Uprootedness, Human Capital, and Skill Transferability

More than a century has passed since the abrupt exodus of 1.2 million Greek Orthodox from Anatolia and their resettlement in Greece, a transformative event for the country’s social and demographic landscape. Today, more than one in three Greeks reports a refugee background. While its historical significance is well-documented, its short-, medium-, and long-term impact on human capital accumulation remains unexplored. How did forced displacement shape the educational trajectories of the uprooted and their offspring? Did refugees invest in portable skills to respond to uncertainty, or did they struggle to catch up with the autochthonous? To address these questions, we trace the educational investments of refugees and their descendants over the last 100 years, leveraging granular census data and a comprehensive mapping of both their origins in Anatolia and their settlements in Greece. The analysis provides compelling support for the uprootedness hypothesis. Though initially lagging, refugees settling in the Greek countryside eventually outperformed nearby natives in educational attainment. Their university choices also diverged, with refugees’ lineages favoring degrees transferable beyond the Greek labor market, such as engineering and medicine, and natives specializing in law and other fields with a strong home bias. Exploring additional mechanisms reveals the critical role of linguistic barriers and local economic conditions in shaping these outcomes, rather than the refugees’ pre-migration economic background. The widespread educational gains of refugees and their descendants over four generations offer some hope that the ongoing surge of forced displacement, despite its tragedy, if properly addressed by the international community, can be a backbone of economic resilience for the affected communities.