Rejecting Coethnicity: The Politics of Migrant Exclusion by Minoritized Citizens

• In Event: Globalizing Extremism

Abstract

What shapes migrant exclusion? How do host country citizens react to migrants from similar cultural, language, and ethnic backgrounds? In recent decades, hosting migrants has increasingly been met with public backlash in the Global North, as highlighted by a large literature. Xenophobic reactions in these contexts are often rooted in animus over racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Yet, the largest migrant flows occur between neighboring countries in the Global South. In these contexts, migrants often share ethnic, cultural, and linguistic ties to local communities. Absent cultural differences, one might expect that there would be less discrimination and greater inclusion of migrants into local host communities. My project interrogates this assumption. I examine how the presence of refugees and other migrants experiencing displacement affects the social and political identities and behaviors of nearby, often coethnic, citizens. Specifically, I explore the fear of "migrantization'' of minority citizens who are considered coethnic (broadly, sharing ethnic, racial, cultural or other ascriptive ties) with migrants. In contexts where migrants are forced to be in camps and are stigmatized by state rhetoric and the media for being dangerous or a drain on resources, such as Tanzania and Kenya, coethnic citizens who live near them will seek to differentiate themselves. I argue that they will more strongly cohere around their national identity as a differentiating marker from the refugees and to signal affinity with other non-coethnic co-nationals. Thus, rather than welcoming coethnic refugees, these citizens will further "other'' them, because they do not want to be associated with or mistaken for the refugees by other citizen groups.

Author

• Yang-Yang Zhou, Dartmouth College