Editing Refugee (section)

===League of Nations===
[[File:Spanish War Children001.jpg|thumb|Children preparing for evacuation from [[Spain]] during the [[Spanish Civil War]] between 1936 and 1939.]]
The first international co-ordination of refugee affairs came with the creation by the [[League of Nations]] in 1921 of the High Commission for Refugees and the appointment of [[Fridtjof Nansen]] as its head. Nansen and the commission were charged with assisting the approximately 1,500,000 people who fled the [[Russian Revolution of 1917]] and the subsequent [[Russian Civil War|civil war]] (1917–1921),{{sfn|Hassell|1991|p=1}} most of them aristocrats fleeing the Communist government. It is estimated that about 800,000 Russian refugees became stateless when [[Lenin]] revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921.<ref>{{cite web |title=Humanisten Nansen |language=no |trans-title=The humanist Nansen |url=http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Bruk-av-arkiv/Nettutstillinger/Nansen-passet/Humanisten-Nansen |website=Arkivverket.no |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130126233356/http://arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Bruk-av-arkiv/Nettutstillinger/Nansen-passet/Humanisten-Nansen |archive-date=26 January 2013}}</ref>

In 1923, the mandate of the commission was expanded to include the more than one million [[Armenian people|Armenians]] who left [[Turkey|Turkish]] [[Asia Minor]] in 1915 and 1923 due to a series of events now known as the [[Armenian genocide]]. Over the next several years, the mandate was expanded further to cover [[Assyrian people|Assyrians]] and Turkish refugees.{{sfn|Nansen International Office}} In all of these cases, a refugee was defined as a person in a group for which the League of Nations had approved a mandate, as opposed to a person to whom a general definition applied.{{citation needed|date=August 2010}}

The 1923 [[population exchange between Greece and Turkey]] involved about two million people (around 1.5 million [[Greeks in Turkey|Anatolian Greeks]] and 500,000 Muslims in Greece) most of whom were forcibly repatriated and denaturalized{{clarify|date=September 2015}} from homelands of centuries or millennia (and guaranteed the nationality of the destination country) by a treaty promoted and overseen by the international community as part of the [[Treaty of Lausanne (1923)]].{{efn-ua|The "[[Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations]]" was signed at [[Lausanne]], Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of [[Kingdom of Greece (Glücksburg)|Greece]] and Turkey.}}

The U.S. Congress passed the [[Emergency Quota Act]] in 1921, followed by the [[Immigration Act of 1924]]. The Immigration Act of 1924 was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially [[Jews]], Italians and [[Slavs]], who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s.{{sfn|Old fears over|2006}} Most European refugees (principally Jews and Slavs) fleeing the [[Nazis]] and the [[Soviet Union]] were barred from going to the United States until after World War II, when Congress enacted the temporary Displaced Persons Act in 1948.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1948-displaced-persons-act/ |access-date=7 September 2023 |title=Displaced Persons Act (1948) |website=Immigration History}}</ref>

In 1930, the [[Nansen International Office for Refugees]] (Nansen Office) was established as a successor agency to the commission. Its most notable achievement was the [[Nansen passport]], a [[refugee travel document]], for which it was awarded the 1938 [[Nobel Peace Prize]]. The Nansen Office was plagued by problems of financing, an increase in refugee numbers, and a lack of co-operation from some member states, which led to mixed success overall.

However, the Nansen Office managed to lead fourteen nations to ratify the 1933 Refugee Convention, an early, and relatively modest, attempt at a [[human rights]] charter, and in general assisted around one million refugees worldwide.{{sfn|Nobel Peace Prize}}