations. It was starting to seem that domestic labor markets in the West were not after all the only ones that required protection from an influx of refugees. Internationalist refugee policy over the coming decades would continue to advocate for refugee employment, especially in places no one wanted to go and jobs no one wanted to do; but in this new era of decolonization, automation, and migration, it was increasingly starting to seem that perhaps the real problem of work—even the far-flung menial variety—was that there was too little of it to go around.

8

The Politics of Confinement

Refugee Aid in the Age of Decolonization

By the 1960s, plans to deploy refugees as low-wage workers on grandiose projects of neocolonial developmentalism were disintegrating worldwide. The economics of refugee resettlement were also in flux. For various reasons, private corporations in search of cheap migrant labor had more and more pools of workers from which to choose; and many were coming to view refugees, with their ties (however weak) to the international system and their putative (however rarely exercised) legal safeguards, as less desirable employees than the rising numbers of migrant laborers who had no such claim on international protection. If it wanted to maintain its role into the postwar period, then, the international refugee regime—now taking a new institutional form as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—would have to look for different ways to convince the world that it had a viable approach to the ongoing problem of mass displacement, now increasingly centered on the decolonizing world.

In its early experiments beyond Europe—first in Hong Kong and then in North Africa—the UNHCR worked out a new model of assistance to decolonial refugees that strongly resembled that of the UNRWA regime for Palestinians: one that structured material aid around the premise of refugee containment, with the goal of placating both regional host states and migrant-wary Western powers. Now, even as the language of refugee “self-sufficiency” borrowed from earlier work schemes continued to saturate the discourse of international aid agencies and NGOs, the fledgling UNHCR had mostly to demonstrate its capacity to prevent people displaced by decolonization from moving around in search of work. Gradually, then, a new international refugee landscape emerged featuring a two-tier system of refugee aid: tiny numbers of mostly white European dissident asylum seekers who could be accommodated in the Global North, and enormous numbers of Middle Eastern, African, and Asian refugees theoretically awaiting some kind of eventual repatriation and in the meantime offered material aid premised on physical confinement. In other words, it was during these years that the agency began to construct a recognizably contemporary landscape of refugeedom: one in which international aid agencies publicly declared their commitment to refugee education, gainful employment, and economic autonomy, while refugees themselves were increasingly hemmed in by camps, border guards, checkpoints, and barbed wire.

The New UNHCR

When the IRO dissolved itself in 1952 it still had not managed to disgorge all of Europe’s remaining refugees from their increasingly indefensible wartime encampments; but public and diplomatic commitment to the project was waning fast. ILO attempts to organize some sort of international migration authority (culminating in a conference at Naples in 1951) were scuttled by a United States unwilling to participate in a body that also included communist countries, and anyway suspicious of any hint of infraction on its own sovereign rights vis-à-vis immigration. Reflecting this diminution of interest as well as American resistance, the IRO’s formal successor was one of the UN’s tiniest and most underfunded organizations. The new United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had a miniscule budget of about $300,000, a distinct comedown from the IRO’s previous annual budget of some $150 million. Its first director, a Dutch former refugee and resistance fighter named Gerrit van Heuven Goedhart, recalled in later years that when he arrived at his new offices in Geneva in 1951 he found little more than “three empty rooms and a secretary.”¹

Further, the UNHCR’s foundation met with distinct hostility from an American government seeking to render it irrelevant with alternative migration schemes that could be directly controlled from Washington. In 1951—the same year as the UNHCR’s founding—the United States passed a Mutual Security Appropriations Act that provided $10 million towards some kind of alternative international refugee settlement office. In December of that year, the United States and Belgium spearheaded a conference on the problem of the remaining refugees in Brussels, which established a new Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, PICMME. Noting that “there exists a problem of surplus population and refugees in certain countries of Europe, while certain overseas countries offer opportunities for the orderly absorption of additional population, [and] that the problem is of such magnitude as to present a serious obstacle to economic viability and co-operation in Europe,” PICMME’s founding document declared that “international financing of European emigration should contribute not only to solving the problem of population in Europe but also stimulate the creation of new economic opportunities in countries lacking manpower”—yet another iteration of the old idea.² The next year, the “provisional” label was dropped and PICMME became the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), which competed successfully with the UNHCR for successor status to the IRO (even acquiring the latter’s fleet of ships) and spent the next decade organizing both refugee and labor migration from Europe to American satisfaction.

As an institution, ICEM carefully and deliberately elided the distinction between refugees and other kinds of migrants that the UN had just spent so much time and energy drawing, and continued to promote employment for select eligible refugees and migrants as its primary “solution” to the problem of displacement. (This mission is still evident in its current incarnation as the International Organization for Migration, whose official motto is “Making Migration Work for All.”)³ In language reminiscent of the M Project, ICEM advocated a “scientific” method of refugee resettlement: “Each group of potential migrants must be studied to determine what potential area of resettlement is best suited to receive that particular kind of people. Each under-populated country must be studied to learn what sort of people it could best and most easily absorb into its national life.”⁴ In most cases refugees were expected to partially subsidize their own resettlement, if necessary through a commitment to repay ICEM loans for transport and initial costs. This was understood as both a practical requirement and a moral duty; ICEM contributors felt, as one observer reported, that “the obligation to repay a passage loan is salutary for the migrant.”⁵ With employment as both the primary criterion and the main organizing principle of resettlement, then, it was possible to treat refugees as just another form of migrant. “The Governments represented in Brussels,” one chronicler noted, “understood that the migration needs of refugees, migrants, and displaced persons were identical, and that a single Organization should be charged with their orderly and planned migration”—determined, almost without exception, with primary reference to immediate employability.⁶ It was a vision whose limitations van Heuven Goedhart, defending his organization against its competitor, was not slow to point out. “It has not been proved that migration removes that part of the population which in fact is surplus,” he told the Brussels conference. “Opportunities for resettlement have tended to move the young and able-bodied while leaving behind the dependents.”⁷

Nevertheless, ICEM—with its ever-so-palatable approach of only servicing refugees who could demonstrate their employability—significantly overshadowed the early UNHCR in its budget, resources, and visibility. And there were other American-led refugee schemes as well, designed less to “solve” any extant refugee issues than to foster the political possibilities the Truman and Eisenhower administrations sensed in the heavily publicized acceptance of political dissidents from Communist bloc countries. As Truman declared forcefully, “We want to stretch a helping hand, to save those who have managed to flee into Western Europe, to succor those who are brave enough to escape from barbarism.”⁸ The US Escapee Program, begun in 1952, resettled some 84,000 people in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada and moved more than 300,000 more to Europe and the Middle East.⁹ This program—designed as both a public relations strategy and a potential recruitment ground for anti-Soviet intelligence officers and propagandists—built on earlier practices of drawing legal, political, and practical distinctions between white Europeans seeking refuge from the Soviet Union and its satellites and nonwhite refugees from decolonizing parts of the globe. “For the time being,” its founding documents instructed, “Department considers no useful purpose is served by publicizing program to audiences in areas such as India and Pakistan in the Middle East and Hong Kong and Korea in the Far East, which contain large numbers of refugees, who, while not admissible for escapee aid, nevertheless regard themselves as bona fide refugees worthy of assistance.” It added, “We should emphasize the humanitarian aspects of assistance and should avoid use of materials suggesting that program may have other than humanitarian purposes”—that is, the purposes of Cold War propaganda.¹⁰

As labor needs continued to dictate ICEM’s resettlement work and indeed most Western countries’ approaches to migration through the first half of the 1950s, the sidelined UNHCR struggled to find destinations for the unemployable and unwanted remaining “displaced persons” still imprisoned in camps across Europe. Its attempts at refugee resettlement tended to meet with opposition from both the United States, which generally did not want to take in nonworkers, and the Soviet Union, which objected equally to Western-encouraged migration of Soviet dissidents and to the long-established Western practice of taking able-bodied refugees to fill out global capitalist labor markets and leaving the rest to rot.¹¹ Nevertheless, thanks to van Heuven Goedharts’s savvy exploitation of early Cold War anxieties, the UNHCR gradually emerged as an organization to be reckoned with. Its receipt of nearly $3 million from the (American) Ford Foundation in 1952, and its subsequent high-profile contribution to refugee assistance and emergency housing in the Berlin crisis the following year, both helped to soften American attitudes. Then, too, the highly publicized successes of ICEM and the Escapee Program led the new Eisenhower administration, taking the reins in 1953, to realize how well tales of refugees fleeing Eastern European Communist regimes played with domestic electorates and to wonder if the UNHCR might actually represent a new and bigger stage for this sort of performative Cold War humanitarianism. Eisenhower supported the UNHCR’s bid for a refugee “emergency fund” the following year, with an inchoate sense of the organization as a potential ally in the emerging Cold War battle for hearts and minds.

In 1956 the UNHCR had a chance to advance this argument further when the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary triggered a mass exodus of some 200,000 Hungarians into Austria and Yugoslavia. Austrian officials, overwhelmed by the numbers and demands of the refugees, appealed to the UNHCR for assistance, and van Heuven Goedhart and his Swiss successor, Auguste Lindt, were not slow to see an opportunity. Their coordinated relief effort involving a number of different aid organizations and NGOs carefully demonstrated, as one chronicler has it, “that [the UNHCR] was the only agency capable of coordinating both international refugee relief and the collections of funds for emergency material assistance.”¹² It was the perfect crisis for the organization to win over its erstwhile enemy; from an American perspective, rescuing large numbers of white Europeans fleeing an oppressive and violent Communist military effort constituted both a justifiable humanitarian outlay and a promising new public relations front in the unfolding Cold War.

The Hungarian crisis opened up further opportunities for the UNHCR beyond the acquisition of American support. The organization’s reach was technically still constrained by the definitions of the 1951 Refugee Convention, restricting assistance to those displaced by “events occurring in Europe before 1951.” In the immediate term Lindt got around this limitation by making the ingenious if mildly tendentious argument that the Hungarian crisis was a consequence of the previous decade’s war, and so its victims were de facto casualties of pre-1951 events; but it was clear that he and his colleagues had in mind the permanent expansion of the UNHCR’s mandate, well beyond this single moment. To accomplish this it would be necessary to convince the United States and its allies that UNHCR refugee assistance could support the Western Cold War cause without threatening states’ immigration controls or disrupting their labor markets. A thorough dispersion of the refugees was key to ensuring this outcome; the UNHCR convinced thirty-seven different countries to take in varying numbers of refugees (the United States admitted 37,000) from Austria and Yugoslavia, and the UNHCR’s deputy high commissioner James Read cautiously noted a new principle of resettlement at work: “Considering the whole of Western Europe as territory of first asylum.”¹³

Eventually, the UNHCR returned some 20,000 Hungarian refugees to their homes and resettled the remainder in the surrounding European countries, the Dominions, and the United States. In a preview of things to come, the American resettlement met with a degree of domestic protest: one Black voter wrote furiously to Eisenhower that he “had a nerve to bring all the Hungarians over here and my people are begging for jobs, schooling and even in some places food. I have seen some hire these displaced persons before hiring a qualified Negro.”¹⁴ The brief midcentury moment in which jobs were going begging was perhaps not quite over, but its sunset was on the horizon; and though the specific Cold War context of the Hungarian crisis meant that Western governments had been willing and able to offer permanent resettlement to its white, European victims, the UNHCR was beginning to think that the resettlement-through-employment model beloved of the IRO was essentially untenable. In order to continue to exist as an institution with the support of the United States and its allies, it would need to find a way of offering aid to the displaced without asking its sponsors to open their doors and their labor markets, especially to the large numbers of refugees who were beginning to appear outside Europe.

And indeed, the next major postwar refugee crisis happened far from Hungary: in Hong Kong, where some 700,000 refugees had fled war, famine, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. By 1956, displaced migrants represented a full third of Hong Kong’s population. The non-communist bloc refused to name them as refugees on the grounds that such an acknowledgement would irreparably damage relations with the People’s Republic, by naming that government as the refugees’ persecutor. The Communist bloc also refused to recognize the migrants as refugees on the grounds that they were citizens of the new Chinese state and should return home. Racial politics further complicated matters; if public support for the entrance of Hungarians to the United States and its allies had been lukewarm, the idea of admitting large numbers of Chinese refugees via Hong Kong met with a positively chilly reception. Race-based exclusion laws had a long history in the United States, which had restricted immigration from Asia and especially China since the nineteenth century even as it relied heavily on Chinese labor for various projects of imperial expansion and industrial development. The United States would formally maintain Chinese exclusion laws until 1965.¹⁵ (An earlier group of Chinese refugees, entering the United States from Mexico in 1917, were allowed to remain in the country only as unfree labor contracted to the US military.)¹⁶ Efforts to convince countries who had taken in Hungarians without (much) protest to now admit Chinese refugees were almost completely unsuccessful. Edvard Hambro, the head of the UNHCR Survey Mission in Hong Kong, reported regretfully that anti-Chinese feeling was strong throughout the Western hemisphere and that there was “a very great reluctance to accept Chinese immigrants anywhere in the world.”¹⁷

Facing the failure of a Hungary-style mass resettlement scheme, Hambro next explored the possibility of reviving an M Project–style distribution of refugee laborers into “underpopulated” colonial territory for the purposes of industrial development. He went some distance to develop and promote a plan to resettle 7,000 Chinese refugees in British North Borneo, where they would serve to redress what he called a “shortage of manpower” as contract labor. Similar plans envisioned placing Hong Kong refugees in British Honduras (Belize) as labor on planned sugar, cocoa, and coffee plantations. Having failed to sell these plans to the relevant British colonial authorities, who feared communist elements among the refugees, Hambro would have to turn to other approaches. It was no longer so easy to suggest shipping refugees to colonial territories to serve as cheap industrial labor; labor was easier to come by, imperial domination was proving fragile, and faith in massive projects of top-down industrialization was beginning to falter.

Despite all the difficulties, UNHCR officials were anxious to claim some kind of role vis-à-vis Hong Kong’s hundreds of thousands of displaced people. In November of 1957 they convinced the General Assembly to agree in principle that the problem of displacement in Hong Kong fell under the moral purview, if not the legal mandate, of the UNHCR and that the UN should support relief efforts there both politically and financially. The technicality that allowed for this expansion of the UNHCR’s work became known as the “good offices” exception: the high commissioner could look beyond his formal mandate to use his powers as he saw fit, in emergent and pressing situations of mass displacement beyond postwar Europe. “In effect,” writes historian Peter Gatrell, “this meant that the refugees could be supported in situ but not resettled.”¹⁸ A new era of refugee policy was dawning, whose principles and practices would be forged in the fire of one of the century’s most brutal wars of decolonization.

Immobilizing Refugees: The Test Case of Algeria

Algeria, occupied by the French since the 1830s and the site of a large and long-established European settler colonial community known as the pieds-noirs (“black feet”), saw massive anti-imperial nationalist organization in the years after the Second World War. In 1954 the Front de libération nationale (FLN, the main Algerian nationalist party opposing French rule) launched its first major anticolonial bombing campaign. The French military mobilized a massive military response in support of both its ongoing imperial claims and Algeria’s European settler population, using conscripted soldiers for what it called “police” operations. The next year French troops began a campaign to break up the FLN’s supply and recruitment grids by driving Algerian villagers and nomadic communities off their land, a goal accomplished by bulldozing villages, torching fields, and gunning down farm animals from military airplanes.¹⁹ Colonial soldiers expelled the surviving villagers from these newly declared zones interdites (forbidden zones) to what the government called centres de regroupement, developmentalist villages encased in barbed wire and guarded by colonial police. By 1961, the year before the war finally ended, something like half of Algeria’s population—some three and a half million people—had been removed from their homes and cut off from any means of self-support.²⁰

It was in this context that Algeria began to see a new kind of colonial refugee crisis. As early as 1954, tens of thousands of villagers had already begun to flee the regroupement campaigns for Tunisia. In early 1958 the French army began to enforce a no-man’s-land along the border and “evacuated” some 180,000 residents from the northern reaches of Constantine, substantially worsening the situation. Faced with intensifying colonial clearing-out operations featuring mass murder and the flattening of entire villages, more and more Algerians fled: “Menaced and traced like wild beasts by General Massu’s and Colonel Bigeard’s paratroopers,” as the Tunisian government declared, condemning in no uncertain terms the “torture, humiliation, shame, fires and death spread by the French occupation army.”²¹ By the end of the year Tunisia was hosting some 100,000 Algerian refugees, and Morocco too was beginning to see an influx of displaced people streaming into its eastern regions.

The postcolonial Tunisian government headed by Habib Bourguiba had already called for assistance from the UNHCR, the only standing UN agency still dealing with mass displacement. (ICEM was still operating, but mainly as a “migration” agency.) Lindt—seeing an opportunity to solidify the UNHCR’s expansion into the non-European world that he had begun in Hong Kong—engaged France, Britain, and the United States in conversation about the possibility of a relief scheme. The American response was unreservedly positive; Britain was anxious to balance its competing commitments to France and to the Arab world; and France reluctantly agreed not to object publicly, though it also looked for ways to displace responsibility for the refugees somewhere other than on UNHCR.²² Proceeding cautiously, then, Lindt appointed a Norwegian former resistance fighter named Arnold Rørholt to travel to Tunisia and conduct an inquiry into the possibilities for UNHCR assistance, in consultation with Tunisian authorities and other organizations operating on the ground. In May UNHCR began to collaborate in a “non-operational” way with the League of Red Cross Societies to provide goods and services to Algerians camping in shantytowns along the border.

As in the Hungarian case the office initially worked informally, providing aid without a specific articulation of individual refugee eligibility and without an official expansion of its mandate. But by December of 1958, with some 200,000 Algerian refugees already in Tunisia and Morocco and more coming all the time, the UN made refugee assistance in North Africa a formal part of the UNHCR’s directive: “The General Assembly … recommends the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to continue his action on behalf of the refugees in Tunisia on a substantial scale and to undertake similar action in Morocco.”²³ The following year another resolution allowed the UNHCR new latitude to determine who qualified for its services, without reference to the prior legal architecture: “[The General Assembly] authorizes the High Commissioner, in respect of refugees who do not come within the competence of the United Nations, to use his good offices in the transmission of contributions designed to provide assistance to these refugees.”²⁴ For the second time in less than two years, this new “good offices” frame established international refugee assistance in the decolonizing world as a formal element of postwar internationalism.

The actualities of UNHCR involvement in Tunisia and Morocco transformed the basic provision of food and supplies into a campaign of refugee documentation and incarceration, intended to keep the refugees alive while restricting their movement through explosive border areas and thereby ensuring that they could not serve as conduits of supplies, men, or information to Algerian resistance fighters. As in Hong Kong, the UNHCR identified these Algerian refugees as legally distinct from the earlier European variety: entitled to material assistance in place, but not eligible for asylum or resettlement. As High Commissioner Felix Schnyder put it, there was a difference between “new” and “old” refugees. “Now that the big assistance programmes for European refugees are nearing completion,” he told the General Assembly in 1961, “legal protection, as defined and elaborated in the Statute of the High Commissioner’s Office, is on the way to becoming once more our main concern so far as these refugees are concerned. On the other hand, the problem raised by the new groups of refugees to which my attention was drawn some time ago, is essentially, at the moment, a problem of material assistance and not of legal protection.”²⁵ Under his guidance, the UNHCR was creating two types of refugees: some (largely white and European) who required legal assistance with the processes of asylum and resettlement, and others (largely nonwhite and non-European) who constituted a security threat in situations of decolonial tension. It was a crucial innovation that recalled not the platitudes of the Refugee Convention but the practicalities of the UNRWA regime and the distinctiveness of the legal category of the “Palestine refugee.”

The UNHCR’s experiment in North Africa also modeled a new way of thinking about decolonial refugee employment. Its border camps became sites for a variety of standalone work programs—not because of a local demand for labor, which was essentially nonexistent, but to counteract the perception that refugees were sitting in indolence. “In order to counteract the effects of idleness,” the UNHCR reported, “a number of small pilot projects, such as sewing rooms, mat-weaving and other schemes calculated to provide refugees with work opportunities have been started”—all practices that would continue to characterize UNHCR relief efforts for many decades to come.²⁶ Employment had been a centerpiece of the refugee regime for so long that it had now come to represent a good in itself irrespective of its purpose, outcome, or long-term viability. In North Africa, it became clear that its current goal was to make it look as if refugees were engaged in productive enterprise, rather than providing actual workers for the global labor market.

Further, in the absence of the kind of global labor placement schemes in which they might have been placed a decade earlier, the UNHCR decided that Algerian refugees would eventually have to be returned to their country of origin. The League of Red Cross Societies estimated in January of 1962 that there were some 300,000 people receiving rations in Tunisia and Morocco; in the summer, following the signing of the Évian Accords that set the terms of Algerian independence, they would be required to return to Algeria. In the event, some 200,000 refugees found themselves subject to “repatriation”—a number that included people who had inhabited the border areas on a nomadic basis and had no clear national affiliation. The UNHCR mobilized all its partners and worked with the ALN (Armée de libération nationale, the military wing of the FLN) on the logistics of the scheme, which included refugee transport across demilitarized zones strewn with unexploded mines.²⁷ Once they had delivered their charges the UNHCR workers left tents and rations for the refugees and quickly withdrew, leaving postwar Algerians to reconstruct their destroyed country in a context of general dispossession, destruction, and impoverishment. “It rapidly became apparent,” one Red Cross official noted in a tone of regret a year later, “that [the refugees’] fate could not be separated from that of the two million displaced and regrouped people who likewise converged on their douars [villages] of origin, nor from the mass of the needy population whose standard of living had dropped considerably following this prolonged conflict.”²⁸

Nevertheless, the UNHCR declared the campaign a resounding success and made plans for its expansion. “If the planned rate of repatriation is maintained, a permanent solution of the most satisfactory kind will have been found for a problem which, for a number of years, has been a source of serious concern,” the UNHCR representative told the General Assembly. “Since then, [the High Commissioner] has to deal with another problem in Africa—that of the approximately 140,000 refugees from Rwanda. In all three cases it has been possible, by immediate and suitable action, to meet the urgent needs of the refugees and, at the same time, to encourage the steps required for the speedy implementation of constructive solutions likely to lead to a final settlement of these problems … on the principle that emergency measures should be of a marginal and temporary nature and that the refugees should be helped to become self-supporting pending their return to their own country.”²⁹ In other words, the ideal international solution to the problem presented by decolonial refugees would be confining them collectively, with a view to eventually returning them to their just-decolonized country and removing all external support.

