Book Project

Bad Refugees: Practicing Statelessness at the Margins of Global Northern Citizenship

Bad Refugees: Practicing Statelessness at the Margins of Global Northern Citizenship hybridizes ethnography and comparative-historical research using over two years of participant observations with Vietnamese gang members, life history interviews, and archival records to show that refugee-status is a political category that allows powerful countries to claim moral authority while also closing their borders to masses of displaced people seeking resettlement. Centering the 'Bad Refugee' at the heart of my analysis, I reveal how this dynamic is always riddled with tensions: wealthy countries continually undermine their own moral claims through war making and imperial violence; refugees only have partial citizenship rights that are subject to revocation; and the people classified as refugees are themselves complex human beings who may or may not conform to the set of legal and cultural expectations imposed onto them in the name of assimilation. 

The book is organized into two sections, one that traces the rise of the Bad Refugee as a figure, and another that focuses on the experiences of 'bad refugees' in the US today. Section I, 'Bad Refugee Reconfigurations of Racial Capitalism in the Contested Multicultural Nation,' relies on the comparative-historical portion to frame the immediate post-Vietnam War period as a consequential moment in negotiating the limits to multiculturalism’s inclusions of an increasing number of racial Others arriving in the country during a moment of welfare retrenchment, deindustrialization, and ongoing Cold War tensions. Framing those contestations as occurring within Orange County’s transition from being a ‘mid-century’ to ‘global suburb’ as well as engaging scholarship on boundaries, inequality, and racial capitalism, Section I shows how 'bad refugees'—in failing to live up to assimilationist demands to become economically productive, grateful 'good refugees'—became disposable to the state—thus illustrating how imperial violence became increasingly rationalized and hidden in the form of bureaucratic violence over time while remaining enduringly consequential.

Section II, 'Social Death and Refugee Lifeworlds,' draws parallels between the post-Vietnam War period in Section I and an analogous period during which an 'end' to the War on Drugs in California occurred when it legalized the adult use of recreational cannabis. Offered the chance to 'assimilate' as productive citizen-subjects once again—this time into the formal cannabis economy—the ethnographic chapters follow Vietnamese gang members working in the underground market as they navigate legalization. Faced with impossible barriers to entry and cultivating legal cynicism towards being incorporated anyway, gang members developed sophisticated mutual aid networks to sustain life largely outside of state intrusion, surveillance, and control. Relying on one another for needs as diverse as childcare, substance abuse support, and domestic violence intervention, these 'bad refugees' flout normative accounts of The Family, using the term subversively to make sense of why they take care of each other despite having been rendered externally valueless to and disposable by the state and globalized capitalism. Section II thus pushes back against deprivation-inflected readings of 'system avoidance' and lack of assimilation as problems-to-be-reformed, instead framing bad refugees’ refusals to participate in the formal cannabis economy as continuing to practice a condition of emancipatory statelessness—an organization of everyday life in which they can regularly assert their own valuations of their labor, bodies, and relationships outside of the state’s rubric. Overall, Section II contends that gang members’ practices to both remain “unseen” to the state and produce the mutual aid necessary to sustain their lifeworlds represent intentional refusals of state-sanctioned attempts to cast their behavior as irrational or otherwise more violent than the state itself, which—they intimately challenge—cannot possibly be true.