Paradoxes of Refuge: The Multilevel Governance of Refugees and the Urban Poor

• In Event: Immigration and Refugee Politics in Cities

Abstract

This article examines an understudied aspect of the local governance of migration in the U.S., the case of urban refugees. While there is a growing body of scholarship about local leadership, advocacy and policy related to undocumented immigrants in cities, less is written about urban refugees. The sanctuary policies that mayors and local law enforcement may adopt in a city, then, are not as immediately relevant to refugees because they have legal status, and refugees are less likely to be involved in the networks advocating for protection of immigrants. We argue that a focus on the governance of refugee resettlement in the U.S. offers at least three insights into processes of migrant inclusion or exclusion that are less visible when focusing on undocumented or other categories of migrants. Our article draws on data from an in-depth case study of Syrian and Iraqi refugee families in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a city that is part of the greater New York City metro area.

First, the governance of refugee resettlement has distinctive cross-scale networks of official and unofficial actors, including many that are not involved in the governance of local immigration policy or local urban policy. These include the international and national government and NGO staff involved in self-defined humanitarian assistance of refugees; these also include pan-ethnic regional networks also activated to assist arriving refugee families. These actors may not be connected tightly with local mayors and council members, who tend not to create policies aimed specifically at refugees, in the way they sometimes do for other groups of immigrants. Second, our analysis of local refugee resettlement governance shows extensive reliance on state and local housing and welfare programs designed to serve poor people – with all of the stigma and insufficiency that characterize US welfare state programs. Studying refugee governance thus sheds particular light on the governance of the urban poor more generally; local leadership related to supporting the urban poor will shape refugee experiences, although refugees are not a primary or even necessarily a visible constituency. Finally, sector-specific governance means that from the refugee perspective, they navigate separate systems of resettlement governance, welfare and housing governance, and education governance. As local officials take part in policymaking in these areas, they thus involve themselves in refugee resettlement as they serve other, perhaps voting, constituencies. In some instances we find that refugees and their advocates have learned, from these other constituencies, how to engage formal and informal processes to claim rights from elected officials. We illustrate with an example from the education sector, where refugee families learned from Latino parent activists how to secure access to bilingual Arabic-English education, by attending school board meetings on the days when local media would cover their testimony.

Author

• Mara Sidney, Rutgers University, Newark