Meaningless Citizenship: Iraqi Refugees and the Welfare State

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A searing critique of the freedom that America offers to the victims of its imperialist machinations of war and occupation

Meaningless Citizenship traces the costs of Americas long-term military involvement around the world by following the forced displacement of Iraqi families, unveiling how Iraqis are doubly displaced: first by the machinery of American imperialism in their native countries and then through a more pernicious war occurring on U.S. soilthe dismantling of the welfare state.

Revealing the everyday struggles and barriers that texture the lives of Iraqi families recently resettled to the United States, Sally Wesley Bonet draws from four years of deep involvement in the refugee community of Philadelphia. An education scholar, Bonets analysis moves beyond the prevalent tendency to collapse schooling into education. Focusing beyond the public school to other critical institutions, such as public assistance, resettlement programs, and healthcare, she shows how encounters with institutions of the state are an inherently educative process for both refugee youths and adults, teaching about the types of citizenship they are expected to enact and embody while simultaneously shaping them into laboring subjects in service of capitalism.

An intimate, in-depth ethnography, Meaningless Citizenship exposes how the veneer of American valuesfreedom, democracy, human rightsexported to countries like Iraq, disintegrates to uncover what is really beneath: a nation-state that prioritizes the needs of capitalism above the survival and wellbeing of its citizens.

Reviews

"Sally Wesley Bonets book is a beautiful exploration of the meanings of refuge and citizenship through institutions, relationships, and the everyday experiences of children and families in the United States. It exposes essential understandings that are needed for stronger futures, particularly the consequences of misaligned expectations and reality as well as the responsibility the United States has to refugees, especially those to whom it has caused suffering."Sarah Dryden-Peterson, author of Right Where We Belong: How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education

"Drawing on three years of tender and tenacious ethnographic research with Iraqi refugee families resettled into poverty in the U.S., Meaningless Citizenship explains how American imperialism and its brutal late-stage, low-road, neoliberal capitalism deny refugees the economic and social rights of full citizenship. Sally Wesley Bonet critiques how refugee resettlement, public assistance, and educational and health care institutions stymie justice, even as she shows how they might be reformed to foster more humane and equitable outcomes."Lesley Bartlett, coauthor of Humanizing Education for Immigrant and Refugee Youth: 20 Strategies for the Classroom and Beyond

Author Bio

Sally Wesley Bonet is assistant professor of educational studies at Colgate University.