As a coda, it is perhaps worth noting how this story played out for those who left Algeria for metropolitan France. The pieds-noirs and the many Algerian Jews who decamped to France in the aftermath of the war were in the main classed as “repatriates” rather than refugees, and were quickly integrated into domestic housing, welfare systems, and labor markets at enormous cost to the state. By 1970, one historian reports, “an estimated ten billion francs had been spent on monthly benefits and social aid, alongside another twelve billion francs on diverse grants and subsidies and a further four billion on aid loans.”³⁰ By contrast, the harkis (Muslim Algerians whose service as French colonial soldiers rendered them eligible to migrate to France) often received the designation of refugee. Upon arrival in France some 42,000 (out of a harki migrant population of somewhere between 65,000 and 100,000) found themselves imprisoned, often in old camps that had interned refugees and prisoners during the Second World War: Rivesaltes, Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise, La Rye Vigéant. In 1974, more than a decade after the harkis’ arrival in France, 16,000 of them were still there.³¹

The 1967 Protocol and the Development of Two Tracks of Refugee

In 1967, now secure in the knowledge that the international refugee regime had the capacity to simultaneously offer aid and ensure refugee containment in the Global South, the UN decided to permanently eliminate the need for the “good offices” exception by expanding its formal definition of refugees. The new “Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees” retained the language of the 1951 convention—continuing to define a refugee as someone prevented from returning to a home country by a “well-founded fear of persecution”—but removed the earlier convention’s limitation of the refugee definition to those displaced prior to 1951, in Europe or elsewhere. Henceforth, the UNHCR’s purview would extend across the globe and apply to all circumstances of refugee displacement irrespective of moment or place of origin.

It was a change driven above all by the organization’s need to demonstrate and establish its own relevance. The UNHCR had tried hard to involve itself (still under the “good offices” clause) in the mass exoduses of the 1960s that took place throughout Africa: Angolan refugees in the Congo, Ghanaians in Togo, and Rwandans in Uganda, Burundi, the Congo, and Tanganyika, to name a few.³² Following on the approach taken in Tunisia and Morocco, these campaigns emphasized material assistance via encampment and internment over legal assistance or the possibility of resettlement; as the UNHCR’s official chronicler Louise Holborn put it, the organization “was compelled to create responses different from its work in Europe.”³³ To its recipients and the states hosting them this simultaneous provision of relief and internment appeared wholly inadequate, indicating the need for an alternative refugee regime run for and by African actors—ideally encompassing a much broader understanding of who qualified as a refugee. So, in 1964, the recently established Organization of African Unity (OAU) began work on a draft proposal for its own definition of and approach to refugees, dissenting significantly from the UNHCR’s narrow parameters.

By the time the OAU formally ratified its own refugee convention in 1969, its definition ran thus: “The term ‘refugee’ shall also apply to every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.”³⁴ Under the terms of this African convention, then, refugees did not have to establish an individual “fear of persecution” but merely be fleeing conditions of disorder or danger; refugee-generating events could include occupation and war as well as active persecution; and refugees did not need to demonstrate having unsuccessfully sought protection in their own country before looking elsewhere.³⁵ The UNHCR viewed this African attempt to create a more generous refugee regime for a context of decolonization with suspicion and a degree of dread. As refugee law scholar Sara Davies puts it, the perception that the UNHCR was essentially unable to operate outside Europe “had the potential to serve as a death knell.”³⁶

To survive, it would need to adapt. In 1966 the UNHCR appointed a new high commissioner, one Sadruddin Aga Khan: the French-born, American-educated son of the All-India Muslim League’s first president. He was all too aware of the UN’s highly racialized approach to the question of refugee rights, having witnessed its deliberate discounting of the 14 million displaced victims of South Asian partition as a mere domestic issue in which it could not intervene.³⁷ One of his first acts was to press for the renegotiation of the organization’s mandate, to erase the distinction between European and “Third World” refugees. “The Convention,” the new high commissioner declared, “had led to an unfortunate discrimination among the different groups of refugees, in particular with regard to the African refugees … contrary to the universal spirit of the Convention itself.”³⁸ By eliminating the European scope of the UNHCR’s mandate, the protocol consciously reduced the danger that alternative organizations like the OAU would take over the UNHCR’s role in Africa and elsewhere.

Still, it chose not to reconsider the basic definition of the refugee, with its emphasis on determining the status of individual refugees vis-à-vis the question of persecution. A UNHCR memorandum during the negotiations explicitly tagged the issue: “Recent experience of new refugee situations in Africa has shown that certain States may not, for various reasons, be able to resort to individual eligibility determination … [and] it might be of advantage if the existing definition were supplemented by certain criteria for the prima facie determination of such group eligibility”—in other words, the organization should consider allowing for mass eligibility without individual application and documentation. But the sponsoring states would hear of no such thing. They wanted eligibility (in the formal, legal sense that might permit migration and resettlement) to remain restricted and limited—something the UNHCR quietly acknowledged as a price of its own continued existence. It was most important, Sadruddin Aga Khan and his staff concluded, that “the new international instrument should be both simple and generally acceptable.”³⁹

Under the new protocol, then, the international refugee regime now firmly centered in the UNHCR was formally charged not with resettlement but with the joint provision of aid and containment for refugees across the globe. American observers, largely supportive of the UNHCR’s new mission, nevertheless recognized that it failed to achieve one of the primary Cold War–era goals of participation in the refugee regime: publicly presenting the United States as a magnanimous welcomer of the oppressed. At the domestic level, then, American administrations from Eisenhower forward began to construct a kind of parallel American refugee regime that would serve as an advertisement for American-led global capitalism without involving the UN or other international agencies. These programs privileged, initially, white European refugees from communism (beginning with Hungarians), but also eventually encompassed other refugees from areas of intense Cold War interest: most notably, the eventual mass resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in the United States in the late 1970s. “American leaders believed that refugees—especially those persons fleeing communism, the Soviets, or their allies—were living symbols of Soviet brutality and communism’s failure,” writes historian Carl Bon Tempo in his assessment of American refugee policy of the period. “Thus, refugee admissions struck a rhetorical blow against the Soviets and reminded the world of the United States’ unbending commitment to anticommunism and to winning the Cold War.”⁴⁰ But because this refugee policy was under strictly domestic control, it could be extremely selective about who was allowed in and under what circumstances.

Further, with the UNHCR guaranteeing that refugee issues would not spill over into American territory, these domestic admissions policies could build American credit for capitalist humanitarianism without fear of mass claims on asylum coming from decolonizing spaces. It was in this context, then, that the United States admitted some half a million refugees from Cuba between 1959 and 1973; continued to maintain an open-door policy for Soviet dissidents; and eventually allowed significant if not enormous numbers of Chilean and Indochinese refugees into the country in the 1970s. It was not until the Refugee Act of 1980 that the United States adopted a definition of refugee that did not mention communism—and even then the implementation of the act under Reagan continued to privilege applicants fleeing from the Soviet Union and its allies.⁴¹ The UNHCR’s containment of certain kinds of refugees, then, opened the door for the United States to construct a parallel system of admittance that advanced its cause vis-à-vis the USSR without the need to apply consistent standards of admission for refugees across the globe.

Such superpower machinations served to give institutional shape to what legal scholar B. S. Chimni calls the “myth of difference”: the idea that refugees from the decolonizing world represented a radically different phenomenon from the European variety. “What followed,” he notes caustically, “was the advice to reject the exilic bias of international refugee law as it was entirely unsuited for providing assistance and protection to refugees from the Third World.”⁴² Now, as labor needs across the globe shifted in ways inimical to refugee employment, the examples of Palestine and Algeria would become important models for a new mode of refugee aid organized around the principle of mass containment.

Replacing Refugee Workers: The Rise of Mass Labor Migration

The global labor market underwent dramatic changes in the 1960s as companies (and countries) turned increasingly to the recruitment of migrants on temporary contracts to bolster domestic economies and keep the good times rolling, without the necessity of keeping people on indefinitely. In some instances this shift was in direct reaction to the politics of refugee employment—for instance, in the emerging petrostates of the Arabian Gulf, where Palestinian refugees who had filled labor gaps in the 1950s and early 1960s were now proving politically inconvenient as they began to lobby for workers’ rights and political representation. But in a more basic way, it was becoming apparent to both governments and corporations across North America, Europe, and the Middle East that refugees were no longer the cheapest option for labor, either economically or politically. International refugee protection might be weak and limited, but the rise of mass labor migration meant the provision of a new class of workers who had no legal protections at all—and were all the more desirable for it.

In Germany, for instance, refugees from East Germany made up a large percentage of the country’s employed migrants in the early 1950s, but recruitment in foreign labor markets expanded dramatically following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The German labor office now established recruitment centers across the Mediterranean that accepted fees from domestic employers to find willing workers and (shades of earlier refugee employment matching schemes) put them through health, criminal, and psychological fitness testing before providing them with guest worker papers. The federal government also signed labor supply agreements with a number of other countries in the 1960s: Greece, Yugoslavia, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia, and of course Turkey. By 1961 it had recruited some half a million migrant workers from these places; by 1966 it was 1.3 million; and by 1970 there were 3 million foreign residents living in Germany.⁴³ If refugees had been under only very limited forms of protection, these “guest workers” had almost no rights at all. (A law of 1965 put it in the clearest possible terms: “Foreigners enjoy all basic rights, except the basic rights of freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of movement and free choice of occupation, place of work and place of education, and protection from extradition abroad.”)⁴⁴ “Guest workers,” it was transpiring, were cheaper and less politically combustible than refugees; they were available in greater numbers; and it was possible, even easy, to remove them as necessary.

In Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, another place where refugee employment had been high in the 1950s, the fragility of the government and the ready availability of disposable labor now combined to push Palestinian refugees (as well as migrants from other parts of the Arab Middle East) out of the market and out of the country. Post-1948 Saudi Arabia relied heavily on Palestinian laborers in its port facilities at Dammam, its refineries at Ras Tanura, and its railway between Dammam and Riyadh, which alone employed some 15,000 migrant workers. Aramco too had actively recruited among Palestinian refugees from 1949 onward, hiring some 3,000 people—mostly as menial laborers but sometimes also as foremen —over the next few years.⁴⁵ In the 1950s, though, Aramco became the target of what one historian calls the “most important round of worker mobilization in Saudi history.”⁴⁶ In early 1953 an Iraqi–Saudi communist named Abd al-Aziz al-Sunayd collaborated with Palestinian communist organizers to found a workers’ committee within the company, triggering a series of worker actions that lasted, on and off, for several years. Strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts sought not only to improve wages and working and living conditions but also to end anti-Shia discrimination, force the distribution of oil resources, and shutter the American air base at Dhahran. In other words, some of these demands were local and economic; but others were regional and political, driven by the involvement and influence of migrant Palestinians and Egyptians for whom worker demands for better pay and better conditions were inseparable from the political goals of a broader pan-Arab movement.

The monarchy, increasingly nervous about the political consequences of migrant activism on Saudi soil, began to target Palestinian refugees for arrest and removal. In 1954 and 1955 it imprisoned and deported hundreds of Palestinian workers for their political engagement, and began to reduce the numbers of Palestinians allowed to work in higher-level jobs within Aramco and other Saudi companies. Throughout the 1960s, although Aramco continued to rely on migrant labor from around the Arab world—including Palestinians—its relationship with refugee workers was markedly cooler than in previous decades. In the 1970s the Saudi government deliberately encouraged hiring from elsewhere in the world; and by the 1980s its policy of “replacement migration” actively sought to replace Arab workers with Asian ones, who were, as one study suggests, viewed as “less expensive to employ, easier to lay off … and easily manageable.”⁴⁷ Between 1975 and 1995, the proportion of Arab workers in Saudi Arabia dropped from 91 to 30 percent of the workforce.⁴⁸

Across the world, then, refugees were increasingly considered too dangerous to hire; and replacements were more and more readily available. The global rise in labor migration, particularly to places like the Gulf whose intensive labor needs and small local populations had seemed ideally suited to refugee employment in earlier decades, dealt a new blow to the idea that the refugee problem could be solved by matching displaced migrants with far-flung, low-paid jobs. Ironically, the minimal protections provided to refugees—for instance, the internationalist guarantee of non-refoulement—served to make them less desirable in this brave new world in which countries sought laborers they could easily deport should domestic employment markets demand it. Even for countries like Saudi Arabia, which like most of the rest of its Middle Eastern neighbors had never signed on to the Refugee Convention or its extension, refugees’ regional political knowledge and access to familial, social, and political connections across the region had the potential to attract an unwelcome degree of attention and enjoy an equally unwelcome modicum of protection.⁴⁹ Further, technological acceleration in the realms of automation and division of work was now meeting with the phenomenon of urban flight in many “Third World” countries, resulting not only in a reduction of necessary skill level in much industrial work but also large numbers of peasants streaming into cities in search of work just as governments restricted unionization, and possibilities for easy and cheap shipping and communication blossomed. In short, as one chronicler of this moment reported, it seemed that “metropolitan employers, having been frustrated in their countries in fully exploiting imported migrant labour, had alighted on another cohort of helots in the periphery whom they would now be able to deploy directly, rather than by importing their labour-power.”⁵⁰ In this new “international division of labor,” as the political scientists of the moment liked to put it, refugees were—ironically—too burdened by their admittedly minimal protections and privileges to represent desirable employees.

Penning In Refugees: The Politics of Containment

What then was left to do? Refugees, especially decolonial refugees, were still present—indeed, in higher numbers than ever. The developed world still broadly considered them a threat to the stability of labor markets, a trend now extending to governments in the Global South as well. A few could be admitted to the United States and other Western countries as evidence of the American moral high ground in the Cold War; but the numbers had to be small and controllable (and, preferably, mostly involve white refugees). International refugee policy therefore began to double down on the principle of confinement; and the modern refugee system, already fairly practiced at keeping the displaced penned in, would now develop into a fully fledged carceral regime.

The Palestinian case, always a kind of bellwether for international refugee politics, indicated the degree to which this principle of refugee containment now trumped all other considerations. In the 1970s, Palestinian activists—radicalized by the post-1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai—increasingly turned towards the Marxism of the anticolonial Global South and the nonaligned movement for both political inspiration and practical support. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) originated as a kind of propaganda wing of the Nasserist government in Egypt; but by 1967 it had mostly broken away from its Egyptian sponsorship and was emerging as the most important institution of Palestinian nationalism across both the occupied territories and the diaspora. The PLO National Charter, issued in 1968, set out the terms of the new Palestinian liberationist movement in language that insisted on the specificity of the Palestinian case and the centrality of nationalism to its self-definition. “The Palestinian people believe in Arab unity,” it declared, but “in order to contribute their share toward the attainment of that objective, however, they must, at the present stage of their struggle, safeguard their Palestinian identity and develop their consciousness of that identity, and oppose any plan that may dissolve or impair it.” This was not, however, the nationalism of the mandate period. “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine,” it continued. “Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.”⁵¹

To disseminate its new message and implement its new strategies, the PLO would rely heavily on UNRWA—still, we might note, mostly funded with American money. With the failure and decline of its many proposed works and resettlement programs in the 1950s, UNRWA had increasingly turned its attention elsewhere: first putting together a kind of bureaucratic welfare system in its camps, largely run by Palestinian refugees themselves, and second developing an extensive agency-run school system that quickly emerged as a crucial site for the preservation, development, and dissemination of Palestinian nationalist narratives and political strategies. Now such camp schools came to represent not just crucial educational training grounds but also organizational spheres for the PLO. The first Palestinian teachers’ unions emerged in UNRWA schools in the mid-1950s and immediately became venues not just for negotiating on behalf of teachers but for planning political action on the national level—to the extent that both the Egyptian government in Gaza and the Jordanian administration in the West Bank saw fit to ban them in the later 1950s. Local refugee activists and then the PLO itself successfully pressed UNRWA to “Palestinianize” school curricula, hiring Palestinian historians and educators to produce a specifically Palestinian history syllabus and curriculum that was subsequently taught in UNRWA schools in Lebanon.⁵² And UNRWA’s role in the Palestinian struggle went even farther: following the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan in 1970, UNRWA camps in Lebanon were remade as PLO military bases and supply centers.⁵³ Even the ongoing UNRWA efforts to place Palestinians in employment in the Gulf—the only surviving aspect of their earlier ambitious works programs—had the knock-on effect of aiding the PLO, as workers sent back remittances that supported PLO organizing and recruitment efforts. By the 1970s, as one Palestinian scholar has written, UNRWA had proven to be “of crucial importance for the PLO’s national project, both in political and economic [and military] terms.”⁵⁴

All this at a moment when the United States persisted in regarding the PLO as nothing more than a terrorist organization and a threat to regional stability. Why then did American administrations, both Democratic and Republican, continue to fund a body so deeply involved in the production, dissemination, and administration of a militant Palestinian nationalism to which they were (at least officially) adamantly opposed? Even as the PLO’s relationship with UNRWA developed into a fraught but real mutual support, the United States and its allies continued to support the agency financially—albeit at lower and lower levels. Up until 1962, the United States provided nearly three-quarters of the agency’s donations; by 1972 it was just over half, and by 1991 it would drop to one-quarter.⁵⁵ Still, the American commitment to keeping UNRWA’s doors open remained a formal and bipartisan one until the Trump administration’s decision to end funding for the agency in 2018. (It was restored in 2021 under Biden.) Such ongoing support rested on a generally accepted understanding that UNRWA was serving the crucial purpose of refugee pacification and containment, and that to abolish it or allow it to collapse would unleash Palestinian refugees on the region and the world in ways inimical to American interests.

Advocates for its continued funding quietly reminded their American donors that UNRWA physically contained Palestinian nationalism even as it fostered its intellectual and political development, thus limiting the possibilities for a kind of regional political action that might threaten the stability of the Middle East as a whole. As the American UNRWA commissioner Laurence Michelmore reported on the perceived consequences of UNRWA operational cuts, “We squeezed here, we squeezed there, and did as much as we could … But the [host] governments wouldn’t let you do this, especially Jordan and Syria … They thought that it would lead to riots, well, to disturbances. They wanted to keep it quiet. They might have been right. They probably were right.”⁵⁶ In 1979, as financial crisis loomed, a new commissioner-general warned that a cessation of UNRWA services would lead refugees to conclude that the international community had abandoned the Palestinian cause, adding ominously that “the implications of this probable reaction are so serious that the Commissioner-General feels compelled to place before the General Assembly the options that are open to him.”⁵⁷ By the early 1980s the agency itself was warning the international community that violent refugee reactions were likely in the event of any termination of UNRWA employment in Syria.

In other words, the United States was committed to continuing to fund UNRWA—whatever its political associations with the despised PLO—because it was still serving the crucial function of keeping Palestinian refugees pacified and contained. Increasingly this was also a rationale for the Gulf countries, which began to serve as a more and more important source of UNRWA income from the 1980s onwards.⁵⁸ Particularly after 1967, when it signed a memorandum of understanding permitting continued UNRWA operations in the newly occupied territories, Israel too acknowledged itself as a reluctant beneficiary of the organization; as the lead Israeli negotiator, Michael Comay, told an interviewer, the government decided that cooperation with UNRWA represented a way to “maintain the status quo.”⁵⁹ Better, all parties agreed, to keep the Palestinians in situ than to allow the refugee crisis to press on host countries or on Israel itself in ways that might force a political reckoning.

Here as in so many other instances, the Palestinian case served as a model for other, broader refugee policies, and in the 1970s long-term refugee detention would become a basic operational principle at the UNHCR. In 1972 the UNHCR under Sadruddin collaborated with the Sudanese government on a major campaign to encourage the mass repatriation of Sudanese refugees who had fled to neighboring countries—Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic—during the civil war. Though it included the physical repatriation of the displaced, this campaign extended UNHCR responsibility well beyond resettlement to include economic development and the rebuilding of infrastructure, designed specifically to encourage people to stay where they were. It was a harbinger of things to come. Indeed, as we shall see, this decade would witness the final abandonment of the “durable solution” of resettlement in favor of a Palestinian-style form of confinement pending some hoped-for future repatriation that might or might not ever arrive.

By now, the legal schemata for refugee protection drawn up to such fanfare in the 1951 convention and extended to the globe in similarly congratulatory style with the 1967 protocol bore vanishingly little resemblance to the practical operations of any internationalist refugee agency. Instead, it served as the public face of the international refugee regime and a focus for the UN’s many outreach campaigns, while the UN’s institutions of refugee aid (UNHCR and UNRWA chief among them) proved ever more wedded to on-the-ground practices of refugee restriction, containment, and internment, in the name of “human rights.”

