Resettled and unsettled: Syrian refugees and the intersection of race and legal status in the United States

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine how the intersection of legal status and racialization shapes immigrant’s sense of security; or of legal and interpersonal safety. I draw on an ethnography of Syrian refugees who hold a permanent legal status, and who entered the United States in 2015, as Donald Trump was launching his campaign, amplifying anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment. Following refugee experiences from their arrival, through the issuance of the first executive order banning travel in January 2017, I show how this group, racialized as Muslim and Arab, was categorized as a threat to national security. I also capture the uneven way they came to recognize their racialization. While a permanent legal status is likely a necessary condition for feeling a sense of security in the United States, I argue that it is an insufficient one. I show that Syrian refugees’ racialization attenuated their sense of security despite their legal status.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialization
• legal status
• Muslim
• Arab
• refugee
• gender

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Viviana Zelizer, Mitchell Duneier, Nicholas Occhiuto, and the members of the Princeton Ethnography Workshop, and particularly Sharon Cornelissen, for reading drafts of this paper. She also thanks the editors and reviewers, and particularly reviewer 1, for their generous feedback. The author also thanks the Horowitz Foundation and the National Science Foundation for funding this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Syrian also feared broader policy issues such as threats to the Affordable Care Act, as many were admitted due to humanitarian need. This came up in several interviews.

2 The author was among the organizers of this action.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy; National Science Foundation.