Negotiating Belonging: Attitudes Towards Immigrants and Refugees, and Experiences of Displaced Syrians in the U.S.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I follow a migrant-centered approach in investigating the meso-level e.g., intergroup) and micro-level (e.g., individual) challenges and affordances that influence refugee and immigrant belonging in the United States. I situate my analysis in the larger socio-historical context in which migrant communities have been dehumanized by White-supremacist rhetoric and a series of policies that enabled deportations, entry quota restrictions, and travel bans. This dissertation is comprised of three studies, using multiple methods (quantitative and qualitative), and viewpoints of privileged and marginalized members of the society (e.g., American citizens, Syrian refugees). In the first study, I found that when ordinary U.S. citizens viewed Syrian and Mexican immigrants as part of a historical narrative, they felt affinity towards the recent waves of immigrants from both groups. Those who perceived contemporary immigrants from these two dehumanized groups as similar to immigrants in the past were more likely to feel warmly towards them; and this affinity towards Syrian and Mexican immigrants predicted voting for Clinton (as opposed to Trump) in the 2016 Presidential Election. The second study had two parts. In the first part, with an online sample, I examined Americans’ representations of various immigrant groups (e.g., undocumented, refugee, documented, Mexican, Syrian, Nigerian, German) using an inductive approach to elicit contemporary public discourses about immigrants. I found that refugees were constructed as more vulnerable (and less hardworking) and more like drains on national resources (than assets to the nation). In the second part, I examined how consequential these social representations were for granting Syrian refugees legal and institutional rights. This study showed that people who viewed Syrian refugees as vulnerable and drains were less likely to believe that refugees deserve to belong; while those who viewed them as hardworking and assets for the nation were more likely to agree on granting them legal and institutional rights. In the third study, I interviewed with recently resettled Syrian families in order to understand how they negotiate belonging in this new context. I found that the pressure to quickly become self-sufficient deterred refugees from engaging with their ethnically close communities, contributed to isolation, and cycle of poverty. Furthermore, this isolation and fear of stigma was experienced differently based on the family type. Women-headed refugee households were up against double stigma: for not sharing their home with male kin, and for being welfare-dependent. The three studies altogether showed that acceptance of contemporary immigrants and refugees by the American public requires the perception of them as fitting into the historical narrative of American immigration, an appreciation of the migrants’ heritage culture, and perception of them as assets and hardworking rather than vulnerable and resource draining. On the other hand, for recently resettled refugees, their sense of belonging in the U.S. depends on the relations with their ethnic relatives and co-nationals in the ethnic enclave, and the expectation to quickly become self-sufficient and economically independent created fractures in these otherwise close-knit communities.