In the context of the Cold War, state adherence to the protections enshrined in the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol remained crucial to representing Western bloc refugee policy—both broadly international and specifically American—as fundamentally humanitarian. And to that end certain schemes—particularly at the level of the individual state—did permit for the resettlement of very particular types of refugees, particularly white Europeans (and less often others) fleeing Communist regimes. But such public generosity relied on a tacit deal with the UNHCR, which kept up its end of the bargain by doubling down on its new “operational” approach: offering refugees aid in return for staying put. In other words, a recognizable contemporary refugee regime was emerging: one that ostentatiously deployed the convention, and the stories of certain specific (and small) groups of refugees granted asylum in Western countries, as rhetorical and public relations cover for a system actually designed to protect developed countries’ restrictive border regimes by ensuring almost total refugee immobility. The international refugee regime thus had a new basis for operation, built on its longtime practice in Palestine: instead of legal assistance and political rehabilitation it would offer “humanitarian” aid in situ, rendering displaced people’s lives just bearable enough to discourage onward movement.⁶⁰

9

Containing Labor

Refugees, Migrants, SEZs

As the end of the Cold War approached, refugees found public support for even the most limited forms of asylum or resettlement morphing into outright hostility. “Refugees are no longer viewed primarily as indicators of the oppression of the other (and hence, labeled as ‘freedom fighters’) and of our own tolerance and humanitarianism,” as the longtime UNHCR observer Howard Adelman put it, “but are increasingly viewed as threats to our own stability, particularly as the new information economy has a declining need for raw labor.”¹ Indeed, the potential uses of refugee labor appeared now to be an inconsequential consideration as labor markets in the West became accustomed to highly restrictive immigration regimes on the one hand and global access to an apparently unlimited supply of extremely cheap and totally unprotected workers on the other.² In addition, the end of any need to accommodate Soviet dissidents, combined with the rise of an American-led “New World Order,” meant an opportunity to dilute refugee rights to the point of nonexistence while continually expanding the operations of the refugee regime itself by extending its mandate to any domain in which the UNHCR’s backers found it convenient to operate. The UNHCR, then, was shifting from a refugee-facing agency to one devoted to any number of generalized humanitarian interventions: peacekeeping, material aid provisioning, and—increasingly—the usefully vague sphere of “human security.”

If global security and its corollaries were now the ends, confinement and repatriation would be the means. In the 1980s the main story of internationalist refugee policy was the refinement of the principle of containment pioneered so successfully in wartime Algeria: using material aid as a tool to confine refugees to the Global South, with the goal of eventually effecting their repatriation irrespective of whether or not conditions had improved. Casting return to a home country as a fundamental human right, the UNHCR doubled down on the idea of repatriation as the ideal “solution” to the problem of decolonial refugees. This approach simultaneously legitimized refugee internment as a form of refugee protection and foreclosed the possibility of resettlement elsewhere. Its successes moved the agency towards a view that the voluntariness of refugee repatriation was significantly less important than its efficient accomplishment. “Thus,” as legal scholar B. S. Chimni writes, “human rights discourse was once again placed in the service of containment … [and] the ideology of humanitarianism used the vocabulary of human rights to distract attention from involuntary return.”³ In this brave new world of refugee incarceration and forced return, the concept of making use of refugees as laborers for the global expansion of imperial capitalism appeared to have gone the way of the dodo.

But it was not, in fact, quite as dead as it appeared. As the Cold War came to an end and a new European refugee crisis presented itself in the form of the Bosnian War, the countries of the continent tried to find new ways to oust displaced people from the category of “refugee”—with the recognized rights it implied—into various and rapidly proliferating categories of “migrant” that carried many fewer protections. The 1990s and early 2000s saw an exponential rise in the number of legal categories into which displaced people could fall, organized around the novel idea of “temporary protection,” and a concomitant fall in the number of people legally categorized as refugees. This new approach had the perhaps unintended but quickly recognized effect of pushing refugees into a European labor market as informal workers, with few or no legal protections or access to state services—a development that benefited corporate employers and host states alike. It now appeared that one way to integrate the displaced into the labor market at minimal cost or disruption was simply to replace the legal category of refugee, with its potential long-term guarantees, with a temporary protection status that could be withdrawn at any time.

Second, policymakers now began to think about a more modest use of refugee labor within the context of containment. Instead of shipping displaced people across the globe to serve as menial labor in capitalist enterprises, the reasoning went, perhaps they could be deployed inside camps and other physical confines to essentially the same ends. These strategies borrowed from, and built upon, a concept first developed in Ireland in the 1950s: the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a defined space within a country featuring differentiated tax and trade laws designed to appeal to foreign investors. Though not originally conceived with reference to the phenomenon of displacement, SEZs—with their structural similarities to the territorially delimited and legally anomalous spaces of refugee settlement—eventually came to be seen as a possible way to make more active use of refugee labor. With SEZs serving as a containment mechanism, corporations could make use of refugees without exposing their host states to the political and economic dangers of physically releasing them into a regional or global labor market. This model of employing refugees in SEZs came to international prominence in 2016, when the “Jordan Compact” brought together Jordanian, European Union, and United Nations interests to found an SEZ in eastern Jordan employing refugees from the Syrian civil war. This particular plan’s failures did not diminish the global refugee industry’s enthusiasm for dealing with the problem of refugees through the hoary old solution of worker schemes.

From Resettlement to Repatriation

The 1970s represented the last period when mass resettlement of refugees took place, notably for three specific national groups: East African Asians (sometimes referred to as Ugandan Asians) fleeing Idi Amin’s regime, Chileans facing down the Pinochet coup, and Indochinese escaping the violence of regional war. In all three cases, the architecture of these schemes was underpinned by a Western determination to limit the future extent and nature of resettlement in favor of refugee containment within the Global South.⁴

The longstanding communities of South Asian origin, introduced as settlers by the British colonial administrations of modern-day Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had negotiated to retain their British citizenship as these territories became independent nations. Broadly regarded by decolonial nationalists as a class of colonial collaborators, they began in the 1960s to face active persecution from newly established postcolonial governments and to make use of their British citizenship to flee East Africa. The British administration, alarmed by this development, had already begun to sharply limit nonwhite immigration from the former colonies when Idi Amin expelled some 50,000 Asians from Uganda in 1972. Although it eventually agreed to take in some 27,000 East African Asians who held British citizenship, Britain held the line on another 10,000 refugees who possessed the status of “British Protected Person” without any other citizenship. This latter group became stateless wards first of the Red Cross and ICEM, and were eventually resettled from UNHCR refugee camps in Europe to third countries—India and Canada primary among them. “By framing the case as a refugee issue,” historian Sara Cosemans writes, “Britain successfully cut ties with its former colonial subjects” and ensured that mass resettlement of people from former colonial spheres would be a future impossibility.⁵ To complete the job, the 1981 British Nationality Act changed the basis of British citizenship to nationality by birth rather than descent, thus closing the door to any future claims by the descendants of British nationals overseas.⁶

Chile and Vietnam likewise served as instances of mass resettlement whose specifics helped to close down the option for other refugee populations. In Chile, the UNHCR—trying, as had happened in Algeria a decade earlier, to expand its reach beyond its formal mandate—initially worked with the military junta to help dissidents leave, and then (after 1977) assisted it again by offering to help them come back.⁷ In Indochina, UNHCR actions were even more dramatic: it initiated something called the “Orderly Departure Program,” which essentially created paths for resettlement on the condition that those seeking it had not left the country. Ostensibly intended to protect Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees from the dangers of escape by boat, this decision (as the UNHCR head of resettlement, Judith Kumin, understood at the time) simultaneously extended the UNHCR’s mandate to people who had not crossed an international border and denied its new charges a basic human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration: the right to leave a country.⁸ In other words, this particular mass resettlement rested on a new architecture of both legal and physical containment: for the more than 600,000 people involved in this scheme, the process of eventually finding new homes would require that they relinquish some of their most basic human rights.

In any case, though, the UNHCR would henceforth more or less abandon the resettlement piece of the puzzle and work almost exclusively within the institutions of refugee containment that had now been so thoroughly established. After 1979 the door to mass resettlement, even in these sharply delimited forms, was basically closed. With the diminution of refugee flows from communist Eastern Europe and the ever-increasing numbers of decolonial refugees in Asia and Africa, the Cold War–derived premises for resettlement were weakening—a development that the UNHCR, at least, viewed as an opportunity. As one official put it, “We were always interested in repatriation, but geopolitical factors prohibited it. So when the opportunity emerged to move towards repatriation, UNHCR jumped.”⁹ In the subsequent decades the annual rate of resettlement would stabilize at something less than 1 percent of the global refugee population. Instead, the UNHCR doubled down on the principle first established for Algerians in the early 1960s: that it was repatriation that represented the ultimate answer to the problem of mass displacement in the Global South.

The agency now began actively to promote the position that of its three “durable solutions” (repatriation, local integration, or resettlement in a third country), repatriation was by far the most desirable. In 1985 the San Remo Round Table on Voluntary Repatriation made this official policy, stating in its resolutions that “international co-operation and solidarity should be directed, first and foremost, in favor of the solution of return”—now, normally in the absence of the rationale that a war had ended (as in Algeria) or some other notable political development had substantively changed conditions in the refugee-generating state.¹⁰ Through the subsequent decade, critics began to observe that the international refugee regime was promoting return more and more aggressively —moving from the principle of “voluntary return” to “safe return” to, eventually, “imposed return.” Anthropologist and refugee scholar Barbara Harrell-Bond, working in various African spaces that served as the initial testing grounds for the UNHCR’s new approach, recorded the process by which this “voluntary” repatriation was normally carried out:

Tripartite agreements are initiated by UNHCR with the host government and that of the country of origin. The government of the country of origin is asked to give guarantees that refugees can safely return. These guarantees are usually couched in terms of an amnesty. (One might ask what law refugees have broken which requires an amnesty?) There is evidence to suggest that assistance is then stopped or the amount of rations is severely reduced. Refugees are informed that it is now safe for them to return.¹¹

Such a scheme rested heavily on the premise developed long ago for Palestinians, that the provision of aid was a valuable mode of physical control. As Harrell-Bond added laconically, the UNHCR (among other humanitarian agencies) operated on the premise that “material aid has the power to move populations … [It] can attract people from point a to point b and back again to point a.”¹²

This turn to repatriation, voluntary or otherwise, was part of a broader shift in the UNHCR’s approach encompassed in the emergence of the term “preventive protection” that began to circulate in the early 1990s. Prevention, in this usage, meant not the promotion of asylum—which the high commissioner coolly noted in 1992 “remains an essential protection mechanism, but [is] not always the appropriate long-term solution”—but strategies “to attenuate the causes of departure and to reduce or contain cross-border movements or internal displacement.”¹³ It was an approach that followed on state-level trends in migrant policy—particularly in Europe, where during the 1970s a number of governments had introduced “reintegration” schemes designed to prompt guest workers to return to their home countries. The Netherlands put in place a return scheme for migrants from Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia in 1974; France followed in 1977, and Germany in 1983. These programs essentially represented enforced self-deportation, offering a legal alternative not to staying on but to forcible removal; in the French case, it explicitly indicated applicability to migrants without papers and to those who had already been served with an “invitation” to leave the territory. Now, the UNHCR was following these state examples: proactively declaring that its role was not primarily to assist refugees but to prevent their emergence, reduce their numbers, and minimize the disruptions their presence caused to the developing neoliberal political and economic system, all in the name of security and prevention.

Of course, there were many circumstances under which the UNHCR’s carrot-and-stick approach failed to move refugees back to their home countries. Pending this desired repatriation, the UNHCR’s primary role would be to maintain what it called “source control”: ensuring not that refugees would be able to leave but that they could be minimally protected and contained in situ, and then repatriated when it became possible. The long-established practices of internment and restriction so ingrained in the operations of the UNHCR and its parallel organizations now became considerably more exhaustive, in conjunction with the development of ever-more-sophisticated practices of mobility restriction at the national level. In 1994, having arranged for the repatriation of some 200,000 Rohingyan refugees from Bangladesh to Burma, the UNHCR put in place an architecture of aid (and a concomitant refusal to recertify the displaced as refugees) designed to force people to stay in place.¹⁴ In Bosnia in the early 1990s the UNHCR fielded dozens of offices and thousands of personnel to enforce repatriation and containment, on the principle that—as one UNHCR working group put it—it was better to “bring safety to the people, rather than bring the people to safety.”¹⁵ In Rwanda the UNHCR complied with an American instruction to return people by force if necessary, using local militia members to locate and repatriate fleeing refugees—an operation High Commissioner Sadako Ogata later described as a “mop-up of Rwandan refugees.”¹⁶ Such repatriations by and large did not even pretend to be voluntary.

In some notable instances, internationalists carrying out refugee containment-cum-repatriation operations deployed state militaries —not infrequently the very forces that had helped to produce refugee flows in the first place. It was, for instance, American army personnel who organized the mass transfer of Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein’s brutalities in Iraq during the American invasion of the country in 1991, a development followed by the declaration of American, British, and French-enforced no-fly zones to “protect” (and contain) Kurdish refugees trying to escape. (Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then UN secretary-general, asked the Americans to avoid the appearance of impropriety by not flying American and UN flags simultaneously over military-run refugee camps.)¹⁷ In the Balkans, UNHCR offices provided home bases for military crews running airlifts to Sarajevo. And Western states complemented this internationalist strategy of physical containment by shoring up their own domestic defenses against refugees. As sociologist David FitzGerald has put it, a “medieval architecture of repulsion” made up of “cages, domes, buffers, moats, and barbicans … [came to do] much more to keep out refugees than the more obvious border walls.”¹⁸

Repatriation—voluntary or not—thus continued to beckon as the best of all possible “solutions,” and not just at the UNHCR. As the organization expanded both its in situ operations and its efforts at repatriation to large numbers of people ineligible for actual refugee status under the convention, it began to run into institutional competition with the International Organization for Migration (IOM, the successor organization to ICEM encountered in chapter 7) that had long sought to “manage” nonrefugee migration flows to the satisfaction of its client states. The IOM, having long left the practice of refugee aid to the UNHCR, viewed that agency’s expansion into the provision of aid to nonrefugees as a kind of encroachment on the IOM’s territory. As a way to resolve their increasing overlap, the two organizations now quietly began to cooperate with states and agencies involved in what was euphemistically called “safe return”—that is, internationally sanctioned deportation. Their uneasy cooperation was epitomized by their collaboration on so-called AVR schemes (for “Assisted Voluntary Return”).

The UNHCR, anxious to preserve its façade of pro-migrant humanitarianism, normally left the operational aspects of AVR schemes to the IOM while it engaged in public justification: “Endorsing return initiatives, legitimising them by ascertaining their compliance with human rights, lobbying for increased funding for IOM-administered return programmes, and providing pre-departure and post-arrival assistance.”¹⁹ But as the UNHCR became increasingly entangled with the adjudication of refugee status, it eventually started to participate actively in removing those who failed to win it. In 1996 the UNHCR officially acknowledged that it would be willing to “contextualise standards of voluntary repatriation”—that is, that there were circumstances under which it would sign off on forced return.²⁰ By 2003 it was openly offering to assist states in the process of deporting refugees whose asylum cases had been rejected for one reason or another, “on a good offices basis” and with recourse to the use of force when necessary.²¹ As with its increasingly active involvement in the legal process of determining refugee eligibility, the organization presented removal schemes as a necessary way of shoring up the legitimacy and efficacy of the broader asylum system to ensure state-level cooperation: that is, that it was a defensible aspect of its mandate to protect “genuine” refugees from the shadows cast, and the resources wasted, by “illegitimate” ones. In practice, this meant that the agency often helped to perpetuate a pretense of voluntary repatriation for destitute and desperate people with no viable alternatives. (In a remarkable display of circular logic, the UNHCR has now generally adopted the principle that refugee return can itself be taken as evidence of an improvement of country conditions.)²² Withdrawal of social services or basic welfare provisions became an especially common way of compelling people to opt for returns deemed voluntary by agents and states; in 2010, for instance, a British repatriation program for families withdrew social services from unaccompanied Afghan children in the UK as a way of forcing their “voluntary” removal to Kabul.²³ “Acceptance of the AVR option rests on there being no other choice, in light of the temporary nature of the status granted to the individuals in question,” even the IOM itself admitted. “The limited duration of temporary protected status, for example, has proven to be an effective inducement to voluntary return.”²⁴

Making Unprotected Laborers: The Strategy of “Temporary Protection”

The concept of “temporary protection” had little prior basis in international law or the conventions, but it now became a central premise of European and then international refugee policy.²⁵ As envisioned both by European states and by the UNHCR, the frame of temporary protection offered an opportunity to keep refuge-seekers in a more or less permanent state of legal limbo—protected to some degree from forcible refoulement, but without any opportunity of local integration or legal access to new forms of residency, employment, or citizenship. The phrase began to appear in various states’ national policies vis-à-vis migration in the 1980s; a decade later it had become key to refugee policy and practice across Europe.

The doctrine of temporary protection received its first detailed expression in the context of the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. A UNHCR document from 1994 outlined its rationale, drawing on arguments about refugee services pending repatriation first advanced in North Africa decades earlier. “One of the major reasons for applying the label ‘temporary,’ ” the document explained, “has been … the focus on return as the most likely and appropriate solution to a particular refugee situation … [Consequent standards of treatment] emphasize the provisional aspect of the refugees’ stay in the country of asylum, and minimize, at least in the initial stages, efforts to promote integration.” It added, “Temporary protection arrangements offer a means of providing protection to those who need it while continuing to emphasize repatriation as the preferred solution.”²⁶ This was an especially tricky case to make because it seemed to many observers that the refugees streaming out of the former Yugoslavia could—unlike nonwhite refugees of decolonization—be clearly categorized as “convention refugees,” fleeing solely on the basis of persecution. The reason for the establishment of temporary protection was, then, a straightforward unwillingness on the part of other European countries to accept them as refugees eligible for asylum; and its primary benefit was the understanding that (unlike the rights guaranteed by the convention) it could be terminated at any time.²⁷

The UNHCR itself eventually came to understand temporary protection as a potential path to suspending the guarantees of the convention at least temporarily, in ways that might be convenient for receiving states. In 2012 it held a roundtable on the question of temporary protection to explore just such a possibility. A discussion paper outlined the legal specifics for deploying the concept of temporary protection to relieve states from their legal obligations to refugees:

There are at least four possible explanations to reconcile the coexistence between temporary protection and the Convention: first, that the 1951 Convention does not apply to the situation or persons at hand (e.g. because the persons are not refugees within the definition of the 1951 Convention such as those fleeing sudden onset environmental events); second, that temporary suspension or derogation of the Convention is permitted because of the impact of the movement on the stability and security of the receiving State, at least in its initial stages (particularly relevant in mass influx and other emergency situations); third, that because of the fluidity of the situation it is not clear whether the Convention applies or ought to be suspended, and thus is a “wait and see” situation, provided any delay in the Convention’s application is made in good faith; or fourth, individual refugee status determination would be impracticable or overly burdensome.²⁸

As per usual, the UNHCR was following on already-extant state approaches: the concept of temporary protection had already become the basis of an enormous number of subcategories in various European nations’ migration laws. Most of them explicitly foreclosed the possibility of a path to naturalization or other forms of permanent residency. Sociologist Roger Zetter, outlining what this process looked like in the UK, noted the purpose of these sorts of devices: “The proliferation of new labels designating different kinds of refugee claimants [underpinned] a deliberately transformative process to create far less preferential categories of temporary protection (e.g. in the UK, Indefinite Leave to Remain, Exceptional Leave to Remain and now redefined as Humanitarian Leave to Remain).”²⁹

The application of these novel categories did not, of course, actually prevent refugees from entering a country and working there. Instead, they remade refugees as unprotected temporary labor, joining the ranks of undocumented or under-documented migrants working on sufferance in a sphere from which they would be perpetually subject to expulsion—a situation broadly viewed as beneficial for employers and states alike. It was in this context that the UNHCR itself began to traffic in the emerging concepts and practices of “managed migration”—a euphemism for the conflation of refugee and migrant status and a broad reduction in the rights of mobile workers across different legal categories. In 2005, following a long series of fora intended to produce a new internationalist policy surrounding questions of global migration, the UNHCR signed on to the “International Agenda for Migration Management.” This agreement advocated for an expansion of legal channels of migration through multilateral agreements among states, on the basis of neoliberal schemes of economic development and with special attention to questions of labor. “Regulated migration,” it noted calmly, “can help ensure the availability of labour when the host country requires it … A key element to achieve a more humane and orderly movement of people is a systematic, managed approach to migration, including consideration of different categories”—including refugees, who would be regarded as simply a variety of migrant and considered within the same framework.³⁰ Such an integrated treatment of people moving across the globe would above all require sophisticated data and tracking capabilities: “An essential prerequisite for a successful migration management system is statistical and documentary information that is timely, accurate, reliable, and accessible … able to take advantage of all available and relevant sources.”³¹

The following year High Commissioner António Guterres proposed a new plan of action for dealing with “Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration,” including volunteering UNHCR staff to train border guards to differentiate between migrants and refugees and forcibly deport the former. This was not, in fact, an entirely new idea. The UNHCR had already dipped a toe into “migration management” in the Middle East—particularly in Turkey, where its officials had decades of experience in “refugee status determination” (that is, deciding who qualified as a refugee and who did not). Beginning in 1994 the agency began to offer training sessions to Turkish officials on the legalities of asylum and refugeedom, as a first step in constructing a UNHCR-vetted internal asylum regimen there. This development was designed to allow the European Union to declare it a “safe third country” where refugees were theoretically able to seek protection—a legal basis for denying the claims of any asylum applicant in a European state who had first passed through Turkey.³² Now, backed by Guterres’s plan, the UNHCR began to run not only refugee camps and “reception centers” in Turkey but also deportation facilities—an action it defended as necessary to protect positive public opinion vis-à-vis the rights of “genuine” refugees.³³ In the event, such schemes of delimiting access to the refugee regime would not serve to exile asylum seekers altogether so much as to remake them as itinerant undocumented labor in their new host country, always vulnerable to expulsion but more likely to hang on as cheap, replaceable, and mostly rights-less migrant labor.

