Human Capital A History of Putting Refugees to Work

An unflinching look at how global humanitarianism transforms refugees into cheap labor

Historian Laura Robson reveals the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime. Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into cut-rate, disposable migrant labor, Robson elucidates global humanitarianism's deep-seated commitment to refugee exploitation and containment.

The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story of humanitarians fighting tirelessly for a system for that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But as Robson meticulously demonstrates, modern refugee policy emerges from a different goal: to use refugees as cheap workers in an emerging system of global industrial capitalism.

With a global eye, Robson captures the travails of Balkan refugees in the late Ottoman Empire, Roosevelt's secret plans to use German Jewish refugees as laborers in Latin America, and contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan.

Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University and a recent Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She has written and edited five books on Middle Eastern and global history, including most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (2020) and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov, 2019). She is co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org.