‘Be Honest, They Are More Like Us’ – Norwegian Refugee Services and the Moral Dimension of Crisis

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Refugees

Abstract

New regulations have created an intense debate in Norway regarding discriminatory practices in refugee politics, and over refugee settlements in Norwegian municipalities. Recently, one municipality in Norway voted to only accept Ukrainian refugees, arguing that these new regulations were necessary due to their limited capacity to host refugees. Additionally, the political leadership in the municipality argued that Ukrainian refugees were easier to integrate into Norwegian society and should thus be prioritized over other groups of refugees.

In this paper we ask: How do employees in refugee services experience discriminatory regulations and how do they negotiate and maneuver these in their everyday work with refugees? We discuss discriminatory practices in refugee services, based on interviews from employees in refugee services in three different Norwegian municipalities. Our findings indicate that employees in refugee services engage in acts of resistance towards what they experience as discriminatory regulations and practice. We rely on insights from institutional ethnography in our analyses of these acts of resistance, and show how employees in refugee services are embedded in accountability circuits, a “form of coordination [which] brings front-line work into alignment with institutional objectives through the activation of texts (Smith 2005; Johnson and Bagatell 2019), and how they develop strategies for handling the moral dilemmas they face in their everyday interactions with different groups of refugees. These strategies take the form of acts of everyday resistance, where employees engage in not only oppositional and critical talk about, and silent maneuvering of, regulations (Sørensen, Nilsen and Lund 2019) to oppose to the ruling regulations, but also engage in negotiations over the moral dilemmas evoked by the regulations they are working to enforce and oppose.

Authors

• Berit Irene Vannebo, Nord University

• Ann-Torill Tørrisplass