Providing Refuge: Faith-Based Resettlement Actors and Refugee Integration in the United States

As of 2019, the total number of forcibly displaced persons is recorded at 70.8 million, breaking global records for the seventh consecutive year. Only 25.9 million of these are formally recognized as refugees, a legal designation signifying an individual has fled their country and claimed international protection based on a fear of persecution due to membership in one or more of the five protected classes: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Today, the majority of displacement occurs in the Global South; however, the United Nation’s global resettlement program enables other countries to demonstrate their humanitarian commitments through the offer of third-country resettlement, thereby sharing a portion of the global responsibility for the protection of displaced persons. Since World War II, the United States has resettled more than 3 million refugees, and has historically led the global resettlement program in total number of refugees resettled. However, the election of Donald J. Trump as president ushered in a wave of reforms regarding immigration, restricting the admission of refugees and asylum seekers, limiting funding, and undermining the future of the U.S. resettlement program. This dissertation explores how resettlement and integration function for refugees through a case study of three resettlement organizations in the southeastern U.S. This research is situated at the intersection of geographic work on migration and refugees, the geographies of religion, and feminist geographic methodologies. This dissertation advances understandings of integration as a multi-dimensional process between newcomers and a heterogeneous host society. Further, it examines how faith influences the work of resettlement actors, advancing geographic scholarship on individual religious subjectivities through a focus on volunteerism as a form of everyday religious practice outside the bounds of what is traditionally considered “sacred”. This dissertation also offers sustained reflection on the challenges which can arise in fieldwork with resettled refugees. This research builds upon existing scholarship by advancing understandings of refugee integration, faith-based volunteerism and religious practice, and methodological challenges in qualitative fieldwork with marginalized populations.

Portions of this document were previously published in the journal, the Geographical Review. This material is denoted in the document by a statement preceding the chapter which contains the citation of the previously published work.