Labor of Displaced Persons after WWII

After World War Two there was a population dilemma. Many people were living in countries that did not want them (for racial, ethnic, or political reasons) or that they had been forced to relocate to because their country did not want them. The countries that these “displaced persons” were living in, were the most hard hit from the war and barely had enough jobs for the people they did want. So many people were living in these countries “idle” with no work or place to go. The International Refugee Organization (IRO) sought to fix this problem by sending these people to countries less badly hit by the war like the United States, the UK and France where they could be used as manpower to rev up and rebuild their massive industries. The director of the IRO, J. Donald Kingsley was proud in stating that after the resettlement of their one millionth refugee that the IRO was “the most successful large-scale international cooperation in history.”

While this sounds like a good idea that benefits everyone involved most of the time that was not the case. Displaced persons camps were seen as a pool of people from which western countries could pick and choose the strongest and most skilled, offering them work they had little reason to refuse. Belgium abused this opportunity by “offering” refugees a contract where if they worked two years in the mines, receiving the salary equal to Belgian workers, they would be freed to pursue whatever other work they wanted. However the Belgians gave the refugees the most dangerous and strenuous work in the mines and the program only recruited 32,000 immigrants of which 8,000 returned to Germany.

The United Kingdom’s displaced person resettlement program was the most successful, bringing in 82,000 immigrants but the program was still discriminatory. Single men were prioritized over married men and families were only accepted if both parents were “productive.” This was to prevent children and the elderly, who tend to be more sickly, from coming into the UK and using their health services without contributing to the labor force.

The displaced persons relocation postwar was not the universal humanitarian embrace as expressed in the Statue of Liberty’s poem (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) but rather a selective admission of workers to fuel the Allied countries’ burgeoning postwar industries.