Review. Laura Robson, Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work
This is the first of two reviews of this exciting intervention in the field. Read Sara Coseman’s review here.
When does refugee displacement become a crisis? This question lies at the core of historian Laura Robson’s sweeping new book Human Capital: A History of Putting Refuges to Work. This new global history catalogs how a wide array of actors, from famous humanitarians and politicians like Fridtjof Nansen and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to international organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the International Refugee Organizations all sought to manipulate and capitalize on refugee labor in the past century. For those interested in the history of refugee policy, the lives of displaced people, and the organizations that have sought to control those people, this book offers a much-needed critique of how vaunted institutions and politicians have exploited refugees for their own gains and to assuage international fears.
Robson begins her book with an anecdote on the Syrian refugee crisis, aptly demonstrating that it “was not the migrants’ exit from Syria but their entrance into Europe that had transformed a tragedy into a crisis” (2). Refugee displacement becomes a crisis, then, when it becomes an issue for the powerful. The language of “crisis” lies at the core of Robson’s book, which analyzes how humanitarian agencies and international organizations sought to exploit refugees’ labor in a variety of schemes throughout the globe. Throughout her book, Robson seeks to recast aid institutions less as altruistic protectors of the dispossessed and more as anxious cynics fearful of refugees as threats to the international order. Reliant upon the support of powerful nation-states and wealthy donors, aid institutions from the 1880s to the present have seen the exploitation of refugee labor as a cheap and easy process to disempower the dispossessed.
Robson argues that money is often at the root of these schemes. Cash-strapped humanitarian organizations often turned to labor plans as cheap alternatives to resettlement, displacing the cost of aid upon refugees themselves. Despite this, aid institutions historically have sought to obfuscate these elements of humanitarian work. Since these organizations generally rely upon donations, “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” (5). This type of work ranged widely, from industrial development in Latin America to agricultural labor in the Middle East, but it all originated in the grand plans, strategies, and ambitions of European and American led international institutions.
As the title and case studies suggest, Human Capital offers an intriguing fusion of the fields of refugee studies and the history of capitalism. Robson’s book also offers something rare in the field of refugee history: an intellectual history. Through her wide-ranging book, Robson traces iterations on the concept of “putting refugees to work.” Rather than analyzing a series of case studies connected by geography or chronology, Robson instead traces the intellectual origins of refugeedom and labor exploitation.
This history, Robson concludes, is irrevocably tied to both modernity and colonialism. Robson opens her book in the late Ottoman Empire, tracing how the Ottoman state sought to manage refugees fleeing the Balkan and Caucasian wars of the late 1800s. These refugees posed a dire problem to a state already in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy and a disintegrating multi-ethnic empire. In order to manage refugees fleeing from internecine wars, the Ottoman Empire created a “Refugee Commission” which resettled displaced people “in thinly populated rural areas where state control was weak and where political organizations was harder to accomplish” (19). In other words, Ottoman officials sought to turn their liability into a strength: converting refugees into the envoys of empire. Ultimately, this project failed to achieve the ambitions of the Ottoman Empire as it careened into further conflict by the early 20th century, but British observers noted the resettlement scheme and began to initiate their own parallel schemes in its wake. By the time of World War I, both Ottoman and British officials had conceived of inchoate plans to resettle refugees in rural areas and turn them into agents of empire.
World War I would provide these schemes with a new home: the League of Nations. With millions of people displaced by the scale of the Great War, the victorious Allied powers empowered the newly built League of Nations to quickly resolve the perceived potential danger of those dispossessed. Led by Norwegian explorer and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ first High Commissioner on Refugees, the League initiated a series of plans and resettlement schemes to categorize refugees by their labor potential, move them to sparsely populated areas, and use that potential for the economic gains of the European Allied powers. These projects would continue throughout the interwar years, with the League and the International Labor Office (ILO) resettling refugees throughout Latin America and the Middle East, employing them in dangerous labor ranging from rubber cultivation to oil harvesting.
