The growing migrant crisis in Europe has spurred a debate about the proper naming of the newly arrived: Are they refugees or migrants? While the question may sound discursive, it carries practical implications, as the definition determines the legal and humanitarian treatment of the migrating subject. In reference to UNHCR’s definition of the refugee as a person in need of protection, European media and politicians alike have suggested that only those who have escaped war and can demonstrate signs of suffering or trauma deserve refugee status, while those who flee from structural inequality in search of ‘better lives’ remain migrants. In Lebanon, where the state has refused to grant refugee status to the close to 1.200.000 Syrians who have arrived since 2011, this phenomenon has been turned upside down. Rather than seek humanitarian help by registering with the UNHCR, many Syrians have relied on local migrant networks to navigate through the housing and labor market, often living in poor urban areas and working in construction and service economies. During fieldwork among Syrian refugees in Beirut in winter 2015, I found that this apparent rejection of the humanitarian system reflects a larger ambivalence with the refugee category; a figure many of my informants affiliate with a lack of agency. By referring to themselves as migrants instead, stressing their position as emerging participants of the socioeconomic life of their host community, Syrians in Lebanon simultaneously challenge the humanitarian privileging of the refugee and tap into a global economic discourse of the agentic, self-determining ’economic migrant’. In its legal and political exclusion of the migrant worker, who relies on existing social networks in order to circumvent institutional constraints on both the state and supranational level, the humanitarian system risks reinforcing regimes of labor exploitation that places this figure at the bottom of the hierarchy. As the case of Syrians in Lebanon suggests, people are often simultaneously in need of protection and looking for labor. As such, Syrians’ lived challenge to the humanitarian vocabulary of migration calls for an operational and epistemological rethinking that encompasses, rather than cuts through, the many people who straddle the definitional binary between refuge and migration.