Global Studies

Abstract:
There are two dominant contrasting images of refugees in scholarship and popular discourse: refugees as powerless victims or beneficiaries of generous welfare packages. While it is true that an individual who enters the United States with legal refugee status has – at least at first glance – many advantages over those arriving as immigrants. Unlike immigrants, refugees are entitled to numerous government benefits, thus putting her or him in a privileged position compared to those who lack the official status of refugee. On the other hand refugees' depiction as being need of services and protection can also perpetuate an image of them as victims without agency. This ethnographic study of Liberian refugees in Staten Island, New York shows how refugees themselves and their co-ethnics who are in the US under a variety of other legal statues regard the term “refugee”. This paper establishes the advantages that are associated with the legal refugee status and the burdens with the informal label “refugee”. This analysis will clarify how the legal refugee status can be beneficial and the informal label refugee, burdensome not just for Liberian, but for refugees in general and as such have significant policy implications.

As Liberian refugee and immigrant families in Staten Island, NY strive to assimilate to life in a new country and in a new social setting they encounter numerous hurdles. This chapter discusses acculturation stressors faced by Liberian parents and their children complicated by living in a neighborhood—plagued by crime, drugs, and other deteriorating conditions—and the strategies that parents are seeking to ease their children’s transition into adulthood and becoming Americans.
While parents are busy dealing with their own adjustment, children frequently receive less of their attention. Parents are ill prepared to provide a nurturing environment at home and to assist their children with their struggles. Not only are Liberian parents unfamiliar with the American education system but also frequently lack basic literacy skills frequently preventing them from involvement with their children’s education. Like most immigrant parents, Liberian parents are slower to grasp American cultural norms and rely on their children as their cultural ambassadors. This also includes youth telling parents that their traditional parenting methods are not in line with child protection laws in the U.S., forcing parents unfamiliar with alternative practices either to withdraw from parenting or to resort to keeping the children at home. Youth are frustrated by this and by their parents’ expectations that youth continue to adhere to Liberian cultural norms and values. Children who are not accustomed with these traditions do not know what they are supposed to do, and in moreover only know about their American peers’ negative view of African traditions.

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“Refugee” is a word that can be found almost daily in the news. However, the usage and the meaning of the term are not always clear. While legislation clearly defines who a refugee is, it is inconsistent in who is rewarded legal refugee status. The definition in social sciences is also murky. Some scholars argue that refugees are not immigrants, people who voluntarily migrate to seek a better life for themselves (and their children); others disagree and contend that refugees are a type of immigrant. Finally, those labeled “refugees” also have varying opinions.  This chapter seeks to give an overview of the different meanings of “refugee,” while paying special attention how refugees themselves feel about the term. The data for this analysis was collected in an ethnographic study of the Liberian refugees in Staten Island, New York from 2009 to 2015. Liberians embraced being labeled “refugee” while in a refugee camp in West Africa as it gave them increased international protection and a chance for resettlement in the U.S. However, once in the U.S. many Liberians started to see themselves as immigrants, not refugees. “Refugee” not only invoked images of the past suffering they sought to distance themselves from, but also prevalent media images about refugees as victims which are not in line with how Liberians see themselves; as survivors and immigrants.

In 1822 Liberia was founded as a place where free(d) enslaved African Americans could find freedom and liberty. While many of them did, the indigenous African population remained for a long time excluded from citizenry, this, although, they fulfilled the necessary criterion to be eligible for Liberians citizenship; being Black. This prerequisite remains part of Liberian law unit today and renders non-Blacks ineligible for Liberian nationality. Today, this mostly affects the Lebanese community who originally came as traders and entrepreneurs to Liberia. This article analyzes how race, ethnicity, and ancestry have influenced eligibility for Liberian citizenship.

Since the “service” component exposes college students to individuals in the community who often differ from them in their ethnoracial, socioeconomic, linguistic background, and age, etc. these classes present an ideal opportunity to test Allport's (1954) intergroup contact hypothesis. This theory stipulates that prejudice can be reduced if certain criteria are met. This case study about freshmen students' service learning experiences with a local West African community tested this theory and found that over the semester students' stereotypes changed. In addition, this research project showed that the experiences of ethnoracial minority and/or immigrant students differed from their White peers; due to race, ethnicity, language, and/or immigration status, they were cultural insiders which enabled them to build more meaningful relationships with the community members.

Present-day immigration in the USA is most frequently analyzed through the experiences of Mexican (and other Hispanic) migrants. These three books provide a refreshing perspective on immigration in the USA by shedding light on communities that are often overlooked. The communities discussed in the reviewed books include both refugees and
immigrants that are generally much smaller populations in the USA. By surveying the experiences of Cambodian and Somali Bantu refugees and Nepali immigrants in the USA, the idea that there is ‘one immigrant experience’ often referred to as ‘the immigrant experience,’ is proven invalid......

