Displacement

Global conversations on refuge

Silvia Pasquetti, Romola Sanyal, Silvia Pasquetti, Romola Sanyal

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526123466
• eBook ISBN: 9781526123480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

As an unprecedented number of people are displaced around the world, scholars continue to strive to make sense of what appear to be a series of constantly unfolding 'crises.'Drawing on research in a range of regions – from Latin America, to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, North America, post-Soviet regions, and South and South-East Asia – Displacement offers an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to thinking about structures, spaces, and lived experiences of displacement. The contributors engage in a historical, transnational, interdisciplinary dialogue to offer different ways of theorizing about refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people and others that have been forcibly displaced.Representing a collective effort by sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, historians and migration studies scholars, this volume develops new cross-regional conversations and theoretically innovative vocabularies in the work on forced displacement. It also draws forced displacement together with other contemporary issues across different disciplines such as urbanisation, race, and imperialism.

Part I
Experiments of categorizing and control

1
Creating proper subjects: the politics of Hmong refugee resettlement in the United States

Chia Youyee Vang

In March 1986, Kao Xiong anxiously awaited the arrival of his cousin, Ka Neng Xiong, at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. An International Institute of Minnesota (IIM) bilingual caseworker accompanied him to welcome Ka Neng, Ka Neng's wife La, and their five children. Ninety days after arrival, the parents’ employment situation looked grim. In describing the couple's progress toward self-sufficiency, the caseworker noted that Ka Neng was “motivated to take a job, but is concerned that he find [sic] one by which he can feed his entire family.” La “will be busy with her children for some time yet,” the caseworker added. “I recommend that she get in English classes as soon as possible [so she can eventually take a job].”¹ Ka Neng and La were among the nearly 200,000 Hmong from Laos who fled following the Vietnam War. With no prior migration history to the Western hemisphere, Hmong presence in the United States is intimately tied to their ethnic group's entanglement with US military projects in Southeast Asia in the post-Second World War era. The majority of refugees were transformed from self-sufficient villagers to traumatized, stateless exiles dependent on the assistance of international agencies.

This chapter critiques the ways in which US refugee resettlement law and practices regulate Hmong refugee lives in order to make them the perfect low-wage employee. I demonstrate that state-centered discourses about refugees show little concern with the actual experiences and desires of refugees themselves. Since the international humanitarian regime fashions the modern refugee as a passive and traumatized object of intervention, the ideal refugee needs to conform to this characterization (Gatrell, 2013: 8). Therefore, the ideal refugee is a hard worker that is not only optimistic and grateful but also non-hostile.

Methodology and theoretical framework

As a result of the nature of forced migration and their agrarian background, refugees like the Hmong leave few publicly accessible paper trails. Those who arrived in the United States came with many official documents first created in refugee camps in Thailand by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representatives. Their documented history often began in the refugee camp, a modern site of enumeration, categorization, and assessment by officials and relief workers (Gatrell, 2013: 9). Since most persons in the camps had little or no previous personal identity records, camp registration was frequently their only form of documentation.² Recently arrived refugees in the camps were tasked with estimating birth dates for family members and determining who should be included on a family application. As they traveled across the globe, they collected more papers that would be used to determine their eligibility for a plethora of social services. These materials prepared by social service providers comprise the bulk of what is archived and available for scholarly study. Other records that they may have of their journeys across multiple national borders remain either in their own homes, collecting dust in basements, or are tossed into the trash.

To perform what historian Antoinette Burton refers to as a “critical engagement with the past,” I examine refugee resettlement records produced by state institutions at the international and national levels and materials created by non-state institutions that administer state policies and programs (Burton, 2005: 21). The available documents not only shape scholarly understanding of conditions, but are also a particular kind of documentation of governmentality. Drawing from Michel Foucault's discussion of “bio-power,” anthropologist Aihwa Ong demonstrated in her study of Cambodian refugees that the modern liberal state's “power over life is exercised with the purpose of producing subjects who are healthy and productive” through the state's various technologies of control (Ong, 2003: 8). Government regulations of the refugee body and mind via the multitude of forms specified strategies necessary to transform refugee subjects from displaced victims of war into self-supporting citizens.

Because so much of the archive represents the perspectives of social service providers and camp registration officials, refugee thoughts and feelings about the resettlement process are generally absent. The contents in the case files provide little evidence of refugee agency, but they reveal much about the systems in place to “rescue” and process them. Thus, my reading of the files centers on the different forms of government regulation and subject making. A close examination of the records reveals subtle refugee resistance to government attempts to categorize them into particular subjects and to control their lives via dispersal resettlement policies (Burton, 2005: 7–8). To demonstrate that both subjectivity and agency occurred in the refugee resettlement process, oral histories conducted with former refugees are juxtaposed with data mined from the case records.

