In the early 1930s, police and immigration department officials in Palestine’s British-administered government questioned whether a group of Jews from Soviet Armenia were “genuine refugees” or simply “now masquerading as refugees.” The leader of the group, the officials declared after further investigation, was a suspected Soviet agent who presented himself alternately as Persian, Armenian, and Turkish but who in reality was an Egyptian deprived of his nationality on account of ‘Bolshevik’ activities. The outcome of this detective work, and the outcome of similar cases, reinforced the administration’s hard-line stance that refugees did not have permission to enter Palestine as refugees. Such persons, so it seemed, could falsify claims to refugee status, rendering the category meaningless. Indeed, at the end of the Second World War, the British mandate even forced Greek refugees housed in Palestine under the auspices of the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA) to instead settle in Egypt due to security concerns. For its part, British authorities recoiled from the possibility that stateless persons could come under their remit. The paper argues that this attitude should not be historically surprising since recognized refugee status and the necessary provisions that accompanied it potentially complicated and threatened the aim of Palestine’s immigration policy: the creation of a Jewish, capitalist state in Palestine whose inhabitants would not be dependent on Great Britain for economic or welfare assistance. Any immigrant who could not be economically or politically-absorbed into Palestine threatened this policy. This paper explores in more depth the impact of the mandate’s stance on non-Zionist refugee resettlement in light of how that stance differed from the Ottoman position on refugees. In doing so, it sheds light on the refugee settlement programs during the interwar period in the Arab Middle East from the perspective of refugees who settled or wished to settle in Palestine. This allows for an analysis of the ways in which both ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ became self-ascribed statuses used and misused in the face of regulations that discouraged the government in Palestine from offering settlement to non-Zionist individuals who could not prove their nationality. The paper’s case studies consider narratives of Kurds, Armenians, North Africans, Druze, Greeks, and others. Their histories demonstrate the multi-faceted ways individuals and communities challenged the mandate with their own beliefs and justifications as to why they deserved refugee status.