How the “Rules-Based International Order” Uses Humanitarianism to Turn Refugees Into Disposable Migrant Labor

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski is calling on European nations to “encourage” Ukrainians who fled their country after the start of the 2022 war to return home to fight Russia. On Friday, September 13 he proposed that Europe “stop paying social security payments for people who are eligible for the Ukrainian draft.” Ukraine’s draft is currently for men aged 25-60, but there is talk about lowering the age even further.

There are growing calls in Germany — “temporary” home to more than one million Ukrainian refugees —  to follow Sikorski’s advice and begin pressuring Ukrainians to leave. Germany is not the only country looking to encourage their return home by cutting benefits or through other means. 

Last year, the EU extended its Temporary Protection Directive by one year, until March 4, 2025. In theory, it allows Ukrainians to get work, plus access to education, housing and medical assistance, but it is temporary. That means ambiguity and fear of repatriation. It also can make for more pliant workers for global capital. Nonetheless, Western media and government officials have hailed the response to Ukrainian refugees as an “unprecedented” “embrace” and a sign of the “European way: matching compassion with strength.”

In reality, there is nothing unprecedented about Europe’s and the US’ system for displaced Ukrainians, but rather the continuation of decades of efforts by the West to transform refugees into guest workers. That’s according to the 2023 book “Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work”, by professor of history at Penn State University Laura Robson.

When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tells Ukrainian refugees that if they want to stay, they better get to work — no matter whether wages are stolen or general employment protections ignored — these are words that could have been uttered a 100 years ago.

While so much of the political and media attention today is on welfare payments to refugees in a time of shrinking public service budgets, Ukrainians and refugees from other places who have come to Europe and the US continue to be a boon for capital. The refugees are frequently at the mercy of the “wage mafia” and face missing wages, criminally low pay, oftentimes horrid living conditions, and an overall complete disregard for employment law standards.

Robson’s book is an account of more than a century of starts and stops by Western governments and capital to perfect the exploitation of the displaced. Sometimes the plans fail, sometimes laborers fight back and make it either unprofitable or too much of a headache to implement. Capital withdraws but always returns shortly after with a new and improved scheme and better public relations.

What’s more is that the status of Ukrainians in Europe under temporary protection is inextricably intertwined with the other conflict that is collapsing the “rules-based international order”: Israel-Palestine where Palestinians have long served as subjects in a sort of refugee laboratory for the West.

Most of all, Robson’s book is concerned with correcting the record. It takes the myths of international humanitarian assistance over the past century-plus and meticulously demolishes them. Robson draws on a wide range of historical sources in an effort to provide a more accurate account of the international refugee system’s origins and evolution. I will briefly summarize her correction of those myths here.

Myth 1: An Altruistic Refugee System Emerged from European Repentance for the Holocaust

The dawn of international refugee policy is often timestamped post-WWII and is told as one of liberal progress. In fact the modern refugee systems led by the UN have their beginnings in late 19th century Ottoman policies for dealing with huge numbers of Balkan and Caucasian refugees into its territory:

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.

Nineteenth century Balkan and Caucasian wars saw huge numbers of people streaming into Anatolia, and the Ottoman government put them into service working for the state wherever needed to consolidate state power or aide economic development in remote areas. Interestingly, the Ottoman efforts, which exempted individuals from taxation and conscription for a number of years as long as they settled and farmed land in particular areas, largely did with refugees what the US was doing at the same time with its Homestead Acts. The Ottoman policy revolved around state strategy, such as blocking certain nomadic populations, I.e. Kurds.

The idea quickly caught fire with the Brits discussing the possibility of putting refugees to work in British East Africa or in the Ottoman sphere, such as Palestine. (The Palestinians and the current space of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank dominate much of the book as policy there has informed so much else of the West’s refugee systems.)

Both the Ottomans and even more the British expected refugees to turn a profit for the state – a sign of what was to come. As Zionism picked up steam, the British were strategizing how to turn refugees into settlers and laborers useful for imperial control and economic development in corners of the empire. This was evident in early conversations about the location for a Jewish homeland. The Zionists initially expressed concerns about backlash from existing populations while an official report from the government in London had different concerns. On the possibility of a homeland in Africa, it anxiously raised the possibility that European Jews “could never perform the work done by negroes under the burning equatorial sun.”

Zionists embarked on a campaign to convince the government in London that a Jewish homeland would be in service to British capital whether in Africa, industrial agriculture in Iraq, or that European Jewish labor could claim Palestine for European empire (more on that later).

Myth 2: The League of Nations Was a Well-Meaning Effort at Pacifism and Humanitarianism.

In reality, behind this respectable liberalism were brutal forms of exploitation. The League rested its responses to displacement on the foundation of racially conscious imperial capitalism, and the remaking of refugees as workers served as the foundation of the League’s policies.

