My dissertation retells the history of refugees, which typically unfolds as a tale of increasing legal protection, from the viewpoint of statistics and demography. Drawing on archives in Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, I argue that international law and the social sciences developed as competing attempts to identify, classify, and control refugees in twentieth-century Europe. Even before lawyers, demographers set out to fill the gap of knowledge surrounding refugees, starting with methodologies that centered on quantification. Pointing towards the constitutive nature of statistics, they used cross-national data sets and outlined refugees as a comprehensive, international category. Their surveys also offered predictions of future displacement and were directly involved in refugee policy as it was enacted. While highlighting quantification as a targeted management device, my investigation of refugee statistics also reveals several surprises: the colonial fantasies involved in resettling European refugees, the allure that numerical control held for jurists, and not least the ideas the displaced themselves brought to the practice of human accounting.