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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.
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.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published November 28, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 12, 2025
once again i grind my teeth in fury
December 7, 2024
This is an incisive book that challenged the conventional narratives and model of refugee and labour policies as a humanitarian endeavour. Tracing the roots of the exploitative practices from the 19th century Ottoman Empire where displaced people were systematically resettled and deployed as source of cheap labour for state-building and economic development, the model was then expanded and became a key feature of the internationalist refugee regime emerged under the League of Nations in the 1920s.
One of the key focuses of the book is on the Palestinian refugee experience — when the UN designated Palestinian refugees as a distinct legal category with fewer protections than as defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, it allowed them to employ the refugees in development projects across the Middle East BUT without granting them the same rights as European refugees — ultimately contributed to the shift from mobile labour and resettlement, to the model of refugee containment and immobilisation as we see today. A good read to understand how humanitarian has long been fundamentally shaped by the interests of states and capital in exploiting displaced populations, particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
One of the key focuses of the book is on the Palestinian refugee experience — when the UN designated Palestinian refugees as a distinct legal category with fewer protections than as defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, it allowed them to employ the refugees in development projects across the Middle East BUT without granting them the same rights as European refugees — ultimately contributed to the shift from mobile labour and resettlement, to the model of refugee containment and immobilisation as we see today. A good read to understand how humanitarian has long been fundamentally shaped by the interests of states and capital in exploiting displaced populations, particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
January 12, 2026
This is a thorough, well-organised and critical account of refugee policies, practices and promises made and unmade since the 1900s by governments and private interests. The book’s title refers to the contested interplay of Western (including Russian, Turkish, Israeli &c) rejection and containment of refugees on the one hand with, on the other, their recruitment of some refugees as workers and as pawns in territorial expansion including colonialism.
What gets foregrounded in official talk about refugees can be seriously misleading. In the 20th century, there emerged a “regime carefully enveloped in a haze of humanitarian rhetoric designed to suggest that refugee aid operated primarily in the realm of charity rather than politics.” The book introduced me to nativist/racist policies (such as ‘keep out the Jews’ in postwar Europe and the USA) promoted unobtrusively by Western strategists and business chietains. These included Franklin Roosevelt’s Migration or “M” Project (which found inspiration in Stalin’s resettlement schemes, described In a separate chapter) and similarly politicised UN agencies in the postwar period. The book's accounts of the UN’s main agency for refugees, the UNHCR, and of its old, largely American-bankrolled agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, were eye-openers for me, putting paid to some hazy humanitarian assumption I’d held about those bodies.
There's little if any discussion of the use and abuse of displaced people in settings beyond Europe and the Middle East. Nor does the book take on the knotty matter of how economic migrants can be distinguished, if at all, from those fleeing violence and oppression – an issue helping to inflame politics today more than ever. But the force and validity of this book’s accounts over wide and diverse terrains isn’t compromised by the omission of those matters, despite their being major obstacles to tackling the miseries of forced uprootedness and exploitation.
What gets foregrounded in official talk about refugees can be seriously misleading. In the 20th century, there emerged a “regime carefully enveloped in a haze of humanitarian rhetoric designed to suggest that refugee aid operated primarily in the realm of charity rather than politics.” The book introduced me to nativist/racist policies (such as ‘keep out the Jews’ in postwar Europe and the USA) promoted unobtrusively by Western strategists and business chietains. These included Franklin Roosevelt’s Migration or “M” Project (which found inspiration in Stalin’s resettlement schemes, described In a separate chapter) and similarly politicised UN agencies in the postwar period. The book's accounts of the UN’s main agency for refugees, the UNHCR, and of its old, largely American-bankrolled agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, were eye-openers for me, putting paid to some hazy humanitarian assumption I’d held about those bodies.
There's little if any discussion of the use and abuse of displaced people in settings beyond Europe and the Middle East. Nor does the book take on the knotty matter of how economic migrants can be distinguished, if at all, from those fleeing violence and oppression – an issue helping to inflame politics today more than ever. But the force and validity of this book’s accounts over wide and diverse terrains isn’t compromised by the omission of those matters, despite their being major obstacles to tackling the miseries of forced uprootedness and exploitation.
September 29, 2025
The book offers valuable insight into prevailing views on refugees, showing how they are simultaneously perceived as both a risk and an opportunity. Robson begins with the Balkan wars and traces developments through the interwar and post-war periods to the present day. Across these eras, the balance between risk and opportunity shifted, yet states and corporations consistently valued refugees as rights-less, disposable workers or as frontier settlers—provided they did not disrupt the metropole.
Robson also highlights how this perspective shaped the classification of “Palestinian refugees” and the creation of UNRWA. While acknowledging the contributions of UN agencies, she critiques them for framing refugees primarily through the lens of labor. Though wrapped in the language of humanitarianism, such approaches are deeply entangled with systems of control, containment, and economic exploitation.
Overall, this is an excellent read for deepening one’s understanding of the challenges refugees face—particularly in postcolonial contexts—particularly in postcolonial contexts—and the ways neoliberal policies continue to reproduce older patterns of labor-centered governance
Robson also highlights how this perspective shaped the classification of “Palestinian refugees” and the creation of UNRWA. While acknowledging the contributions of UN agencies, she critiques them for framing refugees primarily through the lens of labor. Though wrapped in the language of humanitarianism, such approaches are deeply entangled with systems of control, containment, and economic exploitation.
Overall, this is an excellent read for deepening one’s understanding of the challenges refugees face—particularly in postcolonial contexts—particularly in postcolonial contexts—and the ways neoliberal policies continue to reproduce older patterns of labor-centered governance
February 6, 2024
From the very inception of the refugee category, the institutions built around it targeted those subsumed by it with a humanitarianism that principally had two purposes: depoliticization and precarious labor market integration. This book outlines when these ideas appeared, how they evolved, and how their implementation changed as we moved from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The emerging states asked themselves: What to do with those people nobody feels responsible for and nobody "needs"? Sometimes, their answer was to move them to places where they could be "made useful" in the service of either capitalism or late-imperialist population engineering and sometimes to contain them indefinitely to preempt political challenges.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews