Standardizing Refuge: Pipelines and Pathways in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

How do bureaucracies pattern durable inequalities? Predominant approaches emphasize the role of administrative categories, which prioritize certain populations for valued resources based on broader regimes of human worth. This article extends this body of work by examining how categorical inequaliti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American sociological review 2023-08, Vol.88 (4), p.681-708
Main Author: Watson, Jake
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bureaucracy
Case studies
Concept formation
Immigrants
Land Settlement
Pipelines
Public administration
Reactivity
Refuge
Refugees
Relocation
Resources
Social dynamics
Social inequality
Social systems
Statistics
Visibility
Worthiness
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Summary:How do bureaucracies pattern durable inequalities? Predominant approaches emphasize the role of administrative categories, which prioritize certain populations for valued resources based on broader regimes of human worth. This article extends this body of work by examining how categorical inequalities become embedded within administrative infrastructures and institutional pathways. I develop this argument through a case study of the United States’ refugee resettlement program. Drawing together previously unseen government statistics, expert interviews, and documentary analysis, I show that U.S. resettlement is organized through administrative pipelines that create path dependent imbalances in the distribution of scarce resettlement spaces. Social and political logics of immigrant worthiness are important, yet a full understanding of these imbalances requires attention to the tendency of pipelines to become self-reproducing. I identify three factors that account for this tendency: calculative rationales, administrative reactivity, and structured visibility. This three-part conceptualization of pipelines can be applied to other institutional contexts to study the origins, dynamics, and durability of social inequalities. My findings also demonstrate the analytically autonomous role of policy administration in shaping ethnoracial imbalances in immigrant selection.
ISSN:0003-1224
1939-8271
DOI:10.1177/00031224231180891