How Bureaucrats Culturally Entrench Inequalities in Refugee Resettlement

Join IRIS NRC on December 2nd at 11:00am in 206 Ingraham for the next event in our Global Dialogues series, "How Bureaucrats Culturally Entrench Inequalities in Refugee Resettlement," with Jake Watson.

How Bureaucrats Culturally Entrench Inequalities in Refugee Resettlement

According to formal discourse, refugee resettlement is “a life saving measure to ensure the protection of those most at risk of harm and whose lives often depend on it.” In practice, however, most spaces go to a small number of refugee groups and the institution is poorly responsive to individual needs. Drawing on a transnational ethnography of the U.S. resettlement system, this talk examines how policy administrators understand this disjuncture between discourse and practice. While recognizing that contemporary practices depart from norms of refugee rescue and equity, bureaucrats have developed a humanitarian ethic centered on maximizing the number of refugees resettled to meet and expand country quotas. This “numbers game” is framed as normatively positive, even as it works to produce and legitimize inequities in global resettlement. Watson demonstrates how this ethic works through a comparative study of resettlement imbalances between Congolese and Darfuri refugees living in Central and East Africa.

About Jake Watson

Jake Watson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He uses mixed methods approaches to study the governance of international migration, with a focus on refugees. He has conducted fieldwork across Africa, North America, and Europe. He is particularly interested in how and why states classify different groups of migrants as worthy of admission, status, and resources, and how these decisions become embedded in organizational and bureaucratic systems. He is also interested in how these governance regimes reflect broader racial inequalities and global power imbalances, and he draws on ethnographic methods to explore how migrants develop a sense of identity and political subjectivity through nested interactions with the law in their everyday lives. His work has been featured in American Sociological Review, European Journal of Sociology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, and Social Problems.

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