The NGOization of Refugee Resettlement

This chapter explains the policies, politics, and everyday practices of the New American Services. It highlights the tensions surrounding citizenship and the role that nongovernmental (or nonprofit) organizations play in Fargo under neoliberalism by analyzing these practices in terms of the “NGOization” of refugee resettlement. The chapter defines NGOization as the proliferation of NGOs under neoliberalism as extensions, or new faces, of the state. It views NGOs from a feminist's lens, and challenges the master narrative that refugee resettlement was purely humanitarian or simply unaccountable. The chapter provides an overview of everyday resettlement practices and beliefs about resettlement staff, and how their work can be interpreted in regard to the larger social issues laid out in this book: race, citizenship, and diversity. It also talks about the Cooperative Agreement between the Government of the United States (the State Department and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration) and VOLAGS or voluntary agencies.

Diversity and Inclusion in Fargo

This chapter provides data on the beliefs, practices, and discourse about refugees and race beyond refugee resettlement and welfare agencies. It aims to provide a broader, richer context for refugee resettlement in Fargo by highlighting a spectrum of tensions between those who welcome refugees and those who do not. Primarily, it uses the lenses of race and sociality as markers of difference. In doing so, it is able to explain what tensions indicate about the structures within which resettlement work is done — for example, education, police, media, politics, and civil society, and a range of practices surrounding and shaping refugee resettlement in the city. It makes the case that diversity is good for a city, if not also difficult for the trailblazers who embody and support it.

Sibling Rivalry

This chapter highlights practices of welfare workers in Fargo and compares them to practices of refugee resettlement workers in order to better understand how these institutions have shaped citizenship as well as local race, class, and gender formations in similar and different ways by framing them as siblings in the kinship of neoliberalism. The chapter specifically talks about the Cass County Social Services and the New American Services. Like siblings, workers in both sectors have competed and cooperated as they have worked with New Americans in the city. These institutions and their locations in the public/private borderlands are important loci for understanding varying approaches to citizenship, immigration, race, labor and class, and gender. The chapter also talks about the 1966 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), or simply “welfare reform”.

Beyond Bare Life

This chapter discusses Southern Sudanese forms of citizenship, resettling Christians, social and cultural citizenship, political citizenship, gendered citizenship, and the Lost Boys. It discusses how the Southern Sudanese enacted multi-sited citizenship through religious, social, political, and familial assemblages. The chapter discusses how the Church became an important social service to the Southern Sudanese because social services were not providing enough support. It talks about the New Sudanese Community Association, which was the only Southern Sudanese–led organization registered as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in Fargo Moorhead in 2007–2008. It also discusses women's participation in the community and how men viewed Sudanese women who have lived in the United States. It also discusses The Sudan People's Liberation Army and Sudan People's Liberation Movement formed in 1983 to fight the military domination and political interests, respectively, of the ruling Northern Sudanese elite.

Introduction

This chapter introduces Race ing Fargo as a case study for how citizenship is practiced and how diversity is approached in Fargo, North Dakota, and what the consequences of these practices are. The chapter compares citizenship practices among two social service institutions, the refugee resettlement and county welfare agencies, and two groups of refugees — New Americans — Bosnians and Southern Sudanese. The chapter discusses Fargo's topography and how Fargo has transformed from a city with an economy centered on manufacturing and agriculture to one with a more diversified economy that includes education, healthcare, software, and service based industries. It talks about the Northern European Ancestry of Fargo residents, and how the arrival of refugees complicated understandings of citizenship in the dominant population. It defines race as a broadly encompassing term that refers to skin color and physical variations among people and the harmful social judgments based on those differences, alongside also referencing language, behavior, dress, and ethnicity. The chapter talks about how the size of cities affect how refugees and immigrants are accepted by their residents, and differentiates immigrants from refugees. It then tackles citizenship and approaches it as a set of practices that seek to establish belonging to one or more places and that are relational and always in flux. Finally, the chapter discusses and defines assemblages as a theoretical concept that challenges the idea of nations, cities, or communities as bounded or homogenous spaces and instead focuses on diverse practices and relations that occur in and through the city.

Resettled Orientalisms

This chapter highlights the challenges Bosnians faced, obstacles they overcame, and ways in which they pushed the boundaries of “normal” in Fargo. It describes relationships between and among Bosnian Muslims, Roma, other people, and institutions in the city. The chapter argues that relationships between Bosnian Muslims and Roma were of mutual misrecognition and that this misrecognition made it more difficult to form a “Bosnian” coalition that could liaison — as other refugee groups did — with the city for more rights, recognition, and entitlements. The case of Bosnians in Fargo challenges the idea that the nation or the state is the primary means of establishing group identity. The chapter encourages the reader to think more about everyday practices as a means to initiate and form greater solidarities.

Histories, Assemblages, and the City

This chapter discusses the histories of North Dakota, Bosnia Herzegovina, and South Sudan. It talks about the North Europeans that settled in the region in the 1860s, how the Dakota territory was formed, the Dakota War of 1862, how Fargo turned into a settlement in 1871, the Dawes General Allotment Act, and how North Dakota turned into a state. It also talks about the Balkan Peninsula and how the region changed throughout history. The chapter discusses how Western Europeans portrayed Balkans as having a handicap of heterogeneity. It also talks about the former Yugoslavia, how it was formed, how it was able to recognize ethnic and religious diversity by downplaying social factors such as gender, ethnicity, religion, level of wealth, and age in political identity and in participation of “Yugoslav identity,” the slow end of the socialist state, the wars the ensued after the death of Josip Broz Tito, and how this divided the country. The chapter also discusses Sudan and how the British tried to control anticolonial sentiments through the policies they implemented and by encouraging missionary work. It talks about refugees, its definition given by the United Nations, the Refugee Act of 1980 signed by President Carter, refugee resettlement and how it brought post-socialist and post-colonial people and practices to Fargo. Finally, the chapter talks about how the surge in refugee resettlement at the turn of the century made refugees more visible and shed light on these global assemblages.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes that globalized capitalism has resulted in unprecedented amounts of goods, services, ideas, and people circulating the planet, which has provoked a range of responses at the local level, from excitement and acceptance of new forms of diversity, to fear, aversion, and panic, depending on one's experiences and point of view. The ever-increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants around the world calls into question the role of the nation state and how citizenship has been defined and practiced at national and local levels. It states that cities also host parallel assemblages, where even chance encounters with certain groups of people (for example, New Americans) are minimal and lack context and meaning, which can serve to fuel fear and hate. The chapter discusses “incipient commoning”, and how sensationalist media has shaped the contours of the refugee resettlement debate in Fargo.