Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork on refugee resettlement in Kenya and the United States, the paper examines discourses of fraud and anti-fraud practices that reveal the twin processes of giving access and denying access to asylum and resettlement. Fears of the refugee as “fraud” now circulate globally.

Paper long abstract:

“Vulnerability” is a central category used in the adjudication of asylum, and the allocation of refugee aid and resettlement. In the nexus of humanitarianism and securitization, “vulnerability” also exists in opposition to other categories that are used to define who is unworthy; “fraud” is one such term. Based on long-term fieldwork on refugee resettlement processes in Kenya and in the United States, I examine discourses of fraud and anti-fraud practices that reveal the everyday workings of the twin processes of giving access and denying access to asylum and resettlement. In these processes, “fraud” is a term that is often employed by governmental and non-governmental agencies to refer to those who pose as members of priority categories: persecuted ethnic minorities; single mothers; orphans; or more generally having biographies of exceptional persecution or insecurity.

I argue that while the notion of the refugee as “fraud” pre-existed the War on Terror as a drain on humanitarian systems, this figure transformed in a post-9/11 period, reimagined in relation to Islamic terror. Over the past five to ten years, the figure of the refugee as fraud—the dangerous fake disguised as “the vulnerable”—has become unhinged from more specialized arenas of international humanitarian aid and immigration agencies, and has begun to circulate in broader public discourses in an age of nativism and xenophobia in the U.S. and around the world.