This process enables the consideration of refugees not “as helpless victims of forces beyond their control but ‘survivors’ who create something out of their crisis.” (Richmond, 1988: 18). It was precisely their active resistance to dispersal refugee policies that resulted in the establishment of ethnic enclaves in locations such as California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, a consequence that refugee laws were designed to prevent at the onset of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement in the mid 1970s. For example, refugees were sponsored by individuals and faith-based organizations to small towns and urban cities. Soon after arrival, many moved to join relatives and co-ethics in other locations, often against the wishes of sponsors and resettlement agencies.

In examining resettlement records, I illustrate how state institutions are not neutral but, as anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin argued, are imbued with affect, memories, anxieties, and moralities. Professionals representing the state operate in an ideological environment and under regulatory constraints that require them to deal with each case through evaluations and emotions to pass on judgments on what is a true refugee (Fassin et al., 2015: 10). Documents and papers prepared by the agents of the state play a revealing role in how civil servants view refugees. Professionals who implement the policies of the state simultaneously transform or reinvent them (Fassin et al., 2015: 255). Historian Peter Gatrell concluded that “[time] and again, the terms of the conversation are set not by rank and file refugees but by those who speak and act on their behalf and whose programmes dominate the institutional record. No matter how good their intentions, the appropriation of refugee experience is deeply ironic” (Gatrell, 2013: 296). As social anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin demonstrated, state practices appear much more ordinary when studied at the scale of the everyday. Articulating affects discharged by institutions, their objects, and practices, she writes, “We can conceive of institutions as having nerves or tempers or, alternatively, as having calming and quieting effects. We can study documents as charged with affect: documents that induce fear; others that inflict confidence; and likewise, those that transmit apathy among those who use them” (Navaro-Yashin, 2012: 33). My examination of the International Institute of Minnesota (IIM) case files allows us to explore non-state practices of governance as resettlement agencies work to create desirable refugee subjects. The records reveal that agencies’ implementation of government regulations and surveillance of refugees reflected and reinforced Americans’ anxieties about immigration, race, and welfare dependency. More specifically, refugees’ acts of subversion/resistance to resettlement agencies’ proper subject creation challenged caseworkers’ sensibilities and dispositions in the broader context of past imperial entanglements with Southeast Asia and contemporary racial assumptions and anxieties.

Hmong entanglement in Cold War politics

The Hmong are one of the many groups whose entanglement in Cold War politics resulted in their forced migration to the United States and other Western nations. Tracing their historical roots to southern China, they had migrated in significant numbers to the Indochinese Peninsula in the mid to late 1800s (Michaud, 1997: 119–30; Michaud and Culas, 2004: 61–96). They lived among the many ethnic minorities who occupied the highland areas in present day Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, and interacted with the ruling regimes when it benefited them (Scott, 2009: 18). Their isolation from the larger societies in which they lived did not make them immune to the greater political and military transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The divide and conquer practices instituted by French colonial administrators gave the Hmong in Laos their first experience of the benefits of aligning with an imperial power. Division within their ethnic group intensified as some collaborated with the French while others aligned with nationalists fighting to end colonial domination. This contentious situation further expanded as French colonial rule in Indochina ended in 1954 and US interests in the region increased as part of the growing Cold War rivalry. Although Lao neutrality was declared in 1954 and further solidified in 1962, the people of Laos were pulled into the war as a result of larger US military developments in Vietnam.

Because of its strategic location, both the United States and North Vietnam used Lao territory to stage their military campaigns. The Hmong, who had previously collaborated with the French, took part in US covert operations from 1961 to 1973 against communist forces. Numbering a few hundred in the early 1960s but growing to more than 40,000 by the late 1960s, the Hmong clandestine army supplied and supported by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) faced severe losses. Similar to the predicament of Iraqi and Afghani translators who worked for Western forces, the Hmong who had aligned with Americans faced retribution following US disengagement from Southeast Asia. While the translators were struggling to seek refuge, Hmong were characterized by civilian and military leaders as “America's most loyal allies” for their role in support of the US military, and their resulting suffering due to US enemies recognized them as worth rescuing. Two weeks after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, roughly 2,500 Hmong military officials and thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: global conversations on refuge
• Part I Experiments of categorizing and control
• Part II Inhabiting displacement and crafting futures
• Part III Scales of intervention
• Index