Caring citizens: Refugee families, welfare, and affective equality

Abstract

The United States resettles refugees as humanitarian-aid recipients and authorizes them to work so that they may achieve immediate self-sufficiency. Current and former refugees, who utilize public assistance, must engage in a work activity or risk losing their benefits eligibility. Is employment the right activity for them? Workfare poses challenges for families with young children. When primary caregivers (typically mothers) transition into the formal labor force, they face constraints on their capacity to determine their child's care and on the timing of their physical separations from that child. The employment focus of both workfare and resettlement policies reflects a neoliberal ideal of citizens as workers, unencumbered by partners or dependents. I utilize the concept of affective equality from Kathleen Lynch's Care and Capitalism to consider the institutional disregard of people's relational and moral needs in refugee resettlement programs. Based on research in western New York among Karen and Karenni refugees from Myanmar, this article examines how families contend with resettlement and workfare constraints on their capacity to care. I describe how interlocutors' families manage affective inequalities by constructing and utilizing family networks who nurture a care ethic focused on familial needs like the provision of kin-based care.