Latin America often figured prominently in the minds of these European and American humanitarians. The League and the ILO saw nations like Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina as “safe” places to divert dispossessed refugees. In their minds, relocating refugees to Latin America could solve two problems at once: removing the perceived danger of refugees in Europe and the Middle East and industrializing Latin America simultaneously. This preoccupation with Latin America could have been explored more in the text—Robson relays the various schemes cooked up by the scions of the liberal international order to relocate refugees across the Atlantic, but the ideological valences of Latin America as a “repository” for laboring refugees could be further explored.
By the early 1930s, the League believed they had largely solved the problem of displaced people from World War I. The rise of Nazi Germany, however, would pose a new crisis and a new series of exploitative labor solutions. Robson charts how, over the course of World War II, international organizations and, particularly, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt conceived of the unique crisis caused by the displacement of Nazi policies and the brutal world war. The solution to these crises ultimately became the M Project, a secret study initiated by Roosevelt to analyze and control migration in the post-WWII world. The M Project, much like its predecessors in the Ottoman Empire and the ILO, imagined a “scientific” process of resettlement that would match refugees with far-flung jobs around the world. Robson carefully chronicles how this project relied on Zionist thinking, imagining the creation of an Israeli state as a solution to the Jewish refugee crisis. The M Project, Robson concludes, would form the ideological core of the postwar liberal international order’s refugee regime.
The aftermath of World War II would, in many ways, see the creation of the current international refugee regime. After the war ended, two vast, simultaneous refugee crises engaged the liberal international order: Europeans displaced by Nazi policies and wartime violence, and Palestinians displaced by the creation of the Israeli state. The newly created United Nations employed two radically different solutions to these crises, creating a bifurcated system that defined European, often white, displaced people as refugees eligible for permanent resettlement and Palestinian refugees as their own separate category, “eligible for care, aid, and short-term menial employment but not permanent asylum, advocacy, or legal protection…” (192). Over the ensuing decades, this type of bureaucratic categorization would continue to define the U.N.’s treatment of refugees. Eventually, Robson concludes, the “Palestinian Refugee” treatment would increasingly become the norm for all refugee management plans: “instead of legal assistance and political rehabilitation [the international refugee regime] would offer ‘humanitarian’ aid in situ, rendering displaced people’s lives just bearable enough to discourage onward movement.” The history of putting refugees to work, then, is one where racialized bifurcation of aid eventually leads to domination by the simplest route to refugee management: exploiting their labor.
Briskly moving through more than a century of history, Robson’s book does not present exhaustive analysis of every case study on putting refugees to work. Instead, Robson provides here an analytical framework to understand the actions of the liberal international order and nation-states over the past century. This analysis offers a striking blueprint for future histories of refugeedom, refugee policy, and histories of humanitarian organizations. As Robson highlights throughout her book, histories of colonialism and refugeedom are intimately intertwined. Historians of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and more would certainly find this fusionist approach useful, particularly as it connects to histories of capitalism and humanitarian work.
Robson’s most powerful argument proposes new temporal and geographical origins for modern refugee policy, moving away from traditional historical narratives that center post-war Europe and narratives of decolonization. Instead, as the aforementioned case studies throughout her book illustrate, Robson locates the origins of modern refugeedom in the Middle East, “in the careful recasting of old colonial ideas about migration and labor as basic principles of a more modern imperial internationalism attempting to control a seemingly dangerous global labor market” (10). The evidence for this, Robson concludes, can be seen clearly in the modern refugee order. Whereas the modern UNHCR trumpets its aid work as compassionate and altruistic, the reality is much more brutal, “a regime of encampment and internment” (12).
This is evident today. Over 22 million people currently reside in camps throughout the world, often administered by the UNHCR, with over 117 million people displaced either internally or beyond national boundaries. The United States and the European Union have both distanced themselves from permanent resettlement plans, both mostly embracing emergency temporary measures that grant limited rights and work visas to displaced people within their borders. As Human Capital deftly illustrates, the liberal international order of refugee governance today has learned its lessons from the past well.
You can order Human Capital here.
