Rights, Responsibilities, and Resettlement: The Competing Notions of Refugee Belonging in a U.S. Welfare Program

Thesis advisor: Shawn McGuffeyHistorically, the U.S. has been among the top nation-states of global refugee resettlement, and it continues to be, despite recent domestic political rhetoric against this policy. The U.S. welfare state provides resources to contracted nonprofit immigrant-serving organizations to carry out the U.S. resettlement policy. However, scholars under-examine front-line welfare policy practices with refugees. This area is critical to examine in this historical moment, because scholars argue the rise of neoliberalism has negatively affected the nonprofit human service sector’s capacity to provide social rights to the most vulnerable (Hasenfeld and Garrow 2012). Drawing on participant-observation at a northeastern resettlement organization and 50 semi-structured interviews with front-line bureaucrats and refugees between 2010-2015, I examine how bureaucrats perceive and shape refugees’ initial processes of resettling in the U.S., and how refugees also view this experience. My dissertation found competing restrictive and inclusionary perceptions of and practices with Iraqi, Darfurian, and Bhutanese refugees, which calls into question how, and why, welfare subjects with legal refugee status, are perceived distinctly by their social locations in the shrinking and stigmatized U.S. welfare context. Additionally, my dissertation illuminates how refugees evaluate their resettlement experiences and belonging in the U.S. I present my research in three articles: My first article, Rights and Responsibilities: Bureaucrats’ Competing Frames about U.S. Resettlement Objectives for Refugees, examines the salient frames that bureaucrats used to describe the objectives of U.S. resettlement for refugees. I found two competing frameworks informed their perceptions: market citizenship responsibilities and human rights. By this, I mean local level bureaucrats discussed their role to provide services either geared at making refugees responsible on a path to self-sufficiency, or to provide them with human rights. While I found the responsibilities frame was more dominant, contrary to past findings (Clevenger et al. 2014; Nawyn 2007), frame usage differed depending on one’s professional status and level of experience. Experienced (paid) bureaucrats tended to emphasize the responsibilities frame as most important for assisting refugees with becoming self-sufficient in American society. In contrast, less experienced, temporary (unpaid) bureaucrats generally emphasized the rights frame as most important to assist refugees with gaining membership in the U.S. These insights expand recent immigrant welfare scholarship by illuminating how different local level bureaucratic roles, in contrast to organizational (Nawyn 2010) or city level differences (Clevenger et al. 2014), correlate with distinct frames about refugees. Finally, I discuss how frame usage informs competing notions of the street-level politics of refugee belonging in American society. My second article, Refugees Will Be Poor! Managing Diverging Mobility Transitions to the American Welfare Class, explores how local level bureaucrats evaluate Iraqi and Bhutanese refugees’ “deservingness” of resettlement benefits in the U.S., based on their compliance with self-sufficiency resettlement goals. I argue that bureaucrats divide refugees into “deserving” and “undeserving” poor categories using ethnic and social class distinctions. Specifically, I examined how bureaucrats made decisions to discipline refugees to adhere to a self-sufficiency path. Consequently, these decisions revealed their distinct perceptions of refugee deservingness. Contrary to past scholarship that found race as most salient in informing welfare disciplinary practices and notions of deservingness (Schram 2005; Soss, Fording and Schram 2008), I found bureaucrats used refugees’ ethnicity as a marker for class origins to make decisions to discipline them. They identified Iraqis as having professional class origins; thus, they experienced “unwanted” downward mobility in the U.S. welfare class. In contrast, they viewed Bhutanese as having low class origins; thus, they experienced “desired” upward mobility in the same welfare class. As a result, bureaucrats thought more discipline was needed with Iraqis, compared to the Bhutanese because of their distinct behavioral reactions to their respective mobility shifts. Thus, bureaucrats marked Iraqis as “undeserving” and Bhutanese as “deserving” in their processes of resettling in the U.S. My third article, Waiting for Mobility: Refugee Incorporation as a Process of Temporal Belonging, examines Iraqi and Darfurian refugees’ sense of belonging, on their path toward social mobility in the U.S. I found Iraqis perceived waiting as a lasting obstacle on a generally blocked mobility path; consequently, they felt a sense of enduring social insecurity and a lack of belonging. In contrast, Darfurians perceived waiting as a temporary obstacle to achievable mobility; thus, they felt a sense of belonging, despite feeling a temporary state of social insecurity. Refugees who reconstructed a generally secure past professional class origin (Iraqis), compared to their insecure U.S. class location, expressed more frustration about waiting for mobility. In contrast, refugees who reconstructed a more politically and economically insecure past origin (Darfurians), compared to their secure conditions in the U.S., expressed positive hope for mobility. Bridging welfare theories of waiting (Auyero 2011; Reid 2013) with theories of belonging (Nawyn 2011; Yuval-Davis 2006), I build an immigrant incorporation process theory of temporal belonging to illuminate how refugees’ perceptions of waiting for mobility inform their feelings of belonging in the U.S.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Sociology