"Citizenship Means Nothing": Refugees, the State, and the Right to Have Rights

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-1 - Producing Disciplined State Subjects: Intersectional Analyses of Race and Citizenship

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to examine the ways that recently resettled Iraqi refugees define, critique, and enact citizenship. I ask, “How are refugee families who live in poverty making themselves and being made into particular kinds of citizens through their entanglements with (or lack thereof) the institutions of the state?” To theorize citizenship, I leverage Somers (2008) definition of the term as “the right to have rights”. This definition encompasses two distinct sets of rights; the first right is to membership in a political body, and the second a bundle of rights is civil-juridical, often summarized as Marshall’s (1964) civil, political, and social rights. Somers argues that both sets of rights must also include human rights, since they can only be secured through recognition and inclusion. In her analysis, she investigates the distinction between human rights and those related to citizenship. While citizenship-rights are connected to one’s relationship to a nation-state, human rights are believed to be possessed by all humans. Human rights are often assumed to be ‘natural’, and freely given to all humans, rendering all human beings “rights-bearers”. However, as Arendt (1973) demonstrated in her analysis of the Holocaust, when people are stripped of their connection to the state, they are also stripped of their humanity. Statelessness had paved the way for the annihilation of millions, while in theory humans were still believed to have ‘natural rights’. Somers contends that it is not liberation from social and political entities that frees people and allows them to become rights-bearers, but rather inclusion.

The methods I employed involved a three-year, multi-sited (Marcus, 1995), multi-lingual ethnographic study conducted with four focal recently resettled Iraqi, Muslim refugee families in Philadelphia. Sites included refugee households, as well as multiple state institutions such as welfare offices, free clinics, courts, refugee resettlement agencies, and public schools. My work suggests that refugees’ relationships to healthy state institutions are critical to their ability to become full participants of their new communities—or in others words to become full citizens.

I conclude that refugees’ encounters with the very institutions tasked with their care—such as schools, public assistance agencies, hospitals and clinics—refugees were (re)learning the true meaning of citizenship. Due to the pressure to find immediate work as a result of shortened resettlement support, adults found themselves locked into low wage labor that affords no health benefits, waning welfare supports, and limited access to education or language learning. Faced with such difficulties, Um Zeina, a refugee mother of two with chronic illnesses with no access to healthcare, declared that “citizenship means nothing.” The significance of this study lies in illuminating the post-resettlement experiences of Muslim refugees in the U.S.--a population whose very entry to and survival within the U.S. in under attack in Trump’s America. This study helps us to understand how the neoliberal attack on the state and its institutions erodes the lives of refugees, teaching them all the while what types of citizenship they are expected to embody and enact.

Author

• Sally Bonet, Colgate University