Fridtjof Nansen, one of the chief architects of these policies, is often celebrated as a founding father of noble humanitarian assistance. But a closer look at the record reveals that “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.”

A key component of this vision were the “Nansen Passports,” which generously allowed refugees to work without citizenship, effectively making them exploitable second-class citizens.

At first the League’s definition of a refugee was restricted to Russians who were effectively stateless after being expelled by the Bolsheviks, and League officials hoped that absorbing them into the global capitalist labor force would serve as a rebuke to the government in Moscow. Quickly, however, Western governments were overwhelmed (by 1922, there were more than 300,000 Russian refugees in Berlin alone), worried about communist organizing, and implementing restrictions.

Employment-matching offices tried sending refugees to colonies as sources of cheap labor for Western-owned industrial enterprises. This found limited success. Oddly enough, refugees were not eager to travel thousands of miles to work in French factories or on Brazilian sugar plantations.

British and French “mandate” states in the Middle East became sites of resettlement, often as agricultural or industrial labor, as well as colonial soldiers. For example, Nansen collaborated with the French to remake Armenian refugees into agricultural settlers and colonial soldiers of the French military occupation of Syria.

The interwar period also saw the Western powers attempt to use imported labor on Middle East oil concessions through 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.” This arrangement offered many benefits for capitalists:

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 the subject population by military means.

Although the League came and went, it and Nansen brought about the new era in refugee policies: “one in which an international refugee regime could claim humanitarian bona fides while churning out cheap, disposable, temporary refugee workers, with no rights or permanent residence or reentry, for the benefit of industrial employers abroad.”

One heartening aspect is the resistance to capital found at every turn, and so it was as the book closed on the League:

…despite dislocation, denationationalization, 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.

Myth 3: That Refugee Policy Got Better in Response to the Holocaust.

By the late 1930s with Jewish refugees from Germany a major issue…and the League proved incapable of dealing with it due a lack of cooperation from member states.

A high-profile meeting of more than thirty countries at Évian in 1938 tried to bypass the League in favor of directly negotiated solutions. That too failed, although the meeting served as an important marker of Europe passing the baton of refugee policy leadership to Washington. What would that mean? Those hoping for a more humane response would be left disappointed. If anything, it only got worse:

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 US at this time was trying to figure out how it could dominate the world without the cost or bad optics of colonial occupation.

Isaiah Bowman, a Canadian-born Yale geographer, became one of the US’ leading architects of mid-century refugee policy. He was a big believer in “pioneer zones”—regions of development that could take on population and capital surpluses therefore protecting the homeland from too much immigration and as a way to bolster American private investment.

Bowman was also unsurprisingly a big fan of Mussolini and Italy’s policy of developing Africa by sending surplus population there.

As Bowman saw it, there was no longer much remaining land in good climates and favorable for agricultural production; therefore “rational” schemes would have to include industrial development that could also serve the goal of placing the US at the head of this economic empire.

Another key figure in US refugee policy was anthropologist Henry Field, maybe best known at the time for his work on the “races of mankind” and how to make resettlement “profitable.”

And so the new world refugee regime led by the US looked a lot like the old one run out of Europe with even more Zionism thrown in:

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 practice the interwar arguments from those like British Labor Zionists David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Tebenkin tied the right of expulsion and of residency to agricultural industrialization.

Yet even Bowman of the Mussolini fanclub thought the idea of a Jewish settler state to be insane, “declaring that such a commitment would require facing down 90 million Arabs in service of a program morally equivalent to Hitlerian Lebensraum.” Bowman had no love for “lousy Arabs” but only favored resettlement that would prove useful for the US to extend its neoimperial capitalism. In his opinion, the future Israel did no such thing.

Prominent US refugee experts viewed the Nazi example as an important model and experiment in their goal of remaking the world into a collection of more ethnically homogenous  nation-states through forcible transfer.

This solution was the product of a combination of liberal imperial, Zionist, and Nazi ideas and 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.”

US policy makers were also coming to an understanding that migration was not much determined by physical density anymore but economic factors, which had the potential to erase any “gains” of ethnic homogeneity. Therefore, resettlement should also make sure to direct labor to sources of raw materials and wherever it was needed by capital.

But what to do with displaced people who are no use in helping corporations turn a profit? What of all the survivors in concentration camps after WWII who were unfit to labor ever again?

Israel’s answer was to use them as cannon fodder:

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.

…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.

Myth 4: The 1950s UN Refugee Treaties and Statutes Were Achievements that Marked New Protections for All Refugees.

In reality, they enshrined racialized legal distinctions between refugees from the war in Europe and “Palestinian refugees.”

