Going Rogue: Volunteers Implementing US Refugee Resettlement

• In Event: 40468 - Refugees, Forced Migrants, and Stateless Populations

Abstract

The US refugee resettlement system has long revolved around the idea of ‘self-sufficiency’, reflecting a broader tendency in the humanitarian field to combine compassion with discipline. Scholars have written extensively about the pressures placed on refugees to take low-paid work and to reduce their reliance on public benefits. As volunteers increasingly take on many of the responsibilities for the day-to-day labor of resettlement, resettlement agency employees must convey to volunteers the supposed dangers of ‘dependence’ and the need to enforce compliance. Yet for some volunteers, the emphasis on self-sufficiency conflicts with their desire to welcome refugees and to foster refugees’ success in American society by opening up possibilities for social and economic mobility. Drawing on interviews with Christian resettlement volunteers in South Carolina, the paper provides examples of volunteers ‘going rogue’—that is, of purposefully defying the self-sufficiency directive by providing assistance above and beyond the ‘bare minimum’ mandated by law. This account shows how volunteers bring into play their religious beliefs and their professional experience and credentials in defining what is realistic and fair for refugees. It also explores the tensions that emerge within ‘circles of welcome’, and between volunteers and resettlement agencies, as a result of rogue activities. Ultimately, going rogue does little to undermine the power asymmetries of resettlement; but it does reveal how the engagement of non-state actors in ‘public’ service provision my render self-sufficiency discourses unstable, complicating on-the-ground resettlement patterns.

Authors

• Breanne L Grace, University of South Carolina-Columbia

• Caroline Nagel, University of South Carolina