Redefining refugee: white Christian nationalism in state politics and beyond

ABSTRACT

Although immigration is the domain of the federal government, recently there has been a movement to introduce anti-refugee legislation in state legislatures across the country. In 2017 and 2018 there were 86 anti-refugee state-level bills introduced to limit refugee resettlement in the US. We examine public testimony from South Carolina’s 2016 anti-refugee bill, S-997. Building upon the literature on racist nativism, we find those who sought to eliminate refugee resettlement reconstructed the meaning of a legal status, refugee, to be synonymous with Brown, Muslim, Terrorist, Third World, by presenting these population categories as unified in a legal status in opposition to the white, Christian, civilized, United States. We show how even those who supported refugees and refugee resettlement engaged in and supported the logic of white Christian nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• state legislation
• immigration
• white Christian nationalism
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).