During World War II, the US fantasized about sending refugees to Mars

Over the past few years, I have been reading documents from the “M Project,” started by Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of World War II. The project sought to design and implement a geopolitical master plan for the resettlement of refugees after the war. Decisions regarding who was to be placed where were to be based on scientific research carried out by leading anthropologists, geologists, and diplomats. The research was classified top secret. The researchers reported directly to Roosevelt.

The documents allow us to dig deeper into the history of migration, but they also tell us about how governments today think and fantasize about the “refugee problem.” In her Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work, the historian Laura Robson convincingly embeds the M Project in a larger story where international protection has always entailed elements of coercion, dehumanization, and, above all, labor exploitation.

The M Project sorted European war refugees into three categories: victims of war; surplus populations; and geopolitical problems (ethnic minorities that could create “political problems”). Then as now, we can observe that not all definitions of refugee are created equal by that mortal god on Earth: the state. Then as now, leading intellectuals, politicians, and technocrats argued that some refugees are simply undesirable, damaged goods, pieces of shit, whatever, simply not wanted. This belief is stated rather explicitly in the project’s documents. One of the memos states that refugees with technical training are “desirable immigrants,” while those who are uneducated or unable to be educated (whatever that means) are “a potential burden.”

One of Roosevelt’s key goals was to resettle European war refugees to “uninhabited” or “sparsely inhabited” areas in North Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. This included promoting an unrestricted emigration of Jewish Europeans to the “sparsely populated” regions of Palestine. The idea of sending Jews to Palestine with utter disregard for the Palestinians, then, is not exclusive to Zionism, but has featured in various western geopolitical visions on how to best make use of refugees to satisfy western interests and fulfill all kinds of political visions.

Photo by Zhou Xian on Unsplash

Roosevelt wanted to make North Africa the granary of Europe. Technicians would be recruited from the refugee population and permanently settled across the region. The selected male refugees were to be encouraged to bring their family members with them. The US would, in view of increasing the arable surface, build advanced desalination plants, install the latest irrigation technology, and build a modern infrastructure. In short, make (another) desert bloom.