Early in Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work, Laura Robson makes a provocative charge. Liberals, she argues, have remained silent on a deeply flawed United Nations-led refugee policy for fear of empowering conservatives in their efforts to dismantle the agency.
Verso Books
But in attacking liberals, Robson isn’t arguing against the existence of the United Nations. Instead, she proposes a rethinking and restructuring of refugee policy.
Why? Because global refugee policy, she insists, is exploitative and inhumane. Liberal silence is prolonging this exploitation.
If you’re like me, when you imagine refugees and international aid, you conjure scenes of makeshift camps filled with displaced and desperate people—due to wars, ethnic cleansing, climate change, or political persecution—who are now safe and free thanks to the altruism of the global community. The aid, you reasonably believe, comes from the United Nations or relief organizations with strictly humanitarian goals in mind. But Robson paints a more troubling picture.
Her central argument is that the international “refugee regime,” led by Western countries, has sought to exploit refugees as workers in the service of their own interests and that of multinational corporations. As a result, these refugees and other displaced people have had their movements restricted, have been forcibly repatriated, or have been barred from entering some countries while forced to work for menial wages in others.
Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work
By Laura Robson
Verso Books, 304 pages
Release date: November 28, 2023
“From its inception,” Robson writes, “internationalist refugee policy was designed to treat refugees as simultaneously a threat to be contained and a resource to be exploited.” This policy has been carried out behind “a haze of humanitarian rhetoric designed to suggest that refugee aid operate[s] primarily in the realm of charity rather than politics.”
While these claims may seem overly broad, Robson makes a convincing case through her extensive scholarship. A history professor at Penn State University, Robson has previously penned or edited five books on Middle Eastern and global history. She was also a fellow at the Wilson Center, which provides counseling on international affairs to policymakers. This new book serves as a fascinating history of “refugeedom” as much as a trenchant critique.
Robson takes us back to the origins of current refugee policy. While many scholars point to the two world wars as the starting point (perhaps out of Eurocentrism), Robson highlights how refugee policy actually had its genesis during the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. She cites the Balkan and Caucasian wars, which resulted in huge numbers of displaced people fleeing to Anatolia, as the true beginning.
It was during this period that the Ottoman government “made the crucial decision to put the refugees to work in the service of the state.” A Refugee Commission was established that turned the displaced people away from cities and pushed them into rural areas for agricultural development. This model—driving refugees into remote areas, usually as far from western Europe as possible, and viewing them as a “problem of labor”—became a trend that Robson traces up to the present.
While Robson provides a slew of case studies of refugee exploitation, I found myself wanting more on-the-ground details. For example, when she discusses Special Economic Zones as a “containment mechanism,” it was unclear to me what projects workers in those zones embarked upon and who, exactly, was profiting from their labor. Robson often mentions the issue of Western corporations profiting from refugee labor, but which corporations? I assume there are many, but when she mentions oil companies, the only specific one I noted was Aramco, which is Saudi-owned and based in the Middle East.
One chilling example of refugee maltreatment she offers occurred in the United Kingdom in 2010. The British, seeking to thin the country’s population of Afghan refugees, completely eliminated social services for unaccompanied Afghan children living in the country as a way “of forcing their ‘voluntary’ removal to Kabul.” Robson cites this to show how the U.N. “helped to perpetuate a pretense of voluntary repatriation” for people who were left with no other alternatives.
An area Robson often turns to is Israel-Palestine. She provides a fascinating background on Zionism and the various early considerations for a Jewish homeland. Her tales of Western countries barring Jewish immigrants from entry—even after the world wars, and often with the help of international organizations—are heartbreaking. Robson also mentions that early Zionist proposals by the West were designed as much for keeping Jewish refugees out of Europe, and using them as colonial laborers, as for offering them a secure homeland.
Global refugee policy, Robson insists, is exploitative and inhumane. Liberal silence is prolonging this exploitation.
The exploitation of Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, is crucial to Robson’s central argument. In 1949, after the war that created the state of Israel, three-quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced. After Israel refused their return, the United Nations created a new agency to look after them: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This new agency, Robson says, “began to enact regional employment schemes . . . as a way of providing cut-rate menial labor for a fast-tracked industrialization of the Middle East.”
“By the mid-1950s,” she continues, “there were dispossessed Palestinians at work in oil refineries in the Gulf, industrial farms in Jordan, and rail construction across the Hejaz—all employed via an international refugee regime that had remade them as cheap migrant laborers.”
Then, in 1951, with the signing of the Convention on the Status of Refugees, the “Palestinian refugee” became a separate classification—bereft of the legal protections or guarantees offered to others. This distinguishing between “types” of refugees provided a model for the West that it was able to use in later years to exclude other non-Western refugees from its protections. Robson cites the Cold War as an example, during which the United States reserved political asylum mainly for white Europeans who could be portrayed as victims of communism while deeming other refugees eligible only for limited material aid.
In light of the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, Human Capital is particularly relevant. Robson closes her book with a brief afterword that notes some new and thorny trends that demand more oversight, such as U.N. agencies contracting with private companies to surveil refugees and collect their biometric data.
On a more hopeful note, she cites a 2022 New York Times op-ed from historian Peter Gatrell. In the piece, Gatrell challenges governments to take advantage of the sympathy shown to displaced Ukrainians to push for a more genuinely altruistic refugee policy—free from specific Western or corporate interests—in order to aid these desperate and displaced people scattered all over the world.
This should be a charge that American liberals, as well as conservatives, can get behind.