Sovereignty,citizenship and educating refugees in the United States

Abstract

Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected on refugee and other immigrant networks in Southern Arizona, a US–Mexico border region marked by increasing anti-immigrant policies and practices, I reveal how the everyday practices and policies of one school district reflect and reinforce the government’s control over refugee students. I argue that the ways in which the students are sorted, marginalized, and denied opportunities as learners is inextricable from their positioning as non-citizens by the federal and state governments. Specifically, I demonstrate the linkages between the federal education policy, Every School Succeeds Act, Arizona State’s Proposition 203: English Language Education for the Children in Public Schools, which eliminated bilingual education, and the school district’s approach to teaching refugee students. Finally, I offer recommendations for creating more inclusive, assets-based learning environments for refugee students that push back against the neoliberal favoring of competition and one-size-fits-all solutions in public education.

Introduction

(W)e became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and the means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. (Arendt, 1951: 296–297)

Reduced to being “stateless,” stripped of her German citizenship during World War II, Arendt, who was Jewish, points to the power of governments and political bodies to enact sovereignty, within and across national borders. Arendt’s words, although written nearly 70 years ago, are still applicable to the more than 68.5 million people today who have been forced to flee their homes due to violence and fear of persecution and are without any particular rights to belong to a nation-state. Currently, 25.4 million people—the highest number ever—are refugees; 40 million are internally displaced; and 3.1 million are asylum seekers. They are, as was Arendt, people without particular rights, but moreover they are people who have lost their status as citizens bearing rights afforded by the nation in which they have lived, often since birth. As concepts of citizenship are often based on the rights rooted in national belonging, the stateless condition, as described by Arendt and in which so many migrants now find themselves, is defined contrastingly, as “outside the nation-state” (Ong, 2006: 15).

Through the territorial sovereignty, built up and enacted diffusely through multiple institutions active in a particular “political situation” (Arendt, 1951: 297) and embedded through the making and remaking of “national order” (Malkii, 1994: 62), the stateless become untethered. Even in these times of globalization, the national order—the division of the world into nation-states and the accompanying legitimization of their power—persists, often wreaking havoc on the lives of those who do not find secure positions within the order (Koyama, 2015). According to Nielsen (2015), the ultimate outsider status “is that of the individual who does not have a nation at all. Having a nation means being a citizen, which is exposed by the stateless who lack it and refugees who are displaced from it” (4). For those outsiders, gaining national citizenship as a status remains the main goal for refugees and asylum seekers in the United States (US).

Moreover, neoliberalism, or the “new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions” (Ong, 2006: 3), complicates not only the claims of citizenships, but the rights associated with them. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of issues of power and subjection through neoliberalism, Lazzarato (2009) highlights the role of the state, as an entanglement of diverse and dispersed apparatuses, in creating the conditions through which individual’s conduct is controlled. While Lazzarato uses as his example workers in France, he shows more broadly how particular apparatuses are put to work in promoting “insecurity, inequality and individualization as part of ensuring the conditions for power to exercise a hold over conduct” (110) in daily life. Two sets of intersecting apparatuses—“those that establish the law, the norm, opinion, categories, knowledges . . . and those that administer the conducts and the behavior of individuals” (111)—intervene in what one is able to do and what one is able to say. The apparatuses arbitrate the rights of the citizen and the denial of rights to the non-citizen.

Sovereignty of nation-states is enacted on citizens and non-citizen inhabitants through disperse and diffused modes of power that operate variably through institutions, practices, and discourses to control individuals and populations. Those with citizenship are governed, controlled, and managed through nation-states’ political and legal apparatus (Banks, 2008; Ong, 2006). For refugees, “sovereignty is imposed on them through the very processes designed to resolve their displacement” (Ramsay, 2017: 516), and, as they are resettled and integrated into another country, they occupy a contested peripheral space of legal belonging. As articulated by Ramsay (2017), in her scholarship on refugees, sovereignty, and citizenship:

Sovereignty is not only determined through the legal classification of citizenship . . .. (it) is also realized through implicit forces of racialization that make some groups of peoples, such as resettled refugees . . . (situated and also) subjugated as threats to sovereignty even after, and as a result of, being provided with a legal national identity. (517)

Once refugees—defined as those who have been forced to flee their countries of nationality due to persecution or fear of persecution based on race, religion, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group—have been granted residency in another country, they are often characterized as subjects of exceptions to ordinary rules or laws through which sovereignty is enacted and reified (Ramsay, 2017). For refugees, once resettled in the US, “sovereignty is imposed on them through the very processes designed to resolve their displacement” (Ramsay, 2017: 516) and by which they are to be integrated in American culture. However, my data, like Ramsay’s, demonstrate how sovereignty is, indeed, imposed upon them through the very processes by which they are resettled and pushed not only by government entities, but also through institutional practices and policies put in place to integrate them into their resettlement country.

The institution of public education in the US acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed “to reshape society in accordance with market models” (Kotsko, 2018: 5). It is positioned as one of the technical solutions or tools of what Foucault (1991) notes is a form of governmentality. Refugee children attending public schools in the US are subjected to what has become, under the contemporary articulation of neoliberalism in education, groupings, competition, and rankings based on their proficiency in English and their academic achievement. Although public, it is part of the process of “creating markets where none had previously existed” (Kotsko, 2018: 5) and has become part of the privatization, marketization, and commodification of institutions which act as a sorting, ranking, and ordering systems. In the US, education policies mandate a centralization of control, standardization, and increased accountability that generate comparable schooling data that make it possible to situate “educational achievement as a mimetic of global capitalist competition” (Stronach, 2010: 19). Large-scale standardized assessments, accompanied by punitive measures for schools with low scores, have become the norm. Further, public schools “play major roles in transforming the public into the private” (Apple, 2013: 6).

The authoritarian nature of US federal education policy, such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (United States Department of Education, 2002) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (United States Department of Education, 2015), reflect and reify the neoliberal efforts to “reestablish order and hierarchies” (Apple, 1996) and the needs of the neoliberal state to address problems of control, authority, and legitimacy” (Lipman, 2007: 53). Through The Every Student Succeeds Act, and to a greater degree its predecessor, No Child Left Behind, the US government engages in market-driven, numerical, and comparative assessments of academic achievement and progress, which are justified by government officials in the name of global competitiveness. No Child Left Behind, in particular, served as a racialized form of social control and divergent enactment of sovereignty that marginalizes African American, Latinx, and some immigrant populations across the US by grouping them, by race and English-language proficiency, into the policy’s accountability subcategories. For refugee students, who are not US citizens, and who do not neatly fit into the US’s education system’s accountability subcategories, including race and language proficiency, the marginalization can be multiple and compounded by the refugees’ history of interrupted schooling and trauma.

In this