Ethnic Subjects and Legal Status: How Local Regimes of Reception Shape Refugee Incorporation

• In Event: 4151 - International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 2: Critical Refugee Studies II

Abstract

This paper explores the origin of a puzzle revealed through fifteen months of qualitative fieldwork examining refugee settlement in metro Pittsburgh and metro Atlanta. I found that resettled refugees living in each region expressed distinct notions of their social value, membership, and belonging. In Pittsburgh, refugees emphasize their ethnic identity, membership to ethnic groups, and their contribution to the diversity of the region. In Atlanta, on the other hand, refugees emphasize their formal legal status. In both places, tensions around belonging were primarily oriented around a representational politics. In Pittsburgh, this focused on questions of ethnic identity, community organizations, and community leadership structures; while in Atlanta, tensions hinged on the social meaning of the refugee status, with many framing it as a degraded position which refugees have to overcome to attain status and recognition.

These findings are puzzling given the expectation in immigration scholarship that refugees’ formal legal status and unique terms of admittance undergird a strong and personal relationship to the state (Bloemraad 2006; Brown 2011). To explain this difference, I advance the concept of local reception regimes. These regimes have developed in each place in response to successive cuts to the federal resettlement program. I show that these regimes differ on the basis of two core features: first, how each regime socially organizes access to resources and power; and second, how each regime represents refugees within the broader political and economic projects of local elites and racialized discourses of regional social development. Local reception regimes shape how refugees organize in each context and also how refugees come to understand their social value and the terms of their membership. Refugees in Pittsburgh organize into ethnic groups and build community infrastructure; while refugees in Atlanta emphasize an assimilatory logic of individual work and effort.

Author

• Jake Watson, University of Chicago