The Limits of Human Rights Discourse within Sovereign Territory: Examining US Refugee Policy Formation

Abstract

Human rights denote universality, moral normativity, and the international community. Citizenship rights, meanwhile, denote particularity, collective identity, and sovereign territory. Yet some argue that human rights are realized only through the nation-state. Refugee resettlement allows introspection into the tensions between the human and the citizen, as the “refugee” embodies the transition from internationally governed refugee camps to national political communities. This study examines rights discourse surrounding the US Refugee Act as a crucial moment of policy formation and how policy discourse made sense of human rights approaching US borders. I argue that human rights discourse in US policy brings refugees to the door but abandons them as soon as they enter the sovereign space. There, US policy discourse materializes not citizenship rights but neoliberal citizenship. Refugee resettlement reveals the limits of human rights and the contradictory ways that the market and the state encroach on the neoliberal constitution of citizenship.