This pattern is abundantly evident today in the situation of Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, where—as one scholar has recently put it—“temporary refuge is transitioning to de facto permanent resettlement” without formal rights to employment.³⁴ Refugees in all three countries have come to constitute a permanent underclass of semilegal laborers whose work is arranged and mediated by a variety of contractors and middlemen. Informal arrangements like these generally receive the tacit approval of the state but are carefully monitored and can be withdrawn at will, as one shaweesh (an “intermediary” serving as a labor contractor for refugees) in Lebanon told an interviewer in 2021:

[The workers] don’t have work permits. But there’s a tacit oral understanding with the state that in Lebanon, in the Bekaa area in particular, landowners are in need of workers and that the shaweesh provides these workers … With the outbreak of the Syrian revolution and the flock of refugees, the state now knows how many workers I supervise and how many people live in the camp through the Army Intelligence, the State Security, the municipality, the Information Branch … I have to inform the intelligence whenever anyone leaves my camp.³⁵

In other words, a carefully maintained ambiguity around the legal status of refugee workers allows them to remain in place, often returning to the same agricultural employers on a seasonal basis year after year, but working from a position of political and economic vulnerability that sharply limits their capacities to make demands either of the state or of their employers. In this respect, as the shaweesh’s interviewers note, refugees’ experience of employment in their host countries is strikingly similar to the experience of undocumented labor migrants: “Temporary status, coupled with the threat of deportation, reduces the bargaining power of workers.”³⁶

These outcomes are not accidental. Indeed, the long-term acceptance of such arrangements has now became formal policy at the UNHCR, which in 2019 abandoned its longstanding commitment to its three basic “durable solutions” (repatriation, local integration, or settlement in a third country) and added two other possible aims: “other local solutions” and “complementary pathways.” Deliberately vague formulations like these encompass various forms of long-term legally unprotected residence-cum-employment in countries of transit, almost always located in the Global South.³⁷ As Roger Zetter put it long ago, stripping away the label of refugee in favor of some kind of temporary protection “promoted ‘illegal’ employment” quite deliberately “by restricting the right to work”³⁸—a strategy that now enjoys the active approval and support of the UNHCR.

Working While Contained: The Rise of the SEZ Model

Remaking refugees as unprotected migrants, though, was not the only way to forcibly integrate them into a global labor market. The Middle East was also the site of an experiment in combining physical restraint with industrial labor: the placement of refugees in menial work within enclosed, monitored, walled zones.

The idea of “Special Economic Zones” was first mooted in the late 1950s, at roughly the same moment as the instauration of the modern refugee regime. Although it had a number of antecedents, most observers agree that the first modern SEZ was located at the Shannon Airport in Ireland. After the invention of the long-haul jet deprived the airport of its main reason for being (it had previously served as a necessary fuel stop for transatlantic air traffic), local planners tried to reinvigorate the space as a customs-free industrial zone in which companies would be exempt from national and local taxes and would receive incentives for the purchase of machinery and for worker training.³⁹ The idea caught on quickly, producing some other early SEZs that were mainly “export processing zones”—that is, physically enclosed areas featuring stringent customs controls, in which most products were destined for export.⁴⁰ Now, these began to advertise themselves as a venue for the legal deployment of cheap, impermanent labor. During the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan jointly undertook to create SEZs in South Korea and other parts of Asia as a way of expanding Japan’s role as an American trading partner and offering, as one advocate put it, “an alternative strategy to the guest worker programmes pursued in countries such as West Germany … Japanese zones would allow Japanese firms to manufacture using cheaper labour without allowing migrants to settle in Japan.”⁴¹ By the end of the decade there were SEZs in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mauritius, and the Dominican Republic.

The model of the SEZ took hold in precisely the same economic atmosphere that had put paid to the idea of refugee employment schemes: one of increased urban migration and widespread under-employment, ever-more-granular production strategies allowing for the use of exchangeable unskilled labor across different locations, and new technologies of transport and communication that could easily connect different zones of production. The United Nations, in the form of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), actively promoted the construction of special zones as a valuable path to foreign investment and rapid development, touting the benefits of “low cost labour and freedom from industrial unrest.”⁴² When faced with the accusation that the zones exploited workers, the UN threw its weight behind employers. “Some zones may outlaw unions and ban strikes,” a 1994 UNIDO handbook on the zones conceded, but “within zones, factories are new, lighting conditions are good and canteen and medical facilities are often available … If workers were not better off being ‘exploited’ by EPZ firms, the latter would find it impossible to hire them.”⁴³ Still, a presentable public face was important. Acknowledging that SEZs had to have enforceable borders to function properly, UNIDO warned that “the appearance of the fence should be aesthetically acceptable—no barbed wire.”⁴⁴

SEZs in their first decades often hired migrant labor but did not specifically target refugees, whose international protections tended to render them less desirable in the eyes of employers. (It is perhaps worth noting however that the idea of zones did make a brief appearance in the saga of the Israeli–Palestinian “peace process”: in 1996 the US Congress created “Qualified Industrial Zones” in Egypt, Jordan, and the occupied Palestinian territories, permitted to export goods duty-free if they contained components from Israel.) But the Syrian civil war that began in 2011, and the massive refugee crisis it sparked, prompted new consideration of using SEZs for the exploitation and control of refugees and their labor. In 2016 the Jordan Compact, a three-way agreement between the Jordanian monarchy, the European Union, and the UN, proposed a new kind of international deal vis-à-vis refugee labor. The Jordanian government would issue 200,000 work permits to Syrian refugees and provide schooling for Syrian refugee children in its territory in return for $700 million in grants and $1.9 billion in concessional loans. In addition, goods made in eighteen Special Economic Zones by Jordanian companies employing at least 15 percent Syrians would be eligible for a number of trade concessions: the relaxation of the EU’s rule of origin restrictions, tax exemptions, subsidized transport and electricity, less restrictive licensing and permitting procedures, and substantial administrative assistance. (After two years, the requirement would rise to 25 percent.) Sweetening the pot even further, the World Bank gave Jordan access to $1.4 billion of credit at rates normally only available to low-income countries. Outside the scope of the scheme itself—but clearly intended to further prop up the Jordanian government’s capacity to keep refugees within its own borders—the European Commission also routed some €584 million into Jordan to support refugee efforts there, and not only for direct refugee aid. The commission’s own breakdown indicated the degree to which this money was intended to “stabilize” the refugee situation: “More than €198 million from the humanitarian budget, €180 million from the Macro Financial Assistance Instrument, over €170 million from the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument and more than €30 million from Instrument for Stability … This support comes on top of the over €500 million in regular programmed bilateral cooperation for Jordan under the European Neighbourhood policy, which brings the overall number to €108 billion.”⁴⁵ In addition to this funding, refugee aid from other donors in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere rose from just over $3 billion in 2016 to more than $4 billion in 2019. Jordan has now received more refugee-related aid than any other country in the world.

The Jordan Compact thus represented the marriage of two longstanding different but related strands in international refugee policy: a commitment to physically containing refugees in situ as far as possible from the Global North, and an equally longstanding commitment to exploiting refugees as cheap labor for global industrial production. Two of its original architects, the refugee scholars Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, perfectly encapsulated the compact’s intentions when they described their goal as a “ ‘win-win’ outcome that suits both Northern donors and Southern hosts”—that is, an agreement featuring a more or less total disregard for the interests of refugees themselves.⁴⁶ Unsurprisingly, like its many predecessors over the previous century, it aroused considerable refugee resistance. Refugees did not want to travel to work for low wages in poor conditions in the special zones, which were mainly located far from the urban centers where most of their families and other contacts lived. Transport to the zones was difficult or nonexistent; rent there was high (in some cases, higher than wages); and childcare was generally unavailable on-site, making it difficult for women to participate in the scheme.⁴⁷ Further, the SEZs forbade refugees from participating in a number of sectors, including virtually all professional work; the scheme was intended to enforce refugee participation in menial labor related to manufacturing, and exclude them from any other kind of employment irrespective of their own prior qualifications.⁴⁸ Echoing the much earlier refugee worker schemes of the interwar and WWII periods, refugee employment was to be deployed solely for mass industrial or agricultural production, and refugees would be permitted only to serve as the most menial kind of laborers.

Further, this kind of externally supported development broadly failed to capture the interest of either investors or industries. By 2018, the scheme had attracted only eleven companies—and few of those proved capable of actually producing goods for European export. The uptake of these refugee employment incentives, on the part of both refugees themselves and hiring companies, was so modest that the EU eventually scrapped its initial requirement that would have raised Syrian refugee participation to 25 percent of the workforce, reverting to its original more modest aim of 15 percent. The Jordanian government, too, shifted its attention away from the SEZs, setting up new employment centers in the Zaatari camp in 2017 and Azraq in 2018 that issued refugee work permits that could be used outside the special zones—though most remained tied to a specific employer.⁴⁹ The compact is theoretically still in effect, but it appears to have largely failed in its effort to produce a tightly confined pool of cheap laborers for the expansion of industrial manufacturing in Jordan. In language that could have come directly from the M Project, a 2019 Financial Times essay declared that the essential problem of the SEZ was one of profitability. “SEZs have the tools to pilot programmes that would be difficult to start from scratch across a country,” its author declared, “but such schemes must be sound from a business perspective.”⁵⁰

The failures of the Jordan Compact illustrate a striking truth about the contemporary labor market: that Syrian refugees, vulnerable and exposed as they were, nevertheless represented a kind of privileged subcategory of migrant with more protections and greater demands than other possible sources of labor. Since the 1970s, Jordan—like so many other developing nations—has encouraged the use of migrant labor in its manufacturing sector, particularly from Egypt and South Asia. Jordanian garment production, one of the country’s most significant export sectors, is legally permitted to recruit three-quarters of its workforce from abroad and to exempt migrants from labor law protections that apply to Jordanians (for instance, eight-hour workdays). Syrian refugees, with their local connections, higher wage requirements, expectation of better working conditions, and connections to international organizations offering attention and support, represent an unattractive prospect for Jordanian employers accustomed to reliance on a migrant workforce enjoying no such protections. As JGATE (the trade organization representing Jordan’s garment industry) told an investigator in 2016, “Migrant employees are the CORE of this sector due to their higher efficiency and productivity, skill levels, willingness to work overtime, lower turnover rate … [and] cannot be REPLACED by Jordanians nor Syrians.”⁵¹ To the extent that the industry was willing to formally employ Syrian refugees, it often appeared, it was only as a replacement for the 25 percent of workers who were Jordanian, not as an aspect of the extant migrant labor force. In the meantime, Syrian refugees do continue to operate as laborers in the informal sector, making them vulnerable not only to exploitative conditions comparable to those of legally unprotected labor migrants but also to forcible removal to refugee camps (a common punishment for multiple work permit violations) or even, in some instances, deportation back to Syria.⁵²

From the 1980s onward, the main work of the international refugee regime lay in caging people in containment zones across the Global South until their repatriation could be enforced—thus solving the “problem” of refugees to the satisfaction of wealthy countries around the world. From an institutional perspective this approach was mostly a success, guaranteeing continued superpower support for internationalist refugee organizations that were able to demonstrate a capacity to prevent refugees from disturbing the political and economic equilibrium of the powers of the Global North. In particular, these decades saw the developed world coming to the decision to pay the UNHCR to confine refugees to the Global South, a bargain that the UNHCR more or less agreed to take. By 2018, 40 percent of the organization’s money came from the United States, with the next biggest donors being Germany and the European Union—money provided mostly to maintain the 85 percent of the global refugee population resident in the Global South, half of whom live in host countries with a per capita GDP of less than $5,000.⁵³

But even as internationalist principles and practices of containment and repatriation were painfully hammered out, the idea that refugee labor should somehow be deployed in support of industrial capitalism continued to exert a pull on policymakers. Within this new post–Cold War context of mass confinement, two main ideas for incorporating refugees as workers emerged. The first was a discursive one: deliberately blurring the categories of refugee and migrant through the advent of a new legal category of “temporary protection,” forcing refugees into an informal labor market by stripping away their formal protections under the convention-era rights regime. The UNHCR participated vigorously in this scheme by volunteering to police claims on refugee status, and training various countries’ nationals to do the same. The second approach was more experimental: the idea that refugees could be deployed as laborers within an institutional confinement. The subsequent advent of the refugee-linked SEZ, in which the displaced could simultaneously be detained and exploited, represented a new vision for how to wring labor out of refugees without releasing them into protected national, regional, or global labor markets.

Both of these new approaches emerged from one of the bitter truths of the late capitalist era: that the protections conferred by the international refugee regime, limited and inadequate as they were, had rendered refugees undesirable employees in a global system that was now producing untold numbers of recruits with essentially no rights at all. From the beginning of the refugee regime in the early twentieth century, it had seemed that refugee labor—though always potentially dangerous—also represented a realizable asset to the project of industrial capitalism. Now, it seemed, that project had all the workers it could ever want.

Afterword

Workers, Refugees

The great historian of refugeedom Peter Gatrell, whose brilliant book The Making of the Modern Refugee instantly and rightly became a classic in the field, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in March of 2022 in which he outlined both the historical context and the political opportunities of Europe’s comparatively openhanded approach to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the brutal Russian onslaught. Like much of the rest of his work—indeed, like much of the work of refugee historians more generally—it featured a plea for an expanded system of international protection for displaced people, building on the work of generations past. “Alongside some of the great upheavals in the past had come collective, international responses,” Gatrell noted, pointing to the major benchmarks of twentieth-century refugee policy in chronological order: the creation of the League of Nations’ refugee office in the aftermath of the First World War, the arrival of the Nansen Passport, the founding of the IRO, the signing of the Refugee Convention. “It’s far from perfect, of course,” he wrote. “Yet it’s possible to spy in the outpouring of sympathy for Ukrainians an opportunity to push for better treatment for all refugees … In dire circumstances, bold and creative thinking has produced a better, more humane world. It can happen again. Will anyone rise to the challenge?”¹

The advent of internationalist refugee policy in the first half of the twentieth century has long been told as an inspirational story: one in which heroes like Fridtjof Nansen fought tirelessly for the rights of refugees, securing them limited but real victories and laying the groundwork for a still-emerging humane international system for assisting the displaced and dispossessed. It’s a way of finding narrative direction, and even hope, in the terrible disasters of the First and Second World Wars: in this telling, the eventual recognition of and assistance for the wars’ victims can serve as an admittedly belated and partial redemption for the Allies’ studious indifference to the plight of central European Jews until after they were nearly exterminated. Even when their limitations are acknowledged, as in Gatrell’s essay, the international refugee institutions embodied above all in the Refugee Convention’s guarantees for displaced Europeans still often appear (at least from liberal perspectives) as a good start: a meaningful, well-intentioned legal and diplomatic apparatus, offering a secure foundation on which to build a more generous and all-encompassing form of international aid to refugees everywhere.

Consequently, proponents of a more generous internationalist approach to refugees and displaced people have often been loath to offer serious critiques of the UN’s refugee work, either its original construction or its contemporary manifestations. They see such criticisms as unwitting gifts to a ruthless conservatism that has long sought the destruction of internationalism in favor of (usually) an American global supremacy based primarily on force. To the extent that critiques of the United Nations and its attendant bodies do emerge from liberal sources, then, they have tended to focus not on the organization’s underlying political assumptions or its actual on-the-ground practices but around the perpetual neoliberal preoccupation with bureaucratic rationalization and efficiency. Helen Clark, then head of the United Nations Development Programme and former Labour prime minister of New Zealand, told the Guardian in 2015 that “modern management and modern strategic planning was late coming to the UN.”² Particularly during the Trump years in the United States, when conservative attacks on internationalism reached a new high, this sort of procedural commentary was about as strongly worded as liberal critique got. There seemed to be a consensus that whatever its flaws, serious criticism of the UN’s premises or actions was off the table because it simply handed ammunition to those who wanted to shut down international cooperation altogether. As former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld famously put it long ago, the UN—including its refugee policy wing—is “imperfect but indispensable.”³ There is, many seem to believe, no other path.

Is this kid-glove treatment defensible? Does international refugee policy, as constructed by the UN and its main stakeholders over the past seventy years, really have the best interests of its wards at heart? Did it ever?

To answer these questions, we need to think seriously about the real origins of our modern system of international refugee policy—which do not, in fact, lie in an attenuated but real midcentury European repentance about the terrible fate of the continent’s Jews. The history of modern internationalist policy surrounding mass dislocation goes back much farther, and not to Europe but to the Middle East: to the Ottoman Empire, whose pioneering efforts to deal with the influx of Balkan and Caucasian refugees into its territory established the first principles of international refugee policy. Indeed, it could be argued that the late nineteenth-century Ottoman idea that refugees simultaneously constituted both a threat and a resource, in an emerging modern system dominated jointly by ethnonational states and private global capital, turned out to represent one of the empire’s longest-lasting political legacies.

It was after all with this understanding that the post-WWI League of Nations began, under the guidance of the oft-sanctified figure of Fridtjof Nansen, to construct the first internationalist approach to the question of mass displacement. The League’s remaking of refugees as workers underpinned all its refugee office’s activities, from its provision of “Nansen Passports” allowing bearers to work without citizenship to its schemes for resettling Armenian refugees in the Soviet Union to its employment-matching offices sending refugees to serve as menial labor in Brazilian sugar plantations. Such an approach dovetailed neatly with other of the League’s undertakings, particularly its assumption of responsibility for the British and French colonial occupations of the Middle Eastern “mandate” states: Palestine, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It was no accident that these spaces became sites for refugee resettlement and, often, the deployment of refugees not just as agricultural settlers and industrial workers but also as colonial soldiers. By the time of the interwar refugee crisis surrounding European Jews this foundation for refugee policy was well established, forming the basis for the last-ditch conversations at Évian among thirty countries desperately trying to avoid opening their doors to stateless German Jews. It likewise represented the backdrop to the often-wild imaginings of Roosevelt’s M Project, which hoped to direct the world’s refugees into industrial and agricultural work in “pioneer” zones from the Australian outback to the Iraqi desert. And in an ironic development, it also provided the intellectual and political frame for a noncapitalist version of the same idea in the Soviet realm—where the idea of using deportees as labor migrants persisted for decades, and not just as a theoretical concept.

This premise of turning refugees into workers took on a different valence when, beginning with the war for Palestine in 1948, the epicenter of global refugeedom moved from Europe to the decolonizing world. The racialized legal distinction between refugees and “Palestine refugees,” developed in the period of the first major Refugee Convention, established the principle of differentiated categories of refugee determined by place of origin and (relatedly) formal eligibility for European-style legal asylum. Having declared displaced Palestinians comparatively rights-less under the new system, the early UN sought to “solve” the problem they presented by deploying them as laborers in Western-backed projects of developmentalism across the Middle East—a mostly failed approach that eventually morphed into an established policy of active regional containment pending some imagined future repatriation. The example of Palestine thus set the stage for a formal remaking of international refugee policy around the principle of long-term internment for “new”—that is, non-European—refugees. As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees subsequently expanded into decolonial spaces like Algeria, where it deployed encampment practices recalling UNRWA’s in Palestine, it was beginning to realize a quintessentially modern approach to refugee policy: one that combined the old principle of using the displaced as workers with a newer commitment to physically confining non-European refugees to the Global South.

The idea of refugees serving as workers was by this point so axiomatic to the philosophy and practice of refugee succor, and so crucial an aspect of the UN’s public relations machinery around their refugee aid practices, that it could retain its philosophical centrality even as actual corporate interest in cheap refugee labor waned. By the 1960s the UNHCR and UNRWA were advertising their roles in refugee employment schemes less to serve the interests of international corporations (as had been the case in previous decades) than to legitimize their own presence as gatekeeper and camp guard. Eventually, the fact that “refugees have no place to use their learned skills,” as one aid worker in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya told a researcher much later, would no longer really matter; the point of such schemes was to demonstrate the UNHCR and its partner agencies’ utility, not to actually make refugees into viable local employees.⁴ (Indeed, in this particular example, these same external aid organizations actually helped the Kenyan host government to enforce the boundaries that prevented refugees from legally accessing markets outside the camp.)

This shift came with a crucial realization on the part of international capital: that refugees, with their minimal but occasionally realizable legal protections, were less desirable employees than migrants with no safeguards at all. So, as the asylum-related pressures of the Cold War gradually waned, the UN and its member states began to produce new legal categories for the displaced intended broadly to reduce access to legal and diplomatic recognition. In the 1980s and 1990s the proliferation of new labels around the emerging concept of “temporary protection” turned more and more decolonial refugees into guest workers with few claims to internationally guaranteed rights. And for those who were still being recognized as refugees, often at the price of long-term physical containment, another work scheme was emerging: refugee-specific “Special Economic Zones” where refugees would simply labor in place. Such refugee-oriented SEZs, including a much-discussed zone for displaced Syrians in eastern Jordan, now stand as a notable contemporary realization of a vision first glimpsed by the Ottoman government a century and a half earlier: the possibility of a comprehensive refugee policy consciously designed to promote and protect the linked interests of the ethnic nation-state and global capitalism.

