Economic Refugee: France, the United Nations, and a Troubled Concept

Why is economic impoverishment not a basis for refugee status? Though the United Nations recognizes many kinds of refugees—political, religious, and national among them—economic refugees are not among those offered legal protections and asylum. In this paper, I explore this absence, tracing it back to post-war imperial politics related to colonial labor and labor migration. These imperial politics, I argue, helped to shape the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention. Focusing on the French colonial case, I explore how imperial labor systems, which drew justification from racialized conceptions of colonial workers as unskilled, indolent, and accustomed to minimal standards of living shaped postwar understandings of economic migration. In the colonial moment, these depictions justified imperial labor policies while masking systemic violence and the deep structural inequalities produced by empire. In the postwar era these colonial stereotypes helped to justify legal codes aimed at regulating intra- and inter-imperial labor migration flows. As decolonization loomed, the French state sought ways to continue to shape and regulate these labor flows after the end of empire. These ambitions, I argue, helped to inform the 1951 Refugee Convention and its treatment of economic migrants.