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Reconfiguring the Deserving Refugee: Cultural Categories of Worth and the Making of Refugee Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Talia Shiff
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Abstract

Studies on asylum give little explanatory power to the role of categories of worth in how lawmakers formulate asylum law in lack of a clear policy framework for determining eligibility for asylum status. This article contends that during periods of policy upheaval, distinctions of worth shift to forefront lawmaking: lawmakers renegotiate the moral boundaries between categories of deserving and undeserving refugees to give content in ambiguous law. In the United States, lawmakers drew on the concept of immutability—the notion that to be worthy of protection you must be targeted on account of traits beyond your control to change—to distinguish between “undeserving” Central Americans fleeing civil wars and gang violence, and “deserving” women subjected to gender violence. Understanding how categories of worth inform the formulation and implementation of law in periods of policy upheaval advances understandings of asylum policy and expands scholarship on the role of ideas about worth in processes of institutional change.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 102 - 132
Copyright
© 2019 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Josephine De Karman Fellowship Trust and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. My deep gratitude also goes to Ann Orloff for her meticulous reading and insightful comments. For valuable comments on previous drafts I thank Savina Balasubramanian, John Hagan, Michèle Lamont, Ron Levi, Liz Onasch, Ann Orloff, Jane Pryma and Diana Rodriguez, as well as participants of Harvard's Comparative Inequality and Inclusion Cluster, and Harvard's Weather head Scholars Program. The comments by the anonymous reviewers have also been extremely helpful.

References

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