Whatever romantic interpretations emerge from the soft-focus photos of refugee children that tend to accompany UNHCR publications, the UN’s refugee regime (encompassing both the UNHCR and UNRWA) is today essentially one of containment and internment. In conjunction with the states that comprise its membership, the UN broadly has adopted the language of “migration management” to describe its agencies’ participation in a global regime of mobility restriction. Consequently, the UNHCR’s and UNWRA’s roles are only very partially concerned with humanitarian aid. In accordance with the wishes of both their superpower showrunners and their host-state collaborators, their charges now include the physical maintenance of restricted-access camps, the determination and enforcement of refugee status and access to supplies and services, and the active training of deportation agents and border guards, often for authoritarian governments. Such roles have led some scholars to label the UNHCR as nothing less than a “global police of populations.”⁵

It’s not too harsh a judgment. The UNHCR, particularly since the end of the Cold War, has doubled down on its commitment to offering on-the-ground aid with the explicit goal of ensuring that refugees do not disperse into surrounding areas or move across the globe in search of asylum, a concept it calls “preventive protection.” As one analyst has put it, “By providing on-site relief in the midst of war and violent conflicts, UNHCR has played an important role in the surge of international humanitarian operations launched in the 1990s to prevent (potential) refugee flows or contain them within their own countries or regions of origin.”⁶ This active presence on the ground offers the opportunity to physically curtail refugee movement. It also brings UNHCR personnel into situations of danger on a much more regular basis than was once the case—a state of affairs that has the paradoxical consequence of further reinforcing the organization’s interest in security and promoting its practical militarization.⁷

Further, the UNHCR and UNRWA—which both, from their inception, have been fundamentally committed to surveilling and tracking their refugee charges—have more recently also thrown themselves into collaborations with the private sphere in the realms of biometrics and data mining vis-à-vis refugees. “UNHCR officers,” one analyst has written, “have always worked to ‘fix’ refugees as populations distinct from non-refugees through techniques of isolation and registration,”⁸ a comment that applies equally strongly to UNRWA. In the early 2000s, the UNHCR began to invest in “population management” software that it hoped would simplify the process of tracking refugees’ identities and the legitimacy of their access to UNHCR services. The collection and use of biometric data soon followed. In 2002, the UNHCR decided to implement iris scanning for Afghan refugees seeking repatriation from Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban. It contracted with two private vendors, Iridian Technologies and BioID, to provide and manage the collection and tracking system on-site at UNHCR-run voluntary repatriation centers. Iris scanning now became mandatory for any Afghan refugee over the age of six pursuing UNHCR assistance with repatriation.⁹ The program was deemed a success, and soon became a model for the widespread collection and use of biometric data across the UNHCR’s many fields of operation. In 2015 it introduced the Biometric Identity Management System (BIMS), which made use of iris scans and fingerprints to link refugees to their records on a mandatory basis. By 2020 this system had collected biometrics on 80 percent of UNHCR’s registered refugees, some 37 million people.

Over the past ten years the organization has begun to migrate from management software to blockchain as a way of storing, managing, and deploying biometric data from individual refugees, particularly as a mode of authorization to access refugee services. Once this biometric data is in place, other refugee-adjacent actors also make use of it; the same blockchain used for the UNHCR’s purposes is accessible to employers, to banks, and to border agents. (The UNHCR proactively shares its information on refugees with the EU’s European Border and Coast Guard Agency and with the US Department of Homeland Security, among others.)¹⁰ The first major UN use of this blockchain technology as a refugee identifier was in the Zaatari camp, in Jordan, for Syrian refugees who now must submit to an iris scan attached to their blockchain record every time they want to access food rations or medical care.¹¹ This “Building Blocks” program operates in collaboration with a private corporation called IrisGuard, headquartered in the UK and with a regional office in Amman. “Our technology finds one person in millions,” its website boasts, “anywhere in the world, with 100% certainty, in less than 3 seconds”¹²—a refugee agency’s dream, indeed. Such programs deploy new tactics to accomplish three very old goals: to identify and enumerate refugee populations, to ensure that they cannot quietly disperse across borders and especially into European and North American lands, and—not least—to generate profit for private investors.¹³

This is, obviously, not a new state of affairs. From its inception, internationalist refugee policy was designed to treat refugees as simultaneously a threat to be contained and a resource to be exploited. But from the League of Nations forward, the emerging regime carefully enveloped its activities in a haze of humanitarian rhetoric designed to suggest that refugee aid operated primarily in the realm of charity rather than politics. One of the consequences was that internationalist refugee policy now became associated with a kind of sentimental liberalism, arousing the ire and opposition of conservative commentators in places like Britain and the United States who objected to refugee migration on both economic and nativist grounds. The far right John Birch Society, founded in 1958, has taken on the UN’s refugee agencies as a special source of its ire for decades now. In 2015, its media outlet the New American targeted Obama’s plan for resettling a tiny number of Syrian refugees in the United States as the brainchild of the “radical Marxist” António Guterres, declaring that the UNHCR’s “not-so-hidden agenda aims at transforming Europe and America into chaotic, Balkanized regions afflicted with ethnic and religious strife, social turmoil, and terrorism by surging masses of Muslim migrants into the European Union and the United States.”¹⁴ Such inflammatory language from the right has often obscured the grittier aspects of the UN’s on-the-ground practices and led to a full-throated public defense of the institution from people who might not normally approve, for instance, of the UNHCR’s active participation in authoritarian regimes’ violent deportation of destitute migrants. Barack Obama, calling his internationalist constituents to heel, articulated precisely this liberal case for overlooking such violations—including a subtle nod to the real benefactors of the contemporary refugee regime. “We should all understand,” he told the General Assembly in 2016, “that, ultimately, our world will be more secure if we are prepared to help those in need and the nations who are carrying the largest burden with respect to accommodating these refugees.” He added, pointedly, “We are all stakeholders in this international system, and it calls upon all of us to invest in the success of institutions to which we belong.”¹⁵

It is indisputable that over the past century-plus the international refugee regime has, indeed, provided food, water, and shelter to large numbers of displaced and often desperate people across the globe. But from Nansen to Guterres, its leaders have designed institutions and policies not around the interests of refugees but around the interests of their own most important constituents: Western nation-states and private corporations, often working in tandem. In so doing, they have produced a regime that purports to offer refugees aid and succor while routinely deporting them, imprisoning them, and deploying them in remote locations across the globe as nearly rights-less laborers. The decline of investment in such a system’s “success” might indeed be a catastrophe for the states of the Global North who have come to rely on the UN to keep refugees under lock and key. It’s past time to consider the possibility that it might not, in fact, be such a disaster for refugees themselves.

Acknowledgments

I accumulated any number of intellectual and practical debts in writing this book, and it is an honor and a pleasure to acknowledge and thank the many friends, colleagues, archivists, librarians, and students who helped me to see the project through.

I completed much of this book during a fellowship year at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC in 2021–22, and I am very grateful to the Wilson Center’s director Mark Green and senior vice president Robert Litwak for their interest in and commitment to the undertaking. I would also like to thank Merissa Khurma, director of the center’s Middle East Program, and Christian Ostermann, director of its History and Public Policy Program, for their enthusiasm and assistance, and for successfully fostering an atmosphere of vibrant intellectual exchange at the center even as pandemic conditions were ongoing. My research assistant Duncan Randall offered valuable practical aid. I am also grateful to the Oliver-McCourtney Professorship and the Department of History at Penn State University, both of which provided crucial institutional support; and I would like especially to thank Michael Kulikowski for his advocacy and help.

I am grateful to the many librarians and archivists who facilitated my research, particularly those at the Pattee and Paterno Library at Penn State University; the Wilson Center Library in Washington, DC; the League of Nations Archives and the Archives of the UNHCR in Geneva, Switzerland; the National Archives at Kew in the United Kingdom; and Special Collections at the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I presented pieces of this book at workshops and talks at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris; Cambridge University; the London School of Economics; King’s College London; the University of the Aegean in Samos, Greece; the LBJ Library and the University of Texas at Austin; the Freie Universität Berlin; the Institute of Historical Research in London; the Max Planck Institute in Berlin; the Wilson Center in Washington, DC; the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies at George Washington University; the Università di Milano in Milan; the University of Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; the American University of Beirut; Yale University; Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland; the School of International Service at American University; the National University of Singapore; Sciences Po, Paris; the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University; and the University of Melbourne. All of these exchanges helped sharpen the arguments presented here and provided new sources, ideas, and inspiration. Conversations within the Wilson Center Expert Working Group on Forced Migration, founded and headed by John Thon Majok, have likewise provided intellectual stimulus and vital political context for this project.

Most of all, I wish to thank the friends and colleagues who made crucial interventions, suggestions, and corrections by talking me through these complex issues or by reading and commenting on parts of the draft at various stages. I’m especially grateful to Jennifer Dueck and Bill Cronon for their help with a crucial early reframing of the book’s structure and argument, as well as for subsequent invaluable readings and commentary. Joel Beinin, Bastiaan Bowman, Sarah Cameron, Benjamin Coates, Sara Cosemans, Arie Dubnov, and Randall Hansen all read parts of the draft and made incisive suggestions. I have also benefited hugely from conversations on these and related topics over the course of some years with Mustafa Aksakal, Lauren Banko, Niambi Carter, Dawn Chatty, Jane Cowan, Jonathan Conlin, Stacy Fahrenthold, Ilana Feldman, Hallam Ferguson, Peter Gatrell, Aimee Genell, Georgios Giannakopoulos, Krista Goff, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Bonny Ibhawoh, Anne Irfan, Victor Kattan, Mark Levene, Laura Madokoro, Joe Maiolo, A. Dirk Moses, Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, Laila Parsons, Mezna Qato, Davide Rodogno, Kent Schull, Leonard Smith, Elizabeth Thompson, Jay Winter, Muhammad Zaman, and, as always and especially, Seda Altuğ and Benjamin Thomas White. Nicole Aschoff, my editor at Verso, deserves much thanks for her perspicacity, care, and enthusiasm. And I have finally to thank my best, most acute, and longest-standing reader, interlocutor, and critic, Tam Rankin, without whom no such undertaking would have been any fun at all.

Notes

Introduction

1 William Spindler, “2015: The Year of Europe’s Refugee Crisis,” UNHCR, Dec 7, 2015, unhcr.org.

2 World Bank, “$300 Million to Improve Employment Opportunities for Jordanians and Syrian Refugees,” Sep 27, 2016, worldbank.org.

3 A position touted recently in the widely read book by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

1. What’s a Refugee Regime?

1 See Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2.

2 See M. Hakan Yavuz and Peter Sluglett, eds., War and Diplomacy: The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Treaty of Berlin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011).

3 Ipek Yosmaoglu, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).

4 Dawn Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 66.

5 Kemal Karpat, “Muslim Migration,” in Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays, ed. Kemal Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 66.

6 Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, 95; Resat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

7 Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 22.

8 Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, 66.

9 Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, “Imperial Refuge: Resettlement of Muslims from Russia in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914,” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2017), 17.

10 Hamed-Troyansky, “Imperial Refuge,” 92.

11 Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45.

12 Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 21.

13 Cited in Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (London: Tauris, 2008), 201–2.

14 Laura Almagor, Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).

15 On the relationship between territorialism and more Palestine-centric forms of Zionism, see especially Gur Alroey, Zionism without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).

16 Leon Pinsker, “Autoemancipation!” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 194.

17 Theodor Herzl, “The Jewish State,” in The Zionist Idea, 222.

18 See Adam Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 52.

19 St Hill Gibbons, Alfred Kaiser, and Nahum Wilbusch, Report on the Work of the Commission Sent Out by the Zionist Organization to Examine the Territory Offered by H.M. Government to the Organization for the Purposes of a Jewish Settlement in British East Africa (London: Wethimer, Lea & Co., 1905), 81.

20 Cited in Gur Alroey, “Mesopotamia—the Promised Land,” 920.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, 1946), 94–5.

24 Examples and numbers all taken from Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 26–7.

25 Ibid.; see also Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire and Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

26 Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 30.

27 On the CUP’s Balkan origins see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Erik Zurcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation-Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Ataturk’s Turkey (London: Tauris, 2010).

28 For an account of this violence, see especially Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).

29 Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (New York: Doubleday, 1918), 314.

30 On the genocide, Ronald Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), and Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) are especially useful.

31 Norman Naimark, in Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 40–1, notes that many Turkish historians who accept the Ottoman census figure of 1.3 million Armenians living in the prewar empire have come to a figure of approximately 800,000 killed in the genocide.

32 Examples in Matteo Ermacora, “Assistance and Surveillance: War Refugees in Italy, 1914–1918,” Central European History 16, no. 4 (2007): 445–60; Michael Amara, Des Belges a l’epreauve de l’Exil. Les refugies de la Premier Guerre Mondiale (Bruxelles: Universite de Bruxelles, 2008). Peter Cahalan, in his Belgian Relief in England during the Great War (New York: Garland, 1982), notes that Belgian refugees referred to their restricted circumstances in England—where they were confined under police surveillance—as a “concentration camp.”

33 On the Armenian experience in republican Turkey see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016).

34 For further details and analysis of this episode see especially Elizabeth Thompson, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs (New York: Atlantic Press, 2020).

35 Keith Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 100.

36 Benjamin Thomas White, “A Grudging Rescue: France, the Armenians of Cilicia, and the History of Humanitarian Evacuations,” Humanity 10, no. 1 (2017): 1–27.

2. Turning a Profit

1 League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations (Geneva: League of Nations, 1919).

2 World Peace Foundation, Report on the Brussels Financial Conference (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1920), 2.

3 Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 19.

4 Cited in Atle Grahl-Madsen, “The League of Nations and the Refugees,” in The League of Nations in Retrospect (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 358.

5 John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 227.

6 Quoted in Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 56.

7 New York Times, Apr 20, 1920.

8 ILO, Minutes of the 12th Session of the GB of the ILO, April 1922, 80.

9 Ibid., 47.

10 Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 158.

11 Peter Gatrell, “Displacing and Re-placing Population in the Two World Wars: Armenia and Poland Compared,” Contemporary European History 16, no. 4 (2007): 516, notes that 170,000 Armenians were killed during their service in the Red Army.

12 Cited in Gatrell, “Displacing and Re-placing Population,” 515.

13 ILO, Minutes of the 39th Session of the GB of the ILO, 1928, 342.

14 James T. Shotwell, “The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution,” ANNALS of the American Political Science Association 166, no. 1 (1933): 18.

15 Article 427, The Labour Provisions of the Peace Treaties (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1920), 13.

16 Christopher Szabla, “Entrenching Hierarchies in the Global Periphery: Migration, Development, and the ‘Native’ in ILO Legal Reform Efforts,” Melbourne Journal of International Law 21, no. 2 (2020).

17 ILO Constitution, Article 35. This is also discussed in Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–70 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18–19.

18 League of Nations, Record of Proceedings, International Labor Conference (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1919), 154.

19 Minutes of the 9th Session of the GB of the ILO, 1921, 358.

20 Minutes of the 11th Session of the GB of the ILO, 1922, 72.

21 “Arrangement of 30 June 1928 Concerning the Extension to Other Categories of Refugees of Certain Measures Taken in Favour of Russian and Armenian Refugees,” United Nations Treaty Collection, League of Nations Treaty Series 89, 63.

22 For a look at the evolution of the Nansen Passport, see Otto Hieronymi, “The Nansen Passport: A Tool of Freedom of Movement and of Protection,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2003): 36–47, and Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially chapter 3.

23 Claudena Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 105.

24 Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones, 174.

25 Martin Hill, “The League of Nations and the Work of Refugee Settlement and Financial Reconstruction in Greece,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 34 (1931): 266.

26 Ibid., 267.

27 Ibid.

28 League of Nations, Official Journal vol. IV (Geneva: League of Nations, 1923), 1509.

29 Memo by Maj Gen G. M. Franks, “The Refugee Question in the Near East,” enclosure in Ronald McNeill to C, Dec 22, 1922, TNA FO 839/27.

30 Ibid.

31 Hill notes that this commission “had been established at Athens by the Law of International Control of February 26th, 1898, after a series of defaults in the payment of the service of Greek foreign loans”—thus tying this scheme to a longer institutional history of “Great Power” financial intervention in Greece during the nineteenth century. See Hill, 270n. 4.

32 Ibid., 270.

33 Ibid., 272.

34 Ibid., 273.

35 Ibid., 281.

36 Evan Easton-Calabria, “From Bottom-Up to Top-Down: The ‘Pre-History’ of Refugee Livelihoods Assistance from 1919 to 1979,” Journal of Refugee Studies 28, no. 3 (2015): 419.

37 ILO, Minutes of the 23rd Session of the GB of the ILO, 1924, 259, 258.

38 Ibid., 258–9.

39 Ibid., 29.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 259.

42 Ibid., 261, 263.

43 Katy Long, “When Refugees Stopped Being Migrants: Movement, Labour and Humanitarian Protection,” Migration Studies 1, no. 1 (2013): 10.

44 ILO, Minutes of the 38th Session of the GB of the ILO, 1928, 173.

45 Annex A, “Report of the Refugee Sub-Committee,” Minutes of the 38th Session of the GB of the ILO, 1928, 177.

46 Cited in Marit Fosse and John Fox, Nansen: Explorer and Humanitarian (London: Hamilton Books, 2015), 62.

3. Colonial Workers

1 League of Nations, “Report on the Work for the Refugees,” Official Journal, special supplement 58 (1925), 119.

2 Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe, 190.

3 See Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), chapters 3 and 4.

4 League of Nations, “Report on the Work for the Refugees,” 127.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 131.

7 Ibid., 129–30.

8 Ibid., 132.

9 League of Nations, “Report on the Work for the Refugees,” 135.

10 Ibid., 144.

11 Yann Stricker, “ ‘International Migration’ between Empire and Nation: The Statistical Construction of an Ambiguous Global Category in the International Labour Office in the 1920s,” Ethnicities 19, no. 3 (2019): 472–3.

12 Brian Burgoon et al., “Immigration and the Transformation of American Unionism,” International Migration Review 44, no. 4 (2010), 934. This article makes the important further point that “contrary to scholarly assumptions … when other factors are taken into account, immigration has had no significant effect on American union density over time,” a conclusion that reflects other scholarship about the relatively limited impact of migrant workers on union membership and/or wage depression.

13 Stricker, “ ‘International Migration’ between Empire and Nation,” 472–3.

14 League of Nations, “Report on the Work for the Refugees,” 147.

15 Ibid., 147–8.

16 Ibid., 146.

17 Sir John Hope Simpson, Refugees: A Review of the Situation Since September 1938 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs and Oxford University Press, 1939), 12.

18 The veracity of these numbers is hard to demonstrate, but they recur in ILO and LNA sources. See Louise Holborn, “The League of Nations and the Refugee Problem,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 20, no. 3 (1939): 130; Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe, 192–3, n. 27 and 28; and Long, “When Refugees Stopped Being Migrants,” 10.

19 On the mandate system generally, see Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument,” 560–82, and the relevant chapters in her The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For the Middle Eastern mandates more specifically, the best guides are Peter Sluglett and Nadine Meouchy, eds., The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2004), and Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (Abingdon and New York, 2015).

20 On this point see Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones; and Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005).

21 George Y. Gracey, “Armenian Settlement in Syria,” Contemporary Review 140 (1931), 86.

22 Gracey, “Armenian Settlement,” 87.

23 Ibid., 87.

24 Ibid., 92.

25 Benjamin Thomas White, “Humans and Animals in a Refugee Camp: Baquba, Iraq, 1918–20,” Journal of Refugee Studies 32, no. 2 (2019): 221; H. H. Austin, The Baqubah Refugee Camp: An Account of Work on Behalf of the Persecuted Assyrian Christians (London: Faith Press, 1920), 3; Levon Shahoian, On the Banks of the Tigris: Memoirs of an Armenian Boy Exiled to the Mesopotamian Desert, tr. Garabet Moumdjian (London: Taderon Press, 2012), 50.

26 White, “Humans and Animals in a Refugee Camp,” 222.

27 Ibid., 230.

28 For details see White, “A Grudging Rescue.”

29 The fraught question of Mosul’s postwar disposition is discussed in Sarah Shields, “Mosul, the Ottoman Legacy, and the League of Nations,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 3 (2009): 217–30 and her “Mosul Questions: Economy, Identity and Annexation,” in Reeva Simon and Eleanor Tejirian, eds., The Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 50–60, as well as Robson, States of Separation, chapter 2.

30 Gulbenkian’s maverick career has been recently detailed in Jonathan Conlin, Mr. Five Percent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, The World’s Richest Man (London: Profile Books, 2020).

31 Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “The Power of the Weak and the Weakness of the Strong: Explaining Corporate Behavior in Middle Eastern Oil after the Second World War,” Business and Economic History 23, no. 2 (1994): 109ff.

32 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), chapters 3 and 4.

33 Edhem Eldem, “Ottoman Financial Integration with Europe: Foreign Loans, the Ottoman Bank and the Ottoman Public Debt,” European Review 13, no. 3 (2005): 431–45.

34 Commercial Agreement between the Sheikh of Kuwait and the Kuwait Oil Company, Dec 23, 1934, India Office Records (IOR) R/15/5/247; cited in Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf,” 550. In Qatar, by contrast, the concession required the hiring of local workers except in the case of technical and clerical work requiring qualifications not found in the Qatari labor force.

35 Political Agreement between His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and the Kuwait Oil Company, Mar 5, 1934, IOR R/15/5/247; cited in Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf,” 553.

36 Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence,” 558.

37 The Commissioner of Income Tax vs. Shaw, Wallace and Co., March 14, 1932, indiankanoon.org; see also H. D. Tomlinson, A History of Shaw Wallace and Co. and Shaw Wallace and Co. Calcutta Ltd. (Calcutta: Shaw Wallace, 1965).

38 Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence,” 559.

39 For the creation of such definitions, see Phil Orchard, A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

40 Nathaniel Berman, Passion and Ambivalence: Colonialism, Nationalism, and International Law (Leiden: Nijhoff Publishers, 2012); Anthony Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century International Law,” Harvard International Law Journal 40, no. 1 (1999): 1–80; and Laura Robson, “Capitulations Redux: The Imperial Genealogy of the Post–World War I ‘Minority’ Regimes, American Historical Review 126, no. 2 (2021): 978–1000.

41 E. A. Kinch, “Social Effects of the Oil Industry in Iraq,” International Labour Review 75, no. 3 (1957): 194–5.

42 Henry Longhurst, Adventures in Oil: The Story of British Petroleum (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1959), 89. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, in a discussion of the British account, points out that at least two American and three Iraqi workers died in this episode. See City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), 80–1.

