Refugee Policy as Foreign Policy: Iraqi and Afghan Refugee Resettlements to the United States

Micinski, Nicholas R.

doi:10.1093/rsq/hdy007

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Without strong political support for reducing such demands, these populations will simply not be prioritized [interview 1]. Similarly, domestic pressure groups, such as ethnic associations, religious organizations, NGOs, and veteran associations (García 2017:201), interact with foreign policy considerations (Abdelaaty 2021; Micinski 2018) to shape who is prioritized. National immigration politics and racialized notions of legitimate suffering also intersect to shape prioritizations (Boas 2007; Hyndman and Giles 2011; Sandvik 2010); this is likely reflected in the greater number of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa resettled compared to refugees from Central and South America, who are deemed threatening economic migrants and “bogus” asylum-seekers.…”

Section: Pipelines and Pathwaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standardizing Refuge: Pipelines and Pathways in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

Watson

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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How do bureaucracies pattern durable inequalities? Predominant approaches emphasize the role of administrative categories, which prioritize certain populations for valued resources based on broader regimes of human worth. This article extends this body of work by examining how categorical inequalities become embedded within administrative infrastructures and institutional pathways. I develop this argument through a case study of the United States’ refugee resettlement program. Drawing together previously unseen government statistics, expert interviews, and documentary analysis, I show that U.S. resettlement is organized through administrative pipelines that create path dependent imbalances in the distribution of scarce resettlement spaces. Social and political logics of immigrant worthiness are important, yet a full understanding of these imbalances requires attention to the tendency of pipelines to become self-reproducing. I identify three factors that account for this tendency: calculative rationales, administrative reactivity, and structured visibility. This three-part conceptualization of pipelines can be applied to other institutional contexts to study the origins, dynamics, and durability of social inequalities. My findings also demonstrate the analytically autonomous role of policy administration in shaping ethnoracial imbalances in immigrant selection.

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Section: Pipelines and Pathwaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standardizing Refuge: Pipelines and Pathways in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

Watson

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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“…( Tsourapas 2019 ). Recent literature has unpacked how states across the Global South seek to instrumentalize forced migration in ways that befit their domestic and/or foreign policy goals ( Micinski 2018 ;Tennis 2020 ;Cham and Adam 2021 ), particularly in the Middle East ( Norman 2020 ;Ceccorulli 2021 ;Buehler et al 2022 ), but also Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia ( Freier et al 2021 ;Mielke 2022 ;Paliwal 2022 ). Drawing on neorealist approaches to international relations, this line of work highlights how domestic and geopolitical calculations drive decision-making processes across refugee host states in their negotiations with international donors.…”

Section: Investigating the Politics Of Repatriation In Forced Migrati...mentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do States Repatriate Refugees? Evidence from the Middle East

Mencütek

Tsourapas

2022

Journal of Global Security Studies

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Which conditions affect whether a state will choose to repatriate forcibly displaced populations residing within its borders? One of the most pressing issues related to the protracted Syrian refugee situation concerns the future of over 5 million Syrians who sought shelter in neighboring states. With host countries pursuing disparate strategies on Syrians’ return, the existing literature has yet to provide a framework that is able to account for variation on host states’ policies toward refugee repatriation. In this paper, we expand upon the concept of the refugee rentier state to theorize inductively upon the conditions shaping states’ policymaking on repatriation. We draw upon multi-sited fieldwork across the three major refugee host states in the Eastern Mediterranean (Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey) to establish that a refugee rentier state's strategy is driven by domestic political economy costs related to the hosting of refugee populations as well as its geostrategic interests vis-à-vis these refugees’ country of origin. Using a comparative case study approach, we note how a state is more likely to pursue a blackmailing strategy based on threats if it faces high domestic political economy costs and adopts an interventionist policy vis-à-vis the sending state, as in the case of Turkey. Otherwise, it is more likely to pursue a backscratching strategy based on bargains, as in the case of Lebanon and Jordan. We conclude with a discussion on how this framework sheds light on refugee host states’ repatriation policies on a global scale.

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“…An emerging research agenda shifts away from normative debates and approaches the intersection of refugees and foreign policymaking in a more holistic way, by identifying how cross-border mobility may constitute a distinct instrument of interstate diplomacy -or migration diplomacy (Thiollet 2011;İçduygu and Aksel 2014;Adamson and Tsourapas 2019). In this line of work, refugees are tied to strategic interests of both Western and non-Western states: the united States used its refugee policy to resettle four times more Iraqi refugees than Afghans, strategically pursuing American national interests (Micinski 2018); Moroccan and Turkish policy liberalisation was similarly shaped by migration diplomacy exigencies (Norman 2020). The reluctance of Global North states to accommodate migrants and forcibly displaced populations is still present in this research agenda but approached as an object of diplomatic negotiation between 'neoliberal migration states' , which are explicit in their attempts to monetise cross-border migration flows (Adamson and Tsourapas 2020).…”

Section: The Politics Of Forced Migration and Refugee Rentierismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refugee commodification: the diffusion of refugee rent-seeking in the Global South

Freier

Micinski

Tsourapas

2021

Third World Quarterly

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Do states in the Global South learn from each other regarding the management of forced migration? Although research has shown that refugees have recently been recast as an economic benefit for non-Western host states, little scholarly work exists on whether and how such a normative change is adopted across regions. In this article, we identify the diffusion of refugee rent-seeking behaviour, namely the use of host states' geopolitical position as leverage to extract revenue from other states in exchange for maintaining refugees within their borders. We identify three types of diffusion -learning, cooperation and emulation -occurring at state, regional and international levels across the Global South. Drawing on a range of primary sources, we demonstrate the working of these three types across a range of empirical examples drawn from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Overall, we identify a rising trend in the commodification of forced migration across refugee rentier states, while highlighting the need for further interregional research on policy diffusion outside the Global North.

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Refugee Policy as Foreign Policy: Iraqi and Afghan Refugee Resettlements to the United States

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Standardizing Refuge: Pipelines and Pathways in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

Standardizing Refuge: Pipelines and Pathways in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

When Do States Repatriate Refugees? Evidence from the Middle East

Refugee commodification: the diffusion of refugee rent-seeking in the Global South

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