Rescaling Resettlement: Local Welcoming Policies and the Shaping of Refugee Belonging

Abstract

This paper brings together scholarship on race, place, and legal status to examine how local context mediates the outcomes of federal refugee resettlement policy. Over the past several decades, local actors across the United States have developed initiatives to “welcome refugees” that interact with and extend beyond the formal federal program to shape refugee incorporation. Drawing on a comparative study of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Atlanta, Georgia, I show that these initiatives construct different aspects of refugee identity as socially valuable. Refugees learn about these valuations as they seek access to resources and recognition, in turn amplifying desirable aspects of their identity to claim belonging and to distance themselves from racialized and stigmatized others. In Pittsburgh, refugees emphasize their ethnic identity and membership to ethnic groups, while refugees in Atlanta claim belonging by emphasizing their legal and humanitarian status as refugees. This paper contributes to scholarly understandings of refugee resettlement as a racialized process mediated by the institutional and socio-cultural dynamics of local context. Moreover, this paper extends calls to rethink the immigrant/refugee distinction by revealing the variable salience of the refugee status across subnational space.