43 Ibid., 197.

44 Ibid., 101.

45 On the centrality of the IPC in the 1940s and 1950s see especially Hanna Batatu’s magnum opus, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba’thists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

46 James Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 62.

47 The literature on the Balfour Declaration is extensive, but useful overviews include Maryanne Rhett, The Global History of the Balfour Declaration (New York: Routledge, 2016); Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Toronto: Doubleday, 2010); and, especially, Avi Shlaim, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Consequences,” in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (London: Tauris, 2005), 251–70.

48 Shalom Reichman et al., “The Absorptive Capacity of Palestine, –1948,” Middle East Studies 33, no. 2 (1997): 345.

49 M. Mossek, Palestine Immigration Policy under Sir Herbert Samuel: British, Zionist and Arab Attitudes (London; Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1978), 117–46.

50 Report of the Commission on the Palestine disturbances of August, 1929 (London: HMSO, 1930), 100, 106, 112.

51 Sir John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London: Oxford University Press and Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939).

52 Sir John Hope Simpson, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development (London: HMSO, 1930), 136.

53 He estimated that this would make it possible to settle an additional 20,000 families on farmland. Report, 153.

4. From Europe to America

1 Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey, 516.

2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 296.

3 Simpson, The Refugee Problem, 158.

4 James G. McDonald, “Refugees,” in Harriet Eager Davis, ed., Pioneers in World Order: An American Appraisal of the League of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 226–7.

5 Christoph M. Kimmich, Germany and the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), and Greg Burgess, The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

6 Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe, 199.

7 Naomi W. Cohen, “The Transatlantic Connection: The American Jewish Committee and the Joint Foreign Committee in Defense of German Jews, 1933–1937,” American Jewish History 90, no. 4 (2002): 374.

8 Cited in Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 163.

9 McDonald letter of resignation to the League of Nations in Davis, Pioneers in World Order, 218.

10 This point is made by Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe, 225.

11 Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

12 Marrus, The Unwanted, 170.

13 Proceedings of the Intergovernmental Committee: Évian, July 6th to 15th, 1938: Verbatim Record of the Plenary Meetings of the Committee, Resolutions and Reports (Intergovernmental Committee: Évian-les-Bains, 1938), 12–13.

14 Paul Bartop, The Evian Conference of 1938 and the Jewish Refugee Crisis (London: Palgrave, 2018), 47–8.

15 Proceedings, 14–15.

16 Ibid., 15–16; emphasis added.

17 Ibid., 21.

18 Ibid., 36.

19 Ibid., 28.

20 Ibid., 30.

21 Ashley S. Timmer and Jeffrey G. Williams, “Immigration Policy Prior to the 1930s: Labor Markets, Policy Interactions, and Globalization Backlash,” Population and Development Review 24, no. 4 (1998): 739–71.

22 Arlinda Rocha Nogueira, “Japanese Immigration in Brazil,” Diogenes 48, no. 191 (2000): 45–55.

23 Proceedings, 62.

24 Ibid., 31.

25 Ibid., 33.

26 Ibid., 36.

27 Ibid., 27.

28 Ibid., 36.

29 Cited in Bartrop, The Évian Conference, 101.

30 Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018).

31 Susan Welch, “American Opinion Towards Jews during the Nazi Era: Results from Quota Sample Polling during the 1930s and 1940s,” Social Science Quarterly 95, no. 3 (2014): 615–35.

32 Janice Fine and Daniel J. Tichenor, “Solidarities and Restrictions: Labor and Immigration Policy in the United States,” The Forum 10, no. 1 (2012), and “A Movement Wrestling: American Labor’s Enduring Struggle with Immigration 1866–2007,” Studies in American Political Development 23 (2009): 218–48.

33 Proceedings, 32–3.

34 Richard Breitman and Allen J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 33.

35 Franklin D. Roosevelt, F.D.R., Columnist: The Uncollected Columns of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Donald Scott Carmichael (Chicago: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1947), 37–8.

36 Ibid., 39.

37 Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 5, 9.

38 H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographic Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (1904): 421.

39 Smith, American Empire, 13–14.

40 On Wilson’s relative importance, vis-à-vis Lenin, to post-WWI anticolonial nationalists, see the debate around Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a representative critique see Brett Reilly, “The Myth of the Wilsonian Moment,” Sources and Methods blog, Wilson Center, Jun 17, 2019, wilsoncenter.org, and Manela’s response to such criticisms, “Wilson and Lenin,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 4 (2018): 521–4.

41 Smith, American Empire, 16.

42 Matus Halas, “Searching for the Perfect Footnote: Friedrich Ratzel and the Others at the Roots of Lebensraum,” Geopolitics 19, no. 1 (2014): 1–18; and “Franco Farinelli, Friedrich Ratzel and the Nature of (Political) Geography,” Political Geography 19, no. 8 (2000): 943–55.

43 Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment, on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (New York: Holt, 1911), 1–2.

44 John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 10.

45 Smith, American Empire, 142–3.

46 Isaiah Bowman, The New World: Problems in Political Geography (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1922), 564.

47 Smith, American Empire, 228.

48 Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 68.

49 This point is made, minus the comparison with Palestine, in Matthew Frank, “The Myth of ‘Vacant Places’: Refugees and Group Resettlement,” in Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?, eds. Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 126.

50 Bowman, Limits of Land Settlement, 3; quote also discussed in Frank, “The Myth of ‘Vacant Places,’ ” 126.

51 Cited in Smith, American Empire, 295.

52 Except Alaska, which remained as a potential settlement space—a vision later given fictional form in Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

53 For details on the origins of the Madagascar plan, see Eric T. Jennings, “Writing Madagascar Back into the Madagascar Plan,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 187–217.

54 Cited in Smith, American Empire, 297.

5. Zionism Goes Global

1 On Wilson’s “Inquiry,” see Miller, My Diary, vol. 4, 212–67; Bowman quote cited in Smith, American Empire, 295.

2 Among Field’s works on the topic were Arabs of Central Iraq: Their History, Ethnology and Physical Characteristics (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1935), and The Track of Man (New York: Doubleday, 1952).

3 Henry Field, “M” Project for F.D.R.: Studies on Migration and Settlement (Ann Arbor, MI: N.P., 1962), 3.

4 This plan is discussed as an example of “collaborative relocation” in Robert Darst, “Guaranteed Human Beings for Sale: The Collaborative Relocation of Jews from Axis Europe, 1933–45,” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 2 (2002): 207–30.

5 Cited in David Yisraeli, “The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement,” Journal of Contemporary History 6, no. 2 (1971): 147.

6 Cited in David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1939–1941 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 55.

7 The complications of the negotiations between American Jewish benevolent associations and the US government in the years of Nazi rule are explored in Stephen Porter, Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), chapter 2.

8 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 39–43.

9 Cited in Wyman, Paper Walls, 58.

10 Field reported that Bowman met with the M Project team only twice in the first two years of its operation. See “M” Project, 327.

11 Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), 69.

12 Field, “M” Project, 4.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 5.

16 Frank, “The Myth of ‘Vacant Places,’ ” 133. Frank’s article is one of two academic journal pieces about the M Project, the other of which is Greg Robinson, “Le Projet M de Franklin Roosevelt. Construire un monde grace a la science … des races,” Critique Internationale 27 (2005): 65–82, which emphasizes its racial basis.

17 The long history of Zionist enthusiasm for mass Arab “transfer” out of Palestine has been thoroughly detailed elsewhere; see especially Nur Mashala, The Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992).

18 Penny Sinanoglou, “British Plans for the Partition of Palestine, 1929–1938,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2009): 142.

19 Jan Zouplna, “Revisionist Zionism: Image, Reality and the Quest for Historical Narrative,” Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 2 (2008): 8.

20 Yossi Katz, Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), 85–7.

21 Cited in Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine, 63.

22 See Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 11.

23 Zouplna, “Revisionist Zionism,” 10.

24 Gil S. Rubin, “Vladimir Jabotinsky and Population Transfers between Eastern Europe and Palestine,” The Historical Journal 62, no. 2 (2019): 498.

25 Ibid., 499.

26 Quoted in Smith, American Empire, 306.

27 Ibid., 311.

28 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 3.

29 Israel Kleiner, From Nationalism to Universalism: Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2000), and Colin Shindler, “Jabotinsky and Ukrainian Nationalism: A Reinterpretation,” East European Jewish Affairs 31, no. 2 (2001): 122–31.

30 Joseph Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939–1945 (New York: Institute of World Affairs/Oxford University Press, 1946), 11.

31 Ibid., 467.

32 Ibid., 469.

33 Ibid., 478.

34 Joseph Schechtman, Population Transfers in Asia (New York: Hallsby Press, 1949).

35 Cited in Antonio Ferrara, “Eugene Kulischer, Joseph Schechtman and the Historiography of European Forced Migrations,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 4 (2011): 728.

36 Ruth Reitan, “Population Transfer, Cleansing, and Partition” (review essay), Journal of Refugee Studies 14, no. 4 (2001): 436–46.

37 Eugene M. Kulischer, “Population Changes behind the Iron Curtain,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 271, no. 1 (1950): 100.

38 Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 7.

39 Eugene Kulischer, “Population Transfers,” South Atlantic Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1946): 403.

40 Ibid., 414.

41 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 243.

42 Ibid., 319–20.

43 Eugene Kulischer, Jewish Migrations: Past Experiences and Post-War Prospects (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1943), 49.

44 Ibid.

45 Report by Henry Field, “Settlement Possibilities in the Negeb, Palestine,” in “M” Project, 9.

46 Memo by Walter Lowdermilk, “Absorptive Capacity of Palestine,” in “M” Project, 177.

47 Memo by the Commission on Palestine Surveys, “Plans for Irrigation and Hydro-Electric Development in Palestine,” in “M” Project, 204.

48 Memo by A. Revusky, “Role of Postwar Palestine,” in “M” Project, 263.

49 Memo by Mrs. Edward Jacobs, “Freedom Village, Palestine,” in “M” Project, 173.

50 Bowman, The New World, 533.

51 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palestine: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, 111–12.

52 Field, “M” Project, 1–2.

53 Ibid., 2.

54 Florian Bieber, “Building Yugoslavia in the Sand? Dalmatian Refugees in Egypt, 1944–1946,” Slavic Review 79, no. 2 (2020): 298–322.

55 Memo by Wendall Cleland, “Population Plan for Egypt,” in “M” Project, 228.

56 Memo by Clyde Kiser, “Demographic Position of Egypt,” in “M” Project, 238.

57 Memo by Ernest Jurkat, “Peoples of the Mohammedan World,” in “M” Project, 258.

58 “Possible Developments in Transjordan,” in “M” Project, 303.

59 Field, “M” Project, 88–9.

60 “Colonization Possibilities in Paraguay,” in “M” Project, 48.

61 Robinson, “Le Projet M de Franklin D. Roosevelt,” 65ff.

62 “Settlement Possibilities in Honduras,” in “M” Project, 77.

63 “Post-War Immigration Problems in Mexico and South America,” in “M” Project, 78–9.

64 “Attitudes towards Settlement in Latin America,” in “M” Project, 247.

65 Ibid.

66 Cited in Smith, American Empire, 316.

67 Cited in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 103.

68 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 113.

69 The term and its deployment in popular Israeli accounts and media are explored in Anita Shapiro, “Historiography and Memory: Latrun 1948,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–20.

6. Workers of Another World

1 Report on “Immigration Problems in the U.S.S.R.,” in “M” Project, 94.

2 Stephen Kotkin, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2, no. 1 (2001): 161.

3 Katy Long, “Early Repatriation Policy: Russian Refugee Return 1922–1924,” Journal of Refugee Studies 22, no. 2, (2009): 140.

4 Ibid., 137.

5 Cited in Elizabeth White, “A Category ‘Easy to Liquidate’: The League of Nations, Russian Refugee Children in the 1920s and the History of Humanitarianism,” in The League of Nations’ Work on Social Issues: Visions, Endeavors and Experiments, eds. Magaly Rodríguez García, Davide Rodogno, and Liat Kozma (Geneva: United Nations, 2016), 204–5.

6 Ibid., 208.

7 Ibid., 211.

8 Cited in Long, “Early Repatriation Policy,” 145.

9 Cited in ibid., 161.

10 The history of Soviet population politics is discussed most notably in Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), and Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

11 Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4.

12 Ibid., 7.

13 Ibid., 189.

14 Report on “Documentation on Soviet Colonization Policy 1925–40,” in “M” Project, 22.

15 Report on “Colonization in Soviet Turkestan,” in “M” Project, 114.

16 Steven Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 13.

17 A point made in Kotkin, “Modern Times,” 161.

18 Calvin Bryce Hoover, cited in David Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 170.

19 The broader tale of Birobidzhan’s remaking as a kind of Soviet Palestine is memorably told though a journalistic lens in Masha Gessen, Where the Jews Aren’t—The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (New York: Schocken, 2016).

20 Cited in Srebrinik, “Territorialism and the ICOR ‘American Commission of Scientists and Experts’ to the Soviet Far East,” in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, eds. Masia R. Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 113.

21 Cited in Alexander Ivanov, “Facing East: The World ORT Union and the Jewish Refugee Problem in Europe, 1933–38,” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 3 (2009): 373.

22 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 238.

23 Report on “Birobidzhan—An Experiment in Colonization,” in “M” Project, 37.

24 Quotes from Kathryn Davis, “The Soviet Union and the League of Nations 1919–1933,” Geneva Special Studies 5, no. 1 (1934): 4.

25 Irina Khormach, “The ‘Kremlin’ League of Nations Plan, 1920s,” Social Sciences 39, no. 4 (2008): 53.

26 See Etienne Henry, “The Road to Collective Security: Soviet Russia, the League of Nations, and the Emergence of Ius Contra Bellum in the Aftermath of the Russian Revolution (1917–1934),” Journal of the History of International Law 22, no. 2–3 (2020): 355–84.

27 Davis, “The Soviet Union and the League of Nations, 1919–1933,” 21.

28 Cited in ibid., 23.

29 Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad Is My Native Land, 239–40.

30 Andrew Harder, “The Politics of Impartiality: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the Soviet Union, 1946–7,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 2 (2012): 347–69.

31 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 300.

32 Agreement for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Nov 9, 1943, ibiblio.org.

33 G. Fox, “The Origins of UNRRA,” Political Science Quarterly 65, no. 4 (1950): 563.

34 Andrew Harder, “The Politics of Impartiality: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the Soviet Union, 1946–47,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 2 (2012): 352.

35 Cited in ibid., 353.

36 Cited in ibid., 363.

37 David Mayers, “Destruction Repaired and Destruction Anticipated: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Atomic Bomb, and US Policy 1944–5,” International History Review 38, no. 5 (2016): 968.

38 Frank Snowden, “Latina Province, 1944–1950,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 522.

39 Cited in Jessica Reinisch, “Introduction: Relief in the Aftermath of War,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 379.

40 Mayers, “Destruction Repaired and Destruction Anticipated,” 965.

41 For useful overviews of this episode, see especially Naimark, Fires of Hatred, chapter 4, and R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

42 Both cited in Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 110. On the postwar ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe see especially Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), chapter 10.

43 Stuart Chase, A New Deal (New York: MacMillan, 1932), 252. This book is widely considered to have been the first use of the Rooseveltian phrase.

7. Refugees versus “Palestine Refugees”

1 Sadako Ogata, “Foreword,” in The Refugee Convention, 1951: The Travaux Preparatoires Analysed with a Commentary by Dr. Paul Weis (Geneva: UNHCR, 1995), 1.

2 Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

3 The last DP camp to close was the Föhrenwald camp, in Bavaria, which finally shuttered its doors in 1957.

4 Cited in David Mayers, “Destruction Repaired and Destruction Anticipated,” 970.

5 David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), provides a detailed history of these remaining refugees.

6 Constitution of the International Refugee Organization, UN General Assembly, Jan 14, 1947, UNGA A/284.

7 Ibid.

8 Tom Naegels, La nouvelle Belgique. Une histoire de migration: 1944–1978 (Paris: Racine, 2021), details the use of these refugees in mining operations in Belgium. See also Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 105ff.

9 Cited in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 105.

10 Ibid., 108.

11 Antoinette Friedman to Immigrants Protective League, Oct 14, 1948, in International Refugee Organization, Immigrant Protective League Records, 1919–1976 (Marlborough, Wiltshire: Adam Matthew Digital, 2017).

12 Arthur Rucker, “The Work of the International Refugee Organization,” International Affairs 25, no. 1 (1949): 69.

13 Ibid., 72.

14 UNHCR, UNHCR Resettlement Handbook (Geneva: UNHCR, 2011), 47.

15 Cohen, In War’s Wake, 125.

16 International Refugee Organization, The Forgotten Elite: The Story of Refugee Specialists (Geneva: IRO, 1949), 1.

17 Report of the Director-General to the General Council of the International Refugee Organization, July 1948–June 1949 (Geneva: IRO, 1949).

18 Cited in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 115.

19 Nasaw, The Last Million, 504–5. The United States sometimes actively recruited ex-Nazis for migration to serve the Western cause in the intensifying Cold War; see 468.

20 The details and execution of Zionist plans to expel Palestinians from Israeli territory as a way of solving the demographic “problem” of the new Israeli state are subjects of a large and contentious scholarly literature. Some especially important contributions include Walid Khalidi, “A Palestinian Perspective on the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies 14, no. 4 (1985): 35–48; Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); and James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

21 Penny Sinanoglou, Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Laila Parsons, “The Secret Testimony of the Peel Commission, Part I: Underbelly of Empire,” Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 1 (2020): 7–24, and “The Secret Testimony of the Peel Commission, Part II: Partition,” Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 2 (2020): 8–25.

22 UN Resolution 194, 1948.

23 Erskine Childers, “The Other Exodus,” Spectator, 1961.

24 Susan Akram, “UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees,” in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, eds. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 227–8.

25 Some historians have pointed out the central role of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the drafting of the Refugee Convention as an explanation for its specific contours and limitations; see especially Gilad Ben Nun, “The Israeli Roots of Article 3 and Article 6 of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” Journal of Refugee Studies 27, no. 1 (2014): 101–25.

26 Cited in Ilana Feldman, “Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice, and Political Identification in Gaza,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 1 (2007): 140.

27 Akram, “UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees,” 232.

28 Cited in ibid., 233.

29 Nancy Gallagher, Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Dilemmas of NGO Humanitarian Activism (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 100ff.

30 Lodewijk van Oord, “Face-Lifting Palestine: Early Western Accounts of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” History and Anthropology 22, no. 1 (2011): 29–30.

31 Cited in Gallagher, Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 105.

32 Ibid., 108.

33 Nur Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 67–8 and chapter 3.

34 See Ilana Feldman, “The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a ‘Palestine Refugee,’ ” Journal of Refugee Studies 25, no. 3 (2012): 390.

35 UNCCP, Final Report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East (New York: United Nations, 1949), viii.

36 Cited in David Ekbladh, “ ‘Mr. TVA’: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933–1973,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 3 (2002): 347.

37 Ibid., 351.

38 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 234.

39 Sergei Shenin, The United States and the Third World: The Origins of Postwar Relations and the Point Four Program (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2000).

40 UNCCP, Final Report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission, 206.

41 Ibid., 215.

42 UNRWA, UNRWA: A Brief History (UNRWA HQ: Vienna, 1982), 97.

43 Cited in Maya Rosenfeld, “From Emergency Relief Assistance to Human Development and Back: UNRWA and the Palestinian Refugees, 1950–2009,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 28, no. 2–3 (2009): 294.

44 UNRWA, UNRWA: A Brief History, 98.

45 UNRWA HQ Jordan, Operation in Jordan (Amman: UNRWA, 1956), 40.

46 Don Peretz, Palestinians, Refugees, and the Middle East Peace Process, (Washington, DC: Institute of Peace Press), 104. The bank, which received 80 percent of its funding from UNRWA, was dissolved in 1966–7.

47 UNRWA-Egyptian agreement on cooperation in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, Jun 30, 1953, UN Doc A/2717, Annex C; see also US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation report on Northeast Sinai Project (Republic of Egypt), 1955. On the Gaza plans, see UNRWA Reviews Information Paper No 5 (Beirut: UNRWA, 1962), 16.

48 UNRWA, UNRWA: A Brief History, 102.

49 For further details, see Benjamin Schiff, Refugees unto the Third Generation: UN Aid to Palestinians (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 35–47.

50 UNRWA Reviews Information Paper No 5 (Beirut: UNRWA, 1962), 11.

51 Cited in Rosenfeld, “From Emergency Relief Assistance to Human Development and Back,” 297.

52 UNRWA, UNRWA: A Brief History, 103.

53 Yearbook of the United Nations 1959 (New York: UN Office of Public Information, 1959).

54 John Chalcraft, “Migration and Popular Protest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 79 (2011): 38.

55 UNRWA, UNRWA: A Brief History, 143–4.

56 David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (London and Boston: Faber and Faber), 179.

57 Pamela Smith, Palestine and the Palestinians, 1876–1983 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 153.

58 Ibid., 148.

59 On UNRWA’s move towards an educational mission and the particulars of its nationalist approach, see especially Anne Irfan, “Educating Palestinian Refugees: The Origins of UNRWA’s Unique Schooling System,” Journal of Refugee Studies 34, no. 1 (2020): 1037–59, and Mezna Qato, “A Primer for a New Terrain: Palestinian Schooling in Jordan, 1950,” Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 1 (2018): 16–32.

60 UNRWA, Information Paper No. 1, A Brief History of UNRWA, 1950–1962 (Beirut: UNRWA, 1962), 26.

61 Cited in Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 131.

62 Cited in Fred Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 143.

63 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, A (2).

64 Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, “The Politics of Refugee Protection,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2008): 18.

65 Ibid., 15.

66 Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics, 45.

8. The Politics of Confinement

1 Cited in Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 50.

2 “Resolution to Establish a Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe, Dec 5, 1951,” iom.int.

3 For the shift from ICEM to the IOM in the 1980s, see Richard Perruchoud, “From the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to the International Organization for Migration,” International Journal of Refugee Law 1, no. 4 (1989): 501–17.

