Besides repatriation, integration and resettlement were the other possible permanent solutions. Integration referred to the settlement in the country of refuge, while resettlement was the relocation of refugees to a 'third country'. The domestic labour requirements of receiving countries influenced the condition of possibility for integration and resettlement. Overall, resettlement schemes fitted into the increasingly regularized system of international migration. The reworking of international migration into a strategy of resettlement for refugees was a significant innovation.
Interestingly, little attention was paid on issues of 'absorption' in resettlement countries. Only Hope Simpson (1938) offered an impression of the possible four areas of concern - legal, political, economic, and cultural. The major concern was 'refugee mentality', which portrayed the political attachment
that refugees had with past communities. Such an attachment was considered destructive to the aims of naturalization, that is, nationalization to the new country of residence. Cultural differences, however, would not be a major source of discord because 'no cultural sacrifices [were] essential as a condition of final absorption' and experience showed that social assimilation would be complete in two or three generation (Simpson, 1938, p.540).
There were two types of resettlement schemes. One variety relocated refugees from densely populated cities and towns, where their presence was believed to be unsettling, to sparsely populated rural areas. The other form relocated refugees to 'under-populated' regions of the world. The assumption that population pressure lead to war was widely accepted and disseminated by politicians, scholars, and international public servants (Citroen, 1951).46 As mentioned in Chapter Two, Lebensraum was a powerful idea in Europe and geopolitical knowledge had been influential in shaping the relationship between territory and population. Themes of 'manpower equilibrium', 'national health', and 'excess population' was part of the language used to promote organized migration. Add these ideas to the anxiety over peace in Europe and the need for human resource elsewhere in the world and resettlement schemes appeared to be an intelligent and practical solution.
The requirement of postwar reconstruction in some European states and the general demand for labour in settler states allowed resettlement to be a viable solution in the early and mid 1920s and again in the mid 1940s. The conditions in France indicated how resettlement was an acceptable and
46 See H.A. Citroen, (1951) European Emigration Overseas: Past and Future, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; W. Thompson (1948) Plenty of People: the world's population pressures, problems and policies, and how they concern us, New York: Ronald Press; (1946) Population and Peace in the Pacific, Chicago, University of Chicago press; and (1942) Population problems, 3rd ed., New York: McGraw-Hill.
successful solution to population displacement. The French government perceived the health and wealth of the country as dependent on the size of its population. During World War One, France suffered the loss about 1.5 million members of its male population. This demographic situation prompted the government to encourage immigration, offer special incentives payments for large families, and outlaw birth control. From 1922-1925 France permitted the entry of about 1.5 million foreign workers, of which 400 000 were Russian refugees willing to perform menial jobs (Marrus, 1985, p.96). Recruiters were sent to Sofia and Constantinople to persuade displaced Greeks and Macedonians to move to France (Marrus, 1985, p.114). Upon arrival in France, they were quickly deployed in the task of reconstruction.
Refugee governing bodies were central to the implementation of resettlement schemes. By late 1945, the task of UNRRA had shifted from the organization of repatriation programs for DPs to the coordination of their resettlement in European camps. After the termination of UNRAA, the IRO launched an even more ambitious resettlement program. It supervised the entire resettlement operation - from the moment when a displaced person or refugee applied to the organization for emigration assistance to the moment when she established herself in the immigration country.
The functioning of the IRO as an international employment/migration agency was extensive. The bureaucratic machinery of the organization collected useful data such as language proficiency, previous work experience, and vocational or professional training. The IRO carried out extensive vocational training programs for adolescents and older persons. It also introduced a vocational and professional certification system, which converted, after a series of assessment, the former skills and qualifications of refugees into certificates of merit (Proudfoot, 1957, p.419). After vocational
training, language lessons, and skill elevations, the IRO counseled refugees on the most appropriate potential country of resettlement. In short, it prepared refugees for interviews by the various national selection or resettlement committees. Those selected were granted an immigration visa in their IRO passport, and those rejected were returned to a 'static camp' to wait for another chance (Proudfoot, 1957, p.424).
The marketing campaign, which involved the UN, UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and voluntary agencies emphasized the economic, technical and social values of these people as potential immigrants. The general shortage of skilled labour and technicians after the war provided considerable resettlement opportunities for refugees. Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Canada, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Morocco, Tunisia, Australia, Switzerland, and Sweden made bilateral resettlement agreements with the ILO.47 In the four and a half years of the resettlement operation, over one million European refugees migrated to many parts of the world. Australia and Canada embarked on large-scale immigration programs. Australian government, under the slogan 'Populate or Perish', sought refugee-immigrants to increase the size of the total population, which was perceived to be critical for national economic viability (Boyle, Halfacre, and Robinson, 1998, p.155). Moreover, refugees were not seen as a security risk but as a defense against future military threats from Australia's aggressive Asian neighbours.
As noted before, political tension between 'East and West' marked the activities of the various refugee agencies. Just as repatriation was politicized,
the organized migration of refugees attracted criticism from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. They argued that the schemes were designed to recruit cheap labour to the West rather than to assist refugees. Salomon's (1990, 1991) research on refugee policy in the immediate post- World War Two period shows that this charge was valid. Immigration countries sent selection teams to camps and countries of refuge to choose refugee-applicants according age, health, and occupational qualification (Vernant, 1953, p.35). For example, Britain embarked on an extensive labour recruitment program dubbed 'Westward Ho' to 'skim the cream of the DPs - generally understood to be the Balts' (Salomon, 1990, p.173). Likewise, the Dutch government asserted that the admission of DPs and refugees should be in the interest of industry and commerce, and in sectors where labour shortage was an obstacle to national reconstruction.