On Aug. 15, Taliban forces captured the Afghan capital of Kabul, the culmination of its campaign to seize control of the country in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal. The stunning speed with which the Taliban moved into the city has led to massive displacement, with hundreds of thousands of people seeking safe haven. In preparation, the United States has opened a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) process that is moving slowly to admit Afghans who worked with the U.S. military. Simultaneously, the Biden administration is in negotiations with other nations to admit the Afghans who do not qualify for the small number of SIVs currently being processed, offering political and economic concessions to countries such as Kosovo and Qatar to house them.
While discussions in the United States over global refugee crises often focus on whether to resettle certain people, the dispersion of refugees across the world has long been a part of U.S. foreign policy. Far from being a clear leader in refugee resettlement, the United States has more often engaged with global refugee movements as border control and management projects rather than as humanitarian crises.
With domestic debates in the United States over immigration increasingly driven by racialized resentment and anti-immigrant sentiment, resettlement of any Afghan refugees beyond those with SIVs could require a political fight in Washington. The prospect of expending political will on refugee admittance has historically prompted U.S. policymakers to instead use less obvious, overseas refugee management techniques, including force and coercion, to avoid domestic political battles.
One prominent case of this type occurred almost exactly a century ago. In the wake of World War I and the collapse of the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the United States used a variety of incentives, coercion and politicking to disperse refugee flows emerging out of the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war in Russia. In 1920, the remains of the Russian White Army fled to the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). The Allied powers, who had supported the White Army’s attempt to seize control of Russia from the Bolsheviks, had occupied Constantinople in 1919, and the port city served as the safest location for the 130,000 refugees fleeing Russia, consisting not only of White Army soldiers, but also their families and civilian followers.
The newly created League of Nations saw this refugee crisis as an opportunity to prove its value to a world still wracked with conflict in the aftermath of the Great War. The league first turned to the Allied powers of Europe — France, Britain and Italy — who were still occupying Constantinople after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The European nations mostly rebuffed the League’s entreaties to accept the refugees. Although France and England had resettled many of the earliest refugees fleeing from the Bolsheviks, particularly the landed elites and nobility of Tsarist Russia, these last waves of refugees struggled to receive support from the Allied nations.
The European powers largely delegated humanitarian responsibilities to American aid groups in the area. The United States had survived the World War I largely unscathed and with a massive agricultural surplus at home, which meant U.S.-based humanitarian organizations had considerable amounts of leverage and control over administering their relief to war-torn Europe and the Middle East. The British League of Nations representative, Lord Arthur Balfour, commented that the international organization’s role would have to be to convince the American humanitarian groups to take control over the Russian refugee problem in the city.
The league received aid and support from what would seem an unlikely source: the U.S. secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. Before his tenure as president of the United States, Hoover served at head of a variety of humanitarian organizations, most prominently founding the American Relief Administration (ARA). Despite Hoover’s leaving the organization to head the Department of Commerce under President Warren G. Harding, ARA leaders still deferred to Hoover’s wishes. He argued that the ARA was best positioned to try to manage the Russian refugee crisis in Constantinople, and that it should take control over the movement of the refugees out of the city to willing host countries.
However, Hoover’s arguments were not rooted solely in humanitarian impulse. Hoover encouraged the ARA to manage this refugee dispersal on the suggestion of the State Department, which sought to ensure that Russian refugees did not arrive in the United States, no matter how desperate they were. Despite these refugees fleeing from the Bolsheviks, stereotypes and misconceptions of the displaced Russians along with growing nativist sentiment in the United States prompted the U.S. government to deter their potential movement out of fear of Bolshevik ideology.
This fear of Bolshevism, combined with popular anti-Asian impulses and eugenicist thinking, had led to a series of increasingly restrictive immigration laws in the United States. Starting in 1917, these laws aimed to uphold what nativists deemed America’s White, “Anglo-Saxon” identity, with provisions including literacy tests, the creation of an “Asiatic barred zone” from which people could not immigrate and the banning of entry to “feebleminded persons” and “political radicals.” Restricting the migration of “undesirable” people — including Russian refugees — was understood as a method of racially purifying the White population of the United States.
Seeking to avoid a conflict with these new, prohibitive laws, the State Department encouraged Hoover’s allies at the ARA to resolve the refugee crisis without involving the U.S. government. Policymakers believed that a private NGO, albeit one with extensive governmental connections, offered a way to manage the Russian refugee crisis without engendering a domestic political debate over potential resettlement.
To avoid the new exclusionary immigration policies at home, the State Department and the ARA instead turned to local solutions — pushing refugees out of Constantinople to neighboring countries newly created after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The League of Nations had been trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate with Serbia and Bulgaria to accept Russian refugees. Both nations tentatively accepted league resettlement plans but laid out extremely stringent procedures for migration.
Tapping into funding networks he had established as secretary of commerce, Hoover obtained a special dispensation from the Rockefeller Foundation to incentivize Serbia, Bulgaria and neighboring nations to take in Russian refugees. This included offering the nations a set amount of funds per person resettled. With this funding, and the clout of the ARA behind negotiations, the league secured a concrete timeline to start moving refugees out of Constantinople.
When a few neighboring nations pushed back on this resettlement process, the ARA threatened to withhold famine relief supplies drawn from the American agricultural surplus. Thanks to the contacts forged by Hoover and the power granted by their control over food, the ARA created a new flow of refugees out of Constantinople and, critically, away from the United States.
From there, the ARA, along with Hoover, the Rockefeller Foundation and their contacts in the U.S. government, considered the problem solved. In their minds, Russian refugee resettlement was a question of logistics rather than a humanitarian crisis that required long-term solutions and aid. Two decades later, Russian refugees remained scattered throughout Europe, forming communities that would be disbanded once again during World War II.
One hundred years later, the U.S. still engages in these types of projects. With a refugee resettlement system that has been systematically hollowed out for decades and an immigration regime thoroughly politicized by the Trump administration and imbricated with nativist thinking, the U.S. administration frequently looks beyond its own borders for solutions to refugee crises — including crises caused by the United States. Cases like the Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban are far from the only “dispersal” projects occurring today. From refusing asylum seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border through actions such as Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy or the Title 42 expulsions (which the Biden administration has continued to implement) to the movement of Syrian refugees to Lebanon and Turkey, global management policies have long been used by American policymakers to deflect those in need to assuage domestic political concerns.