“Normal” refugees were those displaced in Europe and required some form of legal recourse. The Palestinian refugee, on the other hand, meant being in perpetual limbo pending a political settlement and eligible for material aid but not legal assistance, asylum, or political advocacy. This meant keeping Palestinians confined to Arab host states and making them prime candidates for regional refugee labor — although efforts to deploy Palestinians as laborers in American-backed projects across the Middle East largely failed, not least because they agitated for more labor and political rights. Israel, however, has long exploited Palestinians for their labor, as well as testing out weapons and surveillance and population technology on them.

In the 1920s and 30s it was a laboratory of a different kind:

…one where the resettlement of a politically threatened 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.

It’s important to note that in Israel’s early years, the Israeli and American positions were not the same. The US wanted stability in the region enough to allow for American capitalists to thrive; the Israelis wanted to make the preservation of a Palestinian national identity impossible and to move refugees away from newly created borders and into neighboring Arab states. And so in the late 1940s when Israel flatly refused the right of return, UN officials instead turned to relief and created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) to deal with their displacement and resettlement, oftentimes via large-scale agricultural operations in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, and Jordan. [2]

But it became clear that it was actually cheaper just to provide aid rather than fund development projects, and so the policy became one of containment until repatriation on some distant undetermined date.

Very importantly, however, what the Palestinian experience showed to the West was that they “might be able to effectively control refugee resettlement, while plausibly claiming to defend refugee rights, simply by legally distinguishing between different types of refugees.”

And so it went. The UNRWA provided cover for the UN to exclude Palestinians from the “universal” 1950 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Statute and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which are still lauded as humanitarian triumphs and among the greatest achievements of the 20th century.

This decision by the US-led international community meant there could be different categories of refugees based on place of origin and method of dislocation, and this is the system that came to dominate global systems of refugee laws:

…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.

Myth 5: The Ongoing Myth of Humanitarian Assistance.

By the 1960s private corporations had plenty of cheap migrant labor to feast on, and refugees, with even their minimal legal protections, began to be viewed less favorably by capital. “Guest workers” were cheaper, less of a political hassle, available in greater numbers, and best of all they could be easily gotten rid of when no longer needed.

So what to do with refugees then? Two primary responses emerged:

1. More confinement.
2. Turn them into migrants.

France’s colonial war in Algeria helped usher in the policy of physical confinement while also using refugees as workers. Even during a time when their cheap labor wasn’t needed or sought, the UNHCR and UNRWA continued to advertise their roles in employment schemes as a way to legitimize the organizations’ roles as “gatekeeper and camp guard.” For example, the UN in Algerian refugee camps in Tunisia and Morocco made the provision of food and supplies go hand in hand with a system of documentation and incarceration. Similar to Palestinians they were entitled to assistance in place but not asylum or resettlement.

The UN even went a step further in Indochina with its “Orderly Departure Program,” which extended the UNHCR mandate to people who hadn’t crossed an international border and essentially “denied its new charges a basic human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration: the right to leave a country.”

By the 1980s, the UNHCR was mostly done with resettlement and working primarily in the field of containment, and following the end of the Cold War, there was no more pressure on the US to offer asylum as part of propaganda wars. [1] Coupled with capital preferring migrants, it meant the UN and member states began to produce new legal categories for the displaced designed to reduce access to legal and diplomatic recognition. The 1980s and 90s saw a wave of new labels around the concept of “temporary protection.”

This made refugees into guest workers with very few claims to guaranteed rights. Europe became familiar with this during the Bosnian War and it had the “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 benefitted corporate employers and host states alike.” More:

 It now appeared that one way to integrate the displaced into the labor market at minimal cost or disruption was to simply replace the legal category of refugee, with its potential long-term guarantees, with a temporary protection status that could be withdrawn at any time.

Any displaced person still recognized as a refugee must typically pay for that designation and attached aid with physical confinement. There are also new schemes to turn refugee zones, such as one in Jordan, into Special Economic Zones. Although these are largely unsuccessful, they do provide a nice complete circle back to Ottoman policy, which aimed to simultaneously protect the ethnic balance of the nation-state while serving global capitalists. Most of the more recent changes to refugee policy involve more Big Brother as UNHCR and UNRWA are now partnering with private companies on biometrics and data mining. In the early 2000s UNHCR began to invest in population management software, such as iris scanning for Afghan refugees seeking repatriation. In 2015 it introduced its Biometric Identity Management System  and “by 2020 had collected biometrics on 80 percent of UNCHR’s registered refugees, some 37 million people” effectively making them laborers in another sense.

Robson’s solution? Make refugee policy in the interests of refugees and not Western capital. To which I would humbly add that the West could also stop instigating and backing so many wars that create so many refugees migrants, but then that’s not good for business.

Notes

[1] The League had been particularly interested in Russian refugee children as venues for public relations and for their labor. Some were herded into education systems tailored for them so that they could eventually return and lead the reintegration of Russia into the Western-led order.

[2] The US always supported the UNRWA (until recently) despite misgivings about its close relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization because the idea of Palestinian refugees destabilizing the Middle East was believed to be bad for business.