Refugee (Un)becoming

Abstract

The fusion of humanitarianism and security is exposed in relation to the (un)making of the deserving refugee. It does so through an examination of the process of resettlement to the US. Security practices characteristic of the resettlement selection process position the refugee as guilty until proven innocent. This active mistrust is enacted by surveillance technologies which collect, monitor and assess biodata from which to produce a ‘threatening population’. In this process ‘risky refugees’ are constituted through an orientalist gaze based on an imagined amalgam of refugee/foreigner/Muslim with a perceived terrorist threat. We describe how the ‘less than human’ populations produced through resettlement processes are out of sight, so that we only see some of the consequences of deselection in the production of ‘illegal’ migration towards Europe.