Refugees or Migrant Workers? The Case of the European Volunteer Workers in Britain (1946–1951)

This article examines the post-1945 Labour Government's programme of recruiting Displaced Persons to work in a number of industries and services deemed essential for economic recovery and suffering from labour shortages. By incorporating elements of both a political and an economic migration, and by recruiting refugees to fill labour shortages, the scheme challenges the conventional dichotomies made between free and forced migrations and between refugees and migrant workers. As both a labour migration and a refugee resettlement programme, the scheme engendered a number of tensions in government policy between economic and humanitarian criteria. When located within the wider context of early post-war migration, the scheme sheds comparative light on a hierarchy of desirability amongst potential immigrants. Given their formal status as aliens, the Displaced Persons (or European Volunteer Workers, as they were known) could be directed to, and kept within, certain sectors of employment, a status which differentiated them from the early West Indian arrivals who, as British subjects, could not be subjected to such formal controls.