This paper traces narratives of displacement by al-maghmureen (the drowned), Syrian tribal pastoralists, farmers, and fisherpeople whose villages were submerged under water by the construction of the Euphrates Dam project in the 1970s, one of the hallmarks of the Baath Party’s vision for state-led agriculture in Syria. Some of the maghmureen were given small tracts of land in compensation by the Syrian state, others became employees of state-owned farms along the Euphrates River (later privatized in the early 2000s), and others remain uncompensated until today. Meanwhile, Lebanon hosts over one million Syrian refugees, many of whom are actually displaced former labor migrants. Based on interviews with displaced Syrian maghmureen now living as refugee-farmworkers in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, I trace how their contemporary displacement as refugees is connected to a lifetime of changing labor conditions and migration patterns paralleling shifts in the agrarian political economy of Eastern Syria. In particular, I consider how the case of the maghmureen links to classic debates on proletarianization within agrarian studies, which treat the rise of waged labor among dispossessed peasants as a key index of capitalism in agriculture. Combining ethnographic data with analysis of texts from the Marxist Syrian historian Abdullah Hanna and the Raqqan novelist Abdulsalam Ojaili, the paper traces shifts in land use-rights adjacent to the Euphrates River from the Ottoman-era practice of wad’ al-yad, to state-owned farms in the 1970s, and eventually privatized parcels during Syria’s infitah period. It was during the period of privatization, I argue, that waged labor migration among the maghmureen increased significantly, well before the Syrian uprising and subsequent war began in 2011. By focusing on the link between labor, property, and migration in the lives of the maghmureen, the paper aims to bring a nuanced historical perspective to the differentiated histories of displaced Syrians in Lebanon, whose conditions are usually generalized in terms of the recent wave of refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict. The paper concludes by considering how the contemporary language of “Syrian refugee crisis” occludes these longer histories of agrarian transformation, casting a critical perspective on what kinds of displacement are seen today as worthy of political repair or historical redress.