Where are the promises of America?: citizenship education and refugee families

This study investigated the ways that newly resettled Iraqi, Muslim refugee families are enacting, defining, and critiquing citizenship in their new American contexts. Through a three year ethnographic, multi-lingual and multi-sited study, I examine the following question: “How are refugee families who live in poverty making themselves and being made into particular kinds of citizens through their everyday encounters with institutions of the welfare state?” Data collection sites included refugee homes, refugee resettlement agencies, local non-profits, welfare offices, courts, and hospitals. Participants included four focal, Iraqi, Muslim families, as well as several employees of a refugee resettlement agency and several of their Iraqi clients. Refugee youth, who oftentimes have porous and interrupted educational trajectories come to their urban public schools with many needs; many eventually age out of public education. Youth who attended urban public schools suffered discrimination, a lack of care, and silencing and overly punitive techniques by their teachers. Refugee families who live in poverty suffered as a result of a welfare system that prioritizes “self-sufficiency” above all else. Parents found themselves pushed into immediate employment by resettlement agents, with the threat of homelessness looming overhead. This oftentimes locked them into low-wage work, with no health-benefits, working long hours. Over 60% of Iraqi adults in the study reported trauma-related mental health problems, as well as chronic illnesses. All of them lacked access to healthcare after their initial federally funded healthcare benefits lapsed, leaving them without medical attention. In sum, refugees’ experiences with the state and the very institutions tasked with their care left them unable to realize the bright futures they had hoped to find in the U.S. Through these punitive and exclusionary encounters with the state, refugees are learning key lessons about their place in society. Participants questioned the meaning of citizenship, and framed the project of American resettlement as a broken promise. Care for refugees requires robust state institutions that can provide for their unique needs. Staging interventions to improve the lives of refugees necessitates bucking current neoliberal trends which dispossess refugees, once again, of their abilities to aspire to and realize better futures.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sally Wesley Bone