4 Cited in Edward Marks, “Internationally Assisted Migration: ICEM Rounds Out Five Years of Resettlement,” International Organization 11, no. 3 (1957): 485–6.

5 Ibid., 490.

6 Perruchoud, “From the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to the International Organization for Migration,” 504.

7 Cited in Jerome Elie, “The Historical Roots of Cooperation Between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration,” Global Governance 16, no. 3 (2010): 352.

8 Cited in Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986), 26.

9 Peter Gatrell, Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21.

10 Secretary of State confidential memo, Feb 19, 1953, reprinted in David Baehler et al., eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1988), 187–8.

11 Gatrell, Free World, 30; Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War: Towards a New International Refugee Regime in the Early Postwar Era (Lund: Lund University Press, 199), 189.

12 Alexander Betts, “UNHCR, Autonomy, and Mandate Change,” in International Organizations as Self-Directed Actors: A Framework for Analysis, ed. Joel E. Oestreich (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2012), 123.

13 Cited in Gatrell, Free World, 53.

14 Cited in ibid., 52.

15 Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

16 Ethan Blue, Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), 245–7.

17 Cited in Glen Petersen, “Sovereignty, International Law, and the Development of the International Refugee Regime,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 465.

18 Gatrell, Free World, 59.

19 Andrei Miroiu, “Deportations and Counterinsurgency: A Comparison of Malaya, Algeria and Romania,” Romanian Political Science Review 15, no. 2 (2015): 187.

20 On the French use of regroupement see especially Michel Conaton’s crucial work Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algerie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). On comparisons to Nazi practice, see especially Emma Kuby, “In the Shadow of the Concentration Camp: David Rousset and the Limits of Apoliticism in Postwar French Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 1 (2014): 147–73.

21 Cited in Cecilia Ruthstrom-Ruin, Beyond Europe: The Globalization of Refugee Aid (Lund: Lund University Press, 1993), 88–9.

22 Ibid., 163–5.

23 UN Resolution 1286, “Refugees in Morocco and Tunisia,” Dec 5, 1958, unhcr.org.

24 UN Resolution 1388 (XIV), “Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,” Nov 20, 1959, un.org.

25 Addendum to the Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Jan 1, 1962, UNGA A/4771/Rev.1/Add.1.

26 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Jan 1, 1961, UNGA A/4378/Rev.1.

27 Malika Rahal and Benjamin Thomas White, “UNHCR and the Algerian War of Independence: Postcolonial Sovereignty and the Globalization of the International Refugee Regime, 1954–63,” Journal of Global History 17, no. 2 (2022): 342–3.

28 Cited in ibid., 344.

29 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Jan 1, 1963, UNGA A/5211/Rev.1.

30 Claire Eldridge, “The Empire Returns: ‘Repatriates’ and ‘Refugees’ from French Algeria,” in Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?, eds. Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 195–212.

31 Jeanette E. Miller, “A Camp for Foreigners and ‘Aliens’: The Harkis’ Exile at the Rivesaltes Camp (1962–1964),” French Politics, Culture and Society 31, no. 2 (2013): 37.

32 Sara E. Davies, “Redundant or Essential? How Politics Shaped the Outcome of the 1967 Protocol,” International Journal of Refugee Law 19, no. 4 (2007): 716.

33 Louise Holborn, Refugees, A Problem of Our Time: The World of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1951–1972 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), 658.

34 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, adopted 10 Sept 1969, 1001 UNTS 14691, article I, 2.

35 Tamara Wood, “Expanding Protection in Africa? Case Studies of the Implementation of the 1969 African Refugee Convention’s Expanded Refugee Definition,” International Journal of Refugee Law 26, no. 4 (2014): 555–80, and Micah Bond Rankin, “Extending the Limits or Narrowing the Scope? Deconstructing the OAU Refugee Definition Thirty Years On,” South African Journal on Human Rights 21, no. 3 (2005): 406–35.

36 Davies, “Redundant or Essential?” 705.

37 Cabeiri Robinson, “Too Much Nationality: Kashmiri Refugees, the South Asian Refugee Regime, and a Refugee State, 1947–1974,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25, no. 3 (2012): 344–65.

38 Cited in Davies, “Redundant or Essential?” 720.

39 Cited in ibid., 723.

40 Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gates: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4.

41 Rebecca Hamlin and Philip Wolgin, “Symbolic Politics and Policy Feedback: The United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees and American Refugee Policy in the Cold War,” International Migration Review 46, no. 3 (2021): 586–624.

42 B. S. Chimni, “The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South,” Journal of Refugee Studies 11, no. 4 (1998): 351. Subsequent studies make this point as well, including E. Tendayi Achiume, “Race, Refugees, and International Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Law, eds. Cathryn Costello et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), and Lucy Mayblin, Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

43 Robin Cohen, The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour (Aldershot, Hants: Gower Publishing Co., 1987), 157.

44 Cited in ibid., 157.

45 Chalcraft, “Migration and Popular Protest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s,” 38.

46 Ibid.

47 S. V. Aarthi and Mrutuyanjaya Sahu, “Migration Policy in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States: A Critical Analysis,” Contemporary Review of the Middle East 8, no. 4 (2021): 413.

48 Steven D. Roper and Lilian A. Barria, “Understanding Variations in Gulf Migration and Labor Practices,” Middle East Law and Governance 6, no. 1 (2014): 40.

49 On the reasons for the Arab world’s general non-acceptance of the Refugee Convention see Maja Janmyr, “The 1951 Refugee Convention and Non-Signatory States: Charting a Research Agenda,” International Journal of Refugee Law 33, no. 2 (2021): 188–213, and “No Country of Asylum: ‘Legitimizing’ Lebanon’s Rejection of the 1951 Convention,” International Journal of Refugee Law 29, no. 3 (2017): 438–65.

50 Cohen, The New Helots, 224.

51 The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council July 1–17, 1968, law.yale.edu.

52 Anne Irfan, “Educating Palestinian Refugees: The Origins of UNRWA’s Unique Schooling System,” Journal of Refugee Studies 34, no. 1 (2019): 1054.

53 Jalal al-Husseini, “UNRWA and the Palestinian Nation-Building Process,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 54.

54 Ibid., 54.

55 Schiff, Refugees unto the Third Generation, 114.

56 Cited in ibid., 122.

57 Cited in ibid., 127.

58 Mandy Turner, “ ‘Aid Intervention’ in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: Do Gulf Arab Donors Act Differently from Western Donors?” Conflict, Security and Development 19, no. 3 (2019): 283–8.

59 Cited in Schiff, Refugees unto the Third Generation, 186.

60 Stephan Scheel and Philipp Ratfisch, “Refugee Protection Meets Migration Management: UNHCR as a Global Police of Populations,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 924–41.

9. Containing Labor

1 Howard Adelman, “From Refugees to Forced Migration: The UNHCR and Human Security,” International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (2001): 16.

2 As refugee scholar B. S. Chimni points out, between the 1980s and 2000 the states of the Global North pushed through more than a thousand “investment protection treaties” intended to “remove ‘national’ impediments to the entry, establishment and operation of transnational capital … While [such] agreements promote the mobility of capital and services, they do not in any way promote the mobility of labour.” See Chimni, “Globalization, Humanitarianism and the Erosion of Refugee Protection,” Journal of Refugee Studies 13, no. 3 (2000): 246.

3 Chimni, “Globalization, Humanitarianism and the Erosion of Refugee Protection,” 255.

4 These three cases are discussed and compared in Sara Cosemans’s important thesis, The Internationalization of the Refugee Question: Resettlement from the Global South in the 1970s (PhD diss., University of Leuven, 2021).

5 Sara Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal: Turning Ugandan Colonial Subjects into Postcolonial Refugees (1967–76),” Migration Studies 6, no. 1 (2018): 101.

6 For a detailed discussion of such policies, see Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

7 Cosemans, Internationalization of the Refugee Problem, chapter 3.

8 Ibid., 256.

9 Cited in Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organization in Global Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 96.

10 Cited in Barbara Harrell-Bond, “Repatriation: Under What Conditions Is It the Most Desirable Solution for Refugees? An Agenda for Research,” African Studies Review 32, no. 1 (1989): 46.

11 Ibid., 56.

12 Ibid., 57.

13 UNHCR, “Note on Internal Protection,” Aug 25, 1992, UNA A/AC.96/799, refworld.org.

14 Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism with a Sovereign Face: UNHCR in the Global Undertow,” International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (2001): 264–5.

15 Cited in Jacob Stevens, “Prisons of the Stateless: The Derelictions of UNHCR,” New Left Review 42 (2006): 58.

16 Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s (New York: Norton, 2005), 249; quoted and discussed in Stevens, “Prisons of the Stateless,” 62.

17 Ogata, The Turbulent Decade, 37–8.

18 David Scott FitzGerald, Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6.

19 Ibid., 918.

20 Cited in Anne Koch, “The Politics and Discourse of Migrant Return: The Role of UNHCR and IOM in the Governance of Return,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 913.

21 Ibid., 914.

22 Saul Takahashi, “The UNHCR Handbook on Voluntary Repatriation: The Emphasis of Return over Protection,” International Journal of Refugee Law 9, no. 4 (1997): 593–612.

23 Frances Webber, “How Voluntary Are Voluntary Returns?” Race & Class 52, no. 4 (2011): 99.

24 Cited in ibid., 105.

25 Roger Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 181. There are prior examples of states issuing forms of temporary protection on a customary basis: for instance, the French and British granting of temporary refuge to escapees from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. For a history, see Deborah Perluss and Joan Hartman, “Temporary Refuge: Emergence of a Customary Norm,” Virginian Journal of International Law 26, no. 3 (1986): 551–626.

26 UNHCR, “Note on Temporary Protection in a Broader Context,” Jan 1, 1993, refworld.org

27 Jean-Francois Durieux, “Temporary Protection: Hovering at the Edges of Refugee Law,” The Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 45 (2014): 233. He points out that in this respect temporary protection was conceived with direct reference to plans for repatriation, which once enforced would end the status for the refugees involved.

28 UNHCR, “Roundtable on Temporary Protection—Discussion Paper,” July 2012, unhcr.org (emphasis added).

29 Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees,” 182.

30 IOM, International Agenda for Migration Management (Berne: IOM, 2005), 34.

31 Ibid., 67.

32 Scheel and Ratfisch, “Refugee Protection Meets Migration Management,” 929.

33 Ibid., 930.

34 Helene Lambert, “Temporary Refuge from War: Customary International Law and the Syrian Conflict,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 66 (2017): 740.

35 Cited in Ann-Cristin Zuntz et al., “Syrians’ Only Option—Rethinking Unfree Labor through the Study of Displaced Agricultural Workers in the Middle East,” Journal of Modern Slavery 7, no. 2 (2022): 23.

36 Ibid., 14.

37 Marjoleine Zieck, “Reimagining Voluntary Repatriation,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law, eds. Cathryn Costello, Michelle Foster, and Jane McAdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1064.

38 Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees,” 183.

39 Megan Maruschke, “Zones of Reterritorialization: India’s Free Trade Zones in Comparative Perspective, 1947 to the 1980s,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 3 (2017): 414–15.

40 Douglas Z. Zeng, “The Past, Present, and Future of Special Economic Zones and Their Impact,” Journal of International Economic Law 24 (2021): 262.

41 Ibid., 416.

42 Thomas Kelleher, Handbook on Export Free Zones (Geneva: United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 1976), 41.

43 UNIDO, Export Processing Zones: Principles and Practice (Geneva: UNIDO, 1994), 65.

44 Ibid., 52.

45 European Union External Action, “EU Support in Response to the Syrian Crisis,” Feb 4, 2016, eeas.europa.eu.

46 Betts and Collier, Refuge, 151. This point, as well as a more extended critique of their plans to extend the SEZ model across the Global South, is made in Benjamin Thomas White, “Refuge and History: A Critical Reading of a Polemic,” Migration and Society 2 (2019): 107–18.

47 Katharina Lenner and Lewis Turner, “Making Refugees Work? The Politics of Integrating Syrian Refugees into the Labor Market in Jordan,” Middle East Critique 28, no. 1 (2019): 65–95.

48 Ala Al-Mahaidi, “Syrian Refugees in Jordan: How a Focus on Human Rights Can Help Secure Economic Livelihoods,” Refugee Law Initiative: School of Advanced Study University of London, May 28, 2020, blogs.sas.ac.uk.

49 Amanda Gray Meral, “Assessing the Jordan Compact One Year On: An Opportunity or a Barrier to Better Achieving Refugees’ Right to Work,” Journal of Refugee Studies 33, no. 1 (2019): 54.

50 Jacopo Dettoni, “Can Free Zones Fix the Global Refugee Crisis?” FDI Intelligence, Oct 17, 2019, fdiintelligence.com

51 Quoted in Lenner and Turner, “Making Refugees Work?” 82.

52 Ibid., 89.

53 Randall Hansen, “The Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework: A Commentary,” Journal of Refugee Studies 31, no. 2 (2018): 135.

Afterword

1 Peter Gatrell, “Europe, the ‘Dark Continent,’ Is the Stage for Another Great Migration,” New York Times, Mar 14, 2022.

2 Chris McGreal, “70 Years and Half a Trillion Dollars Later: What Has the UN Achieved?,” Guardian, Sep 7, 2017.

3 Carl Bildt, “Dag Hammarskjöld and United Nations Peacekeeping,” UN Chronicle, n.d., un.org.

4 Cited in Evan Easton-Calabiria and Naohiko Omata, “Panacea for the Refugee Crisis? Rethinking the Promotion of ‘Self-Reliance’ for Refugees,” Third World Quarterly 39, no. 8 (2018): 1464.

5 Scheel and Ratfisch, “Refugee Protection Meets Migration Management,” 924.

6 Anne Hammerstad, “Whose Security? UNHCR, Refugee Protection and State Security After the Cold War,” Security Dialogue 31, no. 4 (2000): 393.

7 Ibid.

8 Mark F. N. Franke, “Refugees’ Loss of Self-Determination in UNHCR Operations through the Gaining of Identity in Blockchain Technology,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 10, no. 1 (2022): 25.

9 Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, “Experimentation in Humanitarian Locations: UNHCR and Biometric Registration of Afghan Refugees,” Security Dialogue 46, no. 2 (2015): 144–64.

10 Leah Waid, “Tracing the Untraceable: New Technologies that Monitor Displaced Persons and the History of Population Control,” Harvard International Review (2021): 42–5.

11 Russ Justakalian, “Inside the Jordan Refugee Camp that Runs on Blockchain,” MIT Technology Review, Apr 12, 2018.

12 Irisguard.com.

13 Yasmin Fanselow, “Cashing in on Crisis? The Refugee Eye Scan Experiment,” Redfish 2018, redfish.media.

14 William F. Jasper, “UN, Socialist International, Obama Design U.S. Refugee Resettlement,” New American 31, no. 20 (2015): 21.

15 Barack Obama, “Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly,” Sept 20, 2016, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov.

Index

absorptive capacity 57, 79–83, 90, 105, 119, 121, 130–1

Acheson, Dean 180–1

Adelman, Howard 223

Ador, Gustave 37

Afghan refugees 253

Africa 210, 211

agricultural settlers 57

Agro-Join 115

aid-as-containment 167–8

Akzin, Benjamin 125

Algeria 149, 167, 250

Algerian refugees 8, 203–8

All-British Appeal 47

Alliance Israélite Universelle 89

al-Sabah, Sheikh Ahmed al-Jabir 74

al-Saud, Abd al-Aziz 188

al-Sunayd, Abd al-Aziz 215

American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief 31

American Friends Service Committee 180–90, 181, 182

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 89

American Relief Administration 31

Anatolia 16, 17, 19–20, 20, 27, 30

Anatolian Christian refugees 45–50, 55, 118

Anglo-Persian Oil Company 73, 75

Angola 110, 114

anti-fascist refugees 86, 87–91

anti-immigrant feeling 96

anti-imperialism 58

anti-Semitism 21–2, 99, 101, 137

Arab expulsions 117–20

Aramco 188, 214–15

Arendt, Hannah 87

Argentina 23, 60–1, 94–5, 96, 100, 136, 137

Armenian Central Committee of Aleppo 69

Armenian genocide 28–9, 31, 31–2, 33, 68

Armenian resettlement 30, 39–40, 54, 141, 145–6, 248

assimilation 58, 83, 103

Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union 152

Assyrian genocide 68–9

Assyrian refugees 70–2, 73, 78, 79

asylum 179, 236–7, 249

Austria 160, 200

Austria-Hungary 26

AVR schemes 232–3

Baba Gurgur oil field 76–7

Baghdad Dairy Farm 71

Bahrain 74

Balfour Declaration 80, 81

Balkan Wars (1877–78) 16, 18

Balkan Wars, First and Second (1912–13) 20

Bank of England, Greek loan 47, 48, 49

Baquba 70–2

Baquba revolt 72–3

Barnes, Steven 150

Beirut 31, 69

Belgian refugees 43

Belgium 26, 100, 196

Beneš, Edvard 123–4

Ben-Gurion, David 118, 119, 139, 182

Ben-Horin, Eliahu 125

Berenger, Henry 94

Berlin crisis 199

Bernadotte, Count Folke 176

Bet-Shlimon, Arbella 79

Betts, Alexander 241–2

BioID 253

Biometric Identity Management System 253

biometrics 252–4

Birobidzhan 151–4

blockchain records 253–4

Bolivia 100

Bolshevik Revolution 35

border regulation 149

Bosnia-Herzegovina 17, 17–18

Bosnian War 224, 233–4

Bourguiba, Habib 204

Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 231

Bowman, Isaiah 105–8, 109–10, 111, 112, 115, 116, 120–1, 126, 128, 132

Brazil 60, 61–3, 83, 94, 96, 136

British Nationality Act, 1981 227

British Protected Person status 226–7

Building Blocks program 253–4

Bulgaria 16, 17, 18

Burmah Oil 75

Byelorussia 158–9

Canada 7, 108, 159, 183

Carter, John 115

Central African Republic 221

Chamberlain, Joseph 23–4

charitable organizations 46–7

Chase, Stuart 163

Chatham House 171

child refugees 143–5

Chile 43, 136, 226, 227

Chimni, B. S. 213, 224

China, People’s Republic of 160, 201–3

Churchill, Winston 161

Cilicia 31–2, 33

citizenship 76

civil rights 43

Clapp, Gordon 182–3, 184

Clapp report 182–3

Clark, Helen 247

coercion 68

Cold War 8, 140, 149, 166, 183–4, 190–2, 193, 199, 199–201, 211, 212, 221, 223, 224, 228, 251

Collier, Paul 241–2

Colombia 97, 100

colonial industrialization 57

colonial capitalism 83

colonial workers 56–84, 110, 248–9; financial burden 67, 69; financing 63–4; Indian 75–6; interviews 59; investment opportunity 66–7; Latin America 60–7; Middle East 57, 67–72, 72–9; numbers placed 67–8; oil industry 57, 72–9; Palestine 79–83

colonization 103

colonization villages 147–8

Comay, Michael 220

Comité des Delegations 89

Compagnie Française des Petroles 73

Conference des Nationalités (1916) 124

Conference universelle juive 60

containment 167–8, 188–9, 190, 195, 208, 211, 212–13, 217–21, 222, 224, 225–6, 226, 227–8, 244–5, 252

Convention on Statelessness 10

Convention on the Status of Refugees 7–8, 9, 10, 13–14, 166, 177, 178, 179, 190–2, 200, 206, 221–2, 246, 247

convention refugees 234

Cosemans, Sara 227

Costa Rica 109

Coughlin, Charles 99

Cremins, Francis Thomas 97–8

Crimea 151

Crimean War 15, 16–17

currency stabilization 49, 50

Czechoslovakia 38, 161

da Silva Paranhos, José Maria 61

Daladier, Edouard 100

Danube Valley Authority 183

data mining 252–4

Davis, John 190

decolonial refugees 194–5, 208, 217, 234

decolonization 10, 193

demography, and population 104–8

denationalization 20

denationalized Russians 37–40, 54

deportation 26, 100

deportation facilities 237

Depression, the 98

detention camps 100

developmentalism 12, 166, 183–90, 194

differentiated refugee status 178–9

displaced persons camps 10

dispossession 79

Dominican Republic 3, 114–15

Drumont, Edouard 22

durable solutions 228, 238

East African Asians 226–7

Economic and Financial Organization 44–5

economic autonomy 195

economic reconstruction, post–First World War 35–6

Economic Survey Mission 182–3

Ecuador 95

Eden, Anthony 161–2

educational services 187–8, 189, 195

Egypt 134–5, 186, 189, 217

Eisenhower, Dwight 198, 199, 201

employment, relationship with 63–4, scarcity anxiety 193

employment conditions 77–8

employment matching system 56–7

encampment 12

Escapee Program 198, 199

Ethiopia 114

ethnic homogenization 47, 49, 50, 55

ethnic nationalism 5

ethnicity 147

ethnonational violence 16

European Border and Coast Guard Agency 253

European Commission 241

European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument 241

European Union 1–2, 241

Évian-les-Bains conference 3–4, 91–100, 109, 111

fascism 84, 86

Field, Henry 111–12, 115–17, 130, 133–4

financial burden 67

Financial Times (newspaper) 243

First World War 6, 14, 26–32, 141

FitzGerald, David 231

forced displacement 17–18

forced labor 148

forcible expulsion, legitimization 118

Ford Foundation 199

France 13, 31–2, 33, 53, 83, 100, 144, 208, 230; anti-fascist refugees 86, 88; Antisemitic League 22; colonial workers 57–8; Évian-les-Bains conference 3–4, 91–100, 109, 111

