Refugees, Rights, and Race: How Legal Status Shapes Liberian Immigrants’ Relationship with the State Dr. Hana E. Brown
[email protected] Abstract Drawing on three years of participant-observation in a Liberian immigrant community, this article examines the role of legal refugee status in immigrants’ daily encounters with the state. Using the literature on immigrant incorporation, claims-making, and citizenship, it argues that refugee status profoundly shapes individuals’ views and expectations of their host government as well as their interactions with the medical, educational, and social service institutions they encounter. The refugees in this study use their refugee status to make claims for legal and social citizenship and to distance themselves from native-born Blacks. In doing so, they validate their own position vis-à- vis the state and in the American ethno-racial hierarchy. The findings presented demonstrate how refugee status operates as a symbolic and interpretive resource used to negotiate the structural realities of the welfare state and American race relations. These results stress the importance of studying immigrant incorporation from a micro perspective and suggest mechanisms for the adaptational advantages for refugees reported in existing research. Keywords: race, immigration, Africa, incorporation, refugee Acknowledgements: For their helpful comments on earlier version of this article the author thanks Irene Bloemraad, Dawne Moon, Sandra Smith, Rachel Best, Jennifer Carlson, Kimberly Hoang, Daniel Laurison, Laura Mangels, Sarah Anne Minkin, and participants in the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop and Berkeley Sociology Race Workshop. 1 Refugees, Rights, and Race: How Legal Status Shapes Liberian Immigrants’ Relationship to the State The rapid rise in immigration to the United States over the last decades has generated significant scholarly interest in the issue of incorporation, the process by which immigrants adapt to and gain membership in a receiving society.