review on the shelf
THE EUROPEAN REFUGE DREAM
Human Capital, by Laura Robson, published by Verso. (RRP £25)
The ‘Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe’ of border militarisation, asylum laws, detention policies and deportations resulted over 52,760 refugee deaths in the 30 years until 2023. Thousands more are never found.
Bodies surface on European shores, stowaways are discovered in trucks and, hopeless, asylum seekers kill themselves. It’s the consequence of allowing politicians to slam shut doors and their eyes while pretending, through funding aid programmes, to recognise and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people.
In fact, as historian Laura Robson reveals in Human Capital, there have been century-long containment policies, allowing the global mercenary exploitation of refugees as cheap, disposable, highly transportable migrant labour.
WWI produced large-scale
displacement following which Russian and Armenian refugees couldn’t be repatriated while British, American and French officials all agreed they could not be absorbed in the West. With the Middle East in turmoil following the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire, France chose to use 100,000 Armenians as physical markers of French territorial claims in Calicia, part of Syria that was contested by Turkey. Americans donated funds to build factories and offered loans to refugees to open businesses. The project collapsed when Turkish nationalists laid claim to Calicia, slaughtering around half of the 20,000 Armenian residents in Marash city.
In 1921 the newly formed International Labour Organisation (ILO) agreed to exempt colonial territories from international labour standards if they reabsorbed refugees into the global workforce.
Caused by war, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 resulted in Anatolian Greek refugee resettlement in Macedonia being funded by floating public funds – refugees now held out the possibility of turning a profit for investors in countries where they would never be allowed to reside.
It was now open season at looking to send refugees to remote, often agricultural, locations that needed low waged labour. Robson examines from
Roosevelt’s secret plans to use German Jewish refugees as labourers in Latin America until contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan.
Most of these attempts have proved economically unsuccessful. Nevertheless, similar attempts continue, especially across the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia migrant labour with hardly any rights is widely employed.
Meanwhile, there have been fresh developments in containing workers. Massive, almost-permanent refugee camps have been established by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)
Aid is offered to refugees in return for not seeking asylum in Europe or the US. And when the UNHCR, which even provides support to border guards in Europe, does look to relocate refugees it is generally back to the unsafe places people they have escaped from.
n By Mark Metcalf
38 uniteLANDWORKER Summer 2024
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