Human Capital A History of Putting Refugees to Work

HOW GLOBAL HUMANITARIANISM TURNS REFUGEES INTO CHEAP LABOR

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

Surveying more than a hundred years of policy across the globe, 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.

The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story in which reformers fought tirelessly for a system that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But as Robson demonstrates, the motives behind modern refugee policy can be mercenary. Refugees have become easy prey for global industrial capitalism.

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.

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