The Politics of Refugee Belonging: Street-level Contested Meanings of “Iraqi Deservingness” in the U.S.

• In Event: 118 - Regular Session. Arab Refugees and Political Participation

Abstract

Drawing on over 14 months of 700 hours of institutional ethnographic research at a US refugee resettlement agency in an urban northeastern city between 2010 and 2014, I examine the construction of Iraqi refugee identity among street-level bureaucrats in the organizational context of resettlement policy. While Arabs have generally been racialized in negative stereotypical ‘terrorist’ terms post 9-11 (Naber, 2008; Selod and Embrick 2013; Shaheen 2008) this study offers a fundamentally distinct view of a group of Arabs, one of the largest groups of refugees resettled in the US in the 21st century. I contend that bureaucrats construct moral boundaries based on symbolic notions of ‘deservingness’ around Iraqi refugees’ class and legal status in the situated context of US resettlement. Iraqi refugees are symbolically constructed as ‘undeserving’ because they challenge resettlement support in their claims-making efforts that challenge the institutional logic of resettlement that stresses ‘self-sufficiency’ as a goal. At the same time, refugees are implicitly marked as ‘deserving’ victims in bureaucrats’ contemplation of the consequences of the political context of their physical and social displacement. Thus Iraqi refugees are incorporated through bureaucrats’ situated symbolic boundary marking practices that illuminate their class and legal status in racialized constructions of them.

Author

• Fatima Sattar, Boston College