New York City is seen by many as both the quintessential city of immigrants and a bastion of liberalism. While this may be true for most parts of the metropolis, this has not been the case for Staten Island, where thousands of Liberians found refuge after fleeing war in their native country. Staten Island is the only New York City borough with a non-Hispanic White majority and that consistently votes Republican, making it difficult for Liberian refugees to truly find refuge. Thus, this longitudinal ethnographic study (since 2009) shows that refugees’ ability to integrate into a new society and to establish a thriving community is deeply influenced by the local context.

Park Hill, where many Liberian refugees were resettled, is an urban low-income neighborhood that did not exude a warm welcome to traumatized newcomers, but rather fear and lack of safety and has continued to be a site of crime, violence, gang activity, and drug trade. But these vices were not the only issues that Liberians have faced. They also have battled—in many different ways—with native-born Black Americans over scarce resources and ownership of the neighborhood.

Outside the Park Hill neighborhood, Liberians have frequently been reminded that Staten Island is not a “safe haven.” Concretely, Liberian refugees have faced racism and discrimination in housing, employment, and education. Hence, this study concludes that despite being in a “blue” state and “blue” city, actually living in a “red bubble” matters significantly more if and how refugees and immigrants can find refuge.

This long-term ethnographic study about the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, NY shows that their integration and identity formation are not only influenced by race, but also by the context of reception (Portes and Rumbaut 1996). Second generation Liberian Americans have to deal with a number of sources of stigma, leading them to distance themselves from their African heritage. As the children of refugees, they endure taunts associated with this label. The term “refugee” for Blacks in the U.S. has often been equated with being an economic burden. In addition, images of the civil war that raged in Liberia still predominate in the media. Due to the war, many Liberian parents never completed their formal education and thus are illiterate, forcing them to work as home health aides, another cause of shame for the second generation. Finally, the geographical context also matters for Liberian American youth. Seeking to escape discrimination from African Americans in their neighborhoods, they often embrace a “Black” identity, de-emphasizing their African heritage. However, this is to limited effect. Outside of their neighborhood, in greater Staten Island, being “Black” is yet another stigma.

's Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World: Refugee Youth and the Pursuit of Identity introduces the reader to the identity journeys of young refugees from Burma, Sudan, Uganda, and Sierra Leone 1 living in Brisbane, Australia. Based on data collected in an ethnographic study, Moran develops the theory of dynamic responsiveness to demonstrate that identities are not constructed in a vacuum but in response to social context and national policies such as Australia's multiculturalism. Subsequently, she concludes that resettled refugee youth (in Australia) have hybridized and essentialized representations of identity. These hybridized and essentialized representations, Moran contends, ''reflect the perception and accumulation of a kind of symbolic capital which emerges in dynamic response to certain ideals of multiculturalism'' (p. 59). Here she draws on Bourdieu's conceptions of field, social capital, and habitus. This is the main theoretical contribution of the book. A strength of the research is the novelty of its focus on refugee youth in Australia. Australia has embraced-at least on paper-a celebration of multiculturalism, but one that ''is deeply rooted in whiteness'' (p. 27). Moran systematically describes how this multicultural policy is not only understood as ''a black or brown issue'' (p. 37), meaning that BIPOC are the ones who ''do multiculturalism,'' but also how it is related to the official decline of the White Australia Policy and the recent increase of global white nationalism and xenophobia.

Based on an exploratory study of the intersection among social exclusion, gender, and access to education, this article documents interpretive insights into the social and cultural dimensions of schooling through the narrative accounts of young women and
girls living in poverty and experiencing homelessness in Canada. Having recognized the challenges of the public education system to meet the varying needs of a diverse student body, the declarations of these girls shed much-needed analytic light on the
multiple factors mediating the issue of access, social and economic constraints, and alienation from teaching and learning environments faced by homeless young women
and girls in the educational arena. Consequently, they shift our attention away from notions of individualized failure in school to a structural and gendered critique of “access” in education, and bring into relief important questions about justice and social equality in Canada.

In cities and towns across Canada, Indigenous girls are being hunted, harassed, and criminalized by local law enforcement agents and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. These normalized outbreaks of state control, often punctuated by the use of deadly force, are not isolated incidents in an otherwise just and fair social order. Rather, they are reflective of Indigenous girls' daily realities embedded within the structure of an ongoing settler colonial social context that has strategically invented the criminal justice system to secure and maintain settler sovereignty. As such, this paper aims to redirect our critical analysis of the policing and caging of Indigenous girls through the geopolitics of settler colonialism. In the wake of mass protests against colonial state violence throughout 2014, resistance decrying the justice system and insisting that #BlackLivesMatters and that Indigenous lives matter, I argue that we have an urgent need to listen to the stories that Indigenous girls have to tell. These are not just any stories, but narratives that profoundly destabilize the hubristic portrayal of Canada as a humanitarian nation cleansed of settler colonial rule.