First World War 26; Refugee Service arrangement 58–60; Syrian Mandate 69–70

Franks, G. M. 47–8

free movement 63–4

French–Algerian war 8, 203–8

Gatrell, Peter 13, 202–3, 246–7

Gaza 3, 180, 186, 189

Germanos of Patras, Bishop 16

Germany 214

globalization 103

good offices exception 202–3, 208

Goodwin-Gill, Guy 191

Great Power interest 54–5

greater Syria 31

Greco-Turkish War 45–50

Greece 15, 16, 17, 66; Anatolian Christian refugees 45–50, 55, 118; loan plan 47–50, 55

Grynszpan, Herschel 108–9

Guardian (newspaper) 247

guest workers 214

Gulbenkian, Calouste Sarkis 73

Gunther, John 183

Guterres, António 12, 236, 237, 254

Haile Selassie 91

Hambro, Edvard 202

Hammarskjöld, Dag 247

Harrell-Bond, Barbara 228–9

Herzl, Theodor 23, 25, 80

High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and Otherwise) Coming from Germany 86, 88–91

Himmler, Heinrich 109

Hitler, Adolf 87, 105, 120, 125

Hobson, J. A. 21–2

Holborn, Louise 209

Holland 100

Holocaust, the 10

Holocaust survivors 139, 167, 168, 174

Honduras 137

Hong Kong 194, 198, 201–3

Hoover, Herbert 114

Hope Simpson, Sir John 67, 82, 85, 88

Hrdlička, Aleš 112

Hughes, Charles Evans 38

Huguenots 13

human development 9

human displacement 13

human rights 9, 224

human security 224

humanitarian aid 5, 9, 10, 20, 44, 132, 160, 222, 252

humanitarian arguments 54–5

humanitarian assistance 44

Hungary, Soviet invasion of 199–201

Hussein, Saddam 231

identification papers 37, 43–4

immigration, hostility to 7

immigration policies 81–2, 93, 94, 100

imperial capitalism 34

imperial development 21–5

imperial economy 22

imperial interests 55

incomes 71–2

India 7, 149, 165, 177

industrial capitalism 5

industrial development 11

industrial employment 9

industrial unrest 41

industrialization 7, 57, 82–3, 128–9, 131–2, 135, 147, 148, 149–50, 153–4, 154, 160, 162, 184

informal workers 225

Institute of Jewish Affairs 123

Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration 196–9

Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees 98, 99–100, 112–15

internally displaced persons 147

International Agenda for Migration Management 236

International Committee for European Migration 171

international community 6

International Federation of the Red Cross 180

International Financial Conference (1920) 36

International Labor Conference (1919) 42

International Labour Charter 64

International Labour Organization 37, 38, 40–4, 195; budget 51; constitution colonial clause 41–2; Emigration Commission 42; founding documents 41; Governing Council 53; Latin American colonization commission 60–7; Migration Service 60; Native Labour Code 42; purpose 51; Refugee Service 58–60, 67–8; Refugee Sub-Committee 53; refugee-labor nexus 50–3; Refugees Service 53; takes responsibility for refugees 50–3

International Migration Service 89

International Organization for Migration 197, 231–2, 233

International Products Company 63

International Red Cross 46–7

international refugee law 44

International Refugee Organization 7, 138, 165–6, 169–74, 174, 195–6, 201, 246

International Settlement Authority 138

internationalism 10, 138, 154, 154–61, 164, 168–9, 224, 247, 247–51, 254

internment 12

interwar displacement crises 3–4

investment opportunity 66–7

Iraq 57, 83, 231; Assyrian refugees 70–2; oil industry 72–9

Iraq Petroleum Company 73–4, 76–9

Iraqi Communist Party 79

Ireland 239

Iridian Technologies 253

IrisGuard 254

Israel 3, 11, 90, 138–9, 174–6, 179, 181–2, 220

Israel Defense Forces 139

Istanbul 5

Italy 86, 160

Jabotinsky, Ze’ev 119–20, 123

Jerusalem 80, 81

Jewish Agency for Palestine 89, 130

Jewish Colonization Association 60, 89

Jewish DPs 173–4

Jewish Federation 82

Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 115

Jewish question 101–3

Jewish refugees, Nazi Germany 86, 91–100, 112–15, 138–9

Jewish Territorialist Organization 24

Jews 13, 14–15, 247; Algerian 208; British policy 21–5; refugee labor 23–5; resettlement 11–12, 79–83, 85, 112–15, 141, 151–4, 173–4, 179; repatriation 29–30; Uganda scheme 23–5

John Birch Society 254

Jordan 1–2, 3, 189, 240–4, 251

Jordan Compact 1–2, 9, 225–6, 240–4

Jordan Development Bank 186

Jordan Valley 130–1, 185–6

Jouhaux, M. 51–2

Kazakhstan 7, 150

Kennedy, Howard 184

Kershaw, Louis 51

Keynes, John Maynard 35, 105

Kinch, E. A. 76–7, 77–8

Kotkin, Stephen 142

Kulischer, Aleksandre 126, 132

Kulischer, Eugene 121–2, 126–30, 157

Kumin, Judith 227

Kurds 19, 78, 231

Kuwait 74

Kuwait Oil Company 74–5

labor, international division of 217

labor conditions 52

labor distribution 54–5

labor exploitation 12

labor force, incorporation into 37–8

labor law protections 243

labor market 40–4, 193, 199; destabilization 57; global 52; mass labor migration 213–17; refugee-labor nexus 50–3; secondary 42

labor migrants 9, 50, 238

labor migration, mass 213–17

labor participation 9

labor rights 1–2, 67

labor safeguards 41

Labouisse, Henry 187

LaGuardia, Fiorello 159–60

land development 69

Latin America 6, 42; anti-Semitism 137; Évian-les-Bains conference 94–7; and M Project 133; worker colonization 60–7

Le Breton, Tomas 94–5

League Health Conference 155

League of Nations 4, 6–8, 11, 31, 104, 141, 148, 151, 191, 246, 248, 254; anti-Bolshevik aspects 155; assessment 85; definition of refugee 37; denationalized Russians policy 37–40; Economic and Financial Organization 44–5; Economic and Financial Section 36; employment matching system 56–7; financing 35–6, 45; formation 34; Greek loan plan 47–50, 55; High Commissioner for Russian Refugees 142; humanitarian arguments 54–5; ILO 37, 38, 40–4, 50–3; and imperial capitalism 34; last stand 87–91; membership 34; purposes 35–6; raison d’être 53–4; refugee policy 34–55, 56–8; refugee regime 35; refugee–labor nexus 50–3; resistance 57; role of private capital 44–50; successes 83; and USSR 142–6, 154–7; USSR joins 156

League of Red Cross Societies 36–7, 207

Lebanon 1–2, 189, 219

Lebanon Mandate 31, 57

Lebensraum 104–5

Lenin, V. I. 30, 103–4, 154–5

Levant 30–1

Lindt, Auguste 199–200, 204–5

living standards 128–9

Lobo, Helio 96

Lowdermilk, Walter 130–1

Luxembourg 88

Luxemburg, Rosa 103–4

M Project 6–7, 140, 147, 149–50, 154, 162, 248; assessment 138–9; closure 139, 168; influences 117–20; and Latin America 133, 133–8; legacy 138–9; and the Middle East 133–6; origins 111–12; Palestine information sources 130–1; and Palestine question 120–33; researchers 115–16; status 117; wartime context 112–17; and Zionist population engineering 117–20

McDonald, James 89–90

Macedonia 16, 47, 48–9, 55

McGhee, George 181

Mackinder, Halford 103

Macro Financial Assistance Instrument 241

Madagascar 109

Malcolm, Sir Neill 90–1, 99

managed migration 235–7, 251–4

mandatory states 57, 67–72, 80–1, 248

Mandelstamm, Max 25

Marrus, Michael 91–2

mass displacement, problem of labor 5

mass expulsions 13

Mazower, Mark 133

MERRA 167

Mesopotamia 25, 28, 70–2

Mexico 100, 136

Middle East 10, 12, 15, 166, 248; industrialization 3

M Project and 133–6; Special Economic Zones 238, 240–4

migrant arrival 1–2

migrant labor 75–6, 194

migrants, definition 224–5

migration law 235

migration management 235–7, 251–4

military service 72, 248

minority rights regime, failure 120

Moch, Leslie Page 153

Monroe Doctrine 103

Montandon, George 124

Morgan, Frederick 168

Morgenthau, Henry 28

Morocco 8, 167, 205, 207

Mosul 73, 78

Mount Lebanon famine 31

Mussolini, Benito 105, 107–8, 114, 120

myth of difference 213

Nansen, Fridtjof 4, 6, 12, 34–5, 37–40, 43–4, 46, 47, 50–1, 52–3, 54–5, 58–9, 85, 143–4, 145–6, 155, 247, 248

Nansen Passport, the 43–4, 44, 53, 54, 64, 85, 88, 246, 248

national sovereignty 106

nationalism 12, 57, 189

nationality, losing 14

nation-building 36, 58

Native Labour Code (ILO) 42

Nazi Germany 3–4, 6; anti-fascist refugees 87–91; concentration camps 109; crimes 110; invasion of USSR 157; Jewish refugees 86, 91–100, 112–15, 138–9; Kristallnacht 109; Nuremberg Laws 87; population transfer policies 124–6; takeover of Austria 91–2; USSR and 156–7; violence against Jews 87

Near East Relief 30–1, 31–2, 35, 47, 59

neoimperial economic system 58

Netherlands, the 229

New World Order 223

New York Times (newspaper) 246–7

non-refoulement, principle 190–1

Nuremberg Laws 87

Obama, Barack 255

Office of Strategic Services 123

Ogata, Sadako 166, 230

oil industry, colonial workers 57, 72–9

Oman 74

Organization of African Unity 209–10

Ottoman Empire 5–6, 10–11, 13, 135, 247; Armenian genocide 28–9, 31, 33; Committee of Union and Progress 27–8; Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants 20; ethnonational violence 16; First World War 27–9; forced displacement 17–18; General Administrative Commission for Refugees 17; oil industry 73; political imaginary 20–1; Refugee Code 19; Refugee Commission 19–20; refugee regime 14, 15–21, 32–3; refugees 16; resettlement schemes 19–20, 25; resistance movements 15; territorial losses 15–16

overpopulation 105

Palcor News Agency 130

Palestine 6, 23, 25, 57, 83, 90, 91, 98, 119, 151, 152, 165; absorptive capacity 57, 79–83, 90, 105, 119, 121, 130–1; colonial workers 79–83; Jewish settlement 11–12, 80, 85, 138–9; M Project and 120–33; partition of 118, 175; revolt (1936) 84; Zionist population engineering 117–20

Palestine Liberation Organization 217–20

Palestine refugees 3, 7–8, 11–12, 192, 192–3, 248–9; claims to their homeland 189; containment 188–9, 190, 217–21; eligibility for registration 178; emergence of 174–9; expulsion from Israel 175; labor migration 214–15; legal category established 165–7, 178; Placement Service 188; resettlement schemes 184–6; responsibility for 181–2; return option 179–80, 181–2; US priority 182; worker schemes 180–90

Palestinian nationalism 189, 219

Paraguay 60, 88, 95, 136

passport system 43–4

Peel Commission 118

Pelzer, Karl 109

performative work 9

persecution 13, 191

Persia 74

Persian Relief Commission 71

Peru 96–7

physical danger 77

physical restraint 9

Pinsker, Leon 23

Placement Familial 144, 144–5

Poland 160, 161

political asylum 8

political geography 101–8

political stability 52

population, and demography 104–8

population distribution 86, 103–8, 115–17

population engineering, Zionist 117–20

population politics 146–51

population transfer 119, 123, 124–30, 132, 133

populists 12

Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees 113, 115

preventive protection 229–30, 252

prisoners of war 143

private capital, role of 44–50

profit 35, 55

Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe 196

Qatar 74

race and racialization 164–93, 248–9; centrality 164–7; development of racialized approach 167–74; and developmentalism 166; IRO and 165; Jewish DPs 173; Palestine refugees 165–7, 174–9; refugee categories 178–9; and refugee definition 190–2; and refugee distinction 165–7

race redistribution 124

Ratzel, Friedrich 104–5

Read, James 200

reception centers 237

Red Cross 36–7

Red Line agreement 74

refugee aid 12

refugee burden 39

refugee camps 31, 70–2, 167, 199, 237

refugee crisis, EU 1–2

refugee discontent 3

refugee distinction 165–7

Refugee Economic Corporation 109–10

refugee outflow, control 1–2

refugee passports 37

refugee policy 5-8; assessment 247–51; League of Nations 34–55, 56–8; USA 100

refugee protection 221–2

refugee regime, colonial workers 56–84; contemporary 222; development 13–33; earlier incarnations 11; histories 10–11; international 5, 26–32; League of Nations 35; original good intentions 12; Ottoman Empire 14, 15–21, 32–3; policy interests 255

refugee restriction 9

refugee rights 190–2, 210, 223, 247, 251

Refugee Settlement Commission 47

refugeedom 13–14, 26, 32–3, 53, 98, 195

refugee–labor nexus, creation of 50–3

refugees, categories 11–12, 178–9, 206, 224–5, 249, 251; definition 7–8, 13–14, 37, 190–2, 210, 211; myth of difference 213; numbers 1–2; as threat 223; understanding 10–11

reintegration schemes 229

repatriation 29–30, 38, 164, 168, 185, 207–8, 224, 228–33, 244–5

repopulation 6

resettlement schemes 19–20, 21–5, 26, 33, 53, 54–5, 86, 108, 201, 226–8, 248; Anatolian Christian refugees 45–50; colonial workers 56–84; Évian-les-Bains conference 91–100; funding 47–50, 112–13; investment opportunity 66–7; Palestine Refugees 184–6; post–Second World War 171–3; refugee colonization 84; role of private capital 44–50; scientific 197; USSR 140–63

resistance 57, 83–4

Rockefeller Foundation 45

Rohingyan refugees 230

Roman Empire 13

Romania 17

Roosevelt, Eleanor 121

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 4, 6, 12, 92, 94–5, 100–3, 109, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 116, 133–4, 139, 161–2, 248

Rørholt, Arnold 204–5

Royal Dutch Shell 73

Rublee, George 113

Rucker, Arthur 170–1

Russia, Imperial 17, 17–18, 26–7

Russian Civil War 35, 142–3

Russian Red Cross 143

Russian refugees 37–40

Rwanda 208, 230

Saar Basin 87–8

Sadruddin Aga Khan 210–11, 221

Salter, Arthur 35–6

Samuel, Herbert 81

San Remo Round Table on Voluntary Repatriation 228

São Paulo 62, 96

São Paulo Tramway, Light and Power Company 63

Saudi Arabia 188, 214–16

Save the Children Fund 36–7, 47

Scandrett, Richard 159

Schacht, Hjalmar 112–13

Schacht Plan 112–13

Schechtman, Joseph 121–6, 127, 128, 129, 132, 181

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. 183–4

Schnyder, Felix 206

Second World War 14, 79, 141, 157–8; the Anschluss 91–2; concentration camps 109; Jewish refugees 91–100; population resettlement 171–3; refugees 164–5

secondary labor market 42

security 224

segregation 77, 83, 166

self-deportation 229–30

self-sufficiency 9, 195

Semple, Ellen Churchill 105

separatism 18

Serbia 15

settler colonialism 103

Sèvres, Treaty of 45

Shaw, Wallace, and Co. 75

Shaw Commission 81–2

Shotwell, James 40–1

Siegelbaum, Lewis 153

Smith, Neil 103

Society of Friends 89

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 149

source control 230

South Africa 21–2, 23, 43

South America 53, 89–90

South Korea 239

Special Economic Zones 9, 225–6, 238–44, 245, 251

Stalin, Josef 7, 146, 148

standard of living 183

state authority 20

state-building 118, 147

state control 79

state power 146–7

statelessness 17, 33

Sudan 221

Sulzberger, Arthur 121

Supreme Economic Council 35

surplus capital 104

surplus peoples 105

surplus populations 64, 116, 171–2

Switzerland 100

Syrian Civil War 1–2, 240

Syrian Mandate 31, 57, 68–70

Syrian refugees 237, 240–4, 251, 253

Tabenkin, Yitzhak 118

Tatars 16

Taylor, Myron 92, 93, 114

temporary protection 9, 225, 233–8, 245, 251

tenant farmers 61, 63–4

Tennessee Valley Authority 181, 183–4, 193

territorialism 22

Thomas, Albert 37, 41, 43, 51

tracking 252–4

trade unions 61, 63–4

Trujillo, Rafael 114–15

Truman, Harry S. 7, 139, 168, 182, 184, 198

Trump, Donald 219

Tunisia 8, 204–5, 207

Turkestan 150

Turkey 1–2, 236–7

Turkish Petroleum Company 73, 77

Turkish Republic 30, 31

Turkish republic 31

Uganda 137, 226–7

Uganda scheme 23–5

Ukraine 151

Ukrainian refugees 246–7

Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics 158

UN Resolution 194 182

UN Resolution 194(III) 185

unemployment 40, 41, 54, 65–6, 99

United Kingdom 6, 14–15, 173; Aliens Act 22; Assyrian refugees 70–2; British Nationality Act (1981) 227; child refugees 144–5; colonial workers 57–8; East African Asians 226–7; Évian-les-Bains conference 94; Foreign Office 48; and foundation of Israel 175; House of Commons 48; immigration policy 94; Jewish resettlement 21–5, 33, 114, 151; Middle Eastern oil industry 72–9; military service 72; refugee camps 70–2; repatriation policy 233; Royal Commission on Alien Immigration 22; Russian refugees 38; temporary protection policy 235; Uganda scheme 23–5

United Nations 3, 9, 165, 174–6, 175–9, 179–80, 180, 190–1, 221, 247–8, 251–2

United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine 175–7, 182

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 5, 8–9, 9, 12, 177, 194, 194–203, 196, 221, 223–4, 249, 250–1; abandons resettlement policy 227–8; AVR schemes 232–3; Biometric Identity Management System 253; containment policy 211, 212–13, 222, 227–8, 244–5; contribution 199; durable solutions 228, 238; expansion of mandate 200; Ford Foundation donation 199; foundation 196; French–Algerian war response 203–8; good offices exception 202–3, 209; Hong Kong displacement response 201–3; mandate renegotiation 210–13; militarization 252; model 193–4; not-so-hidden agenda 254–5; precursors 196–7; reach 200; relevance 209; repatriation policy 224, 228–33, role 251–4; Soviet invasion of Hungary response 199–201; temporary protection policy 233–8, 245; work programs 206–7

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Statute 177

United Nations Industrial Development Organization 240

United Nations Middle East Economic Survey Administration 180–1

United Nations Relief and Refugee Administration, Soviet involvement 157–61

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration 141, 164–5, 167–9, 173, 177–8, 193, 218–21, 250, 252

United Nations Relief and Works Agency 3, 11–12, 166, 182–90

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees 176–7

United States of America: anti-Semitism 22, 99, 101; closed borders 91; Department of Homeland Security 253; economic expansionism 104; ethnonational quotas 100; Évian-les-Bains conference 92, 93; exclusion laws 201–2; global supremacy 247; Homeland Acts 19; immigration policy 38, 93, 100; imperialism 100–8, 164; internationalism 168–9; interwar displacement crises 4; Jewish immigration 22, 101–3; Jewish population 114; Jewish question 101–2; Mutual Security Appropriations Act 196; Palestine refugee priority 182; parallel refugee regime 212–13; and PLO 219; Refugee Act (1980) 212–13; refugee policy 100; refugee schemes 198; rise of 86; Russian refugees 38; settler colonialism 103; State Department 190; suspicion of urban immigrants 103

UNRWA funding 219; and USSR 158–62; Wagner-Rogers Bill 100; see also M Project

Universal Declaration of Human Rights 10, 227

urbanization 135

Uruguay 60, 63–4, 95

USSR 37–40, 198, 199; Armenian resettlement 39–40, 141, 145–6, 248; Central Executive Committee 152; colonization villages 147–8; Council for Evacuation 157; Council of Labor and Defense 146; engagement with internationalism 154–7; expulsion of ethnic Germans 161–2; forced labor 148–9; German invasion of 157; Gulag system 148–9, 150; immigration 140; internal labor resettlement 140, 146–51; internationalism 154; invasion of Hungary 199–201; involvement with UNRRA 141, 157–61; inward turn 146; Jewish resettlement 141, 151–4; joins League of Nations 156; labor distribution 141; and League of Nations 142–6; 154–7; Nazi Germany and 156–7; New Economic Plan 39; political control 141; population politics 146–51; refugee children 143–5; refugee definition 191; refugees’ role 145–6; resettlement policy 140–63; state power 146–7; and United States of America 158–62; use of displaced populations 7; violent excesses 150–1; war orphans 159

Uzbekistan 7

van Heuven Goedhart, Gerrit 196, 197–8, 199

Varlez, M. 60

Venezuela 100, 136

Vietnam 226, 227

Vitebsk 158–9

Voluntary Repatriation Centres 253

wages 99, 242

Waibel, Leo 109

Warburg, Otto 24

Weizmann, Chaim 118, 130–1

Welles, Sumner 113

White, Benjamin Thomas 70–2

White, Elizabeth 144, 144–5

White Russians 30, 141, 142–3

Wiengreen, Gustavo 95

Willcocks, William 24

Wilson, Woodrow 103, 104, 106, 111

Winterton, Lord 94

worker colonization 58–67

worker discontent 78

workers’ rights 40, 77

World Bank 1–2, 241

World Economic Conference, 1927 45

World Population Conference, 1927 105

World Union of Societies for Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews 152–3

xenophobia 96

Yepes, Jesus Maria 97

Yugoslavia 200

Zangwill, Israel 24–5, 124

Zengor 143

Zetter, Roger 235, 238

Zionism 11, 22, 23, 80; armed expansion 119; and industrial development 131–2; population engineering 117–20; population transfer 131–2

Zionist Congress 90

Zionist Executive Committee 24

Zionist Organization 23, 81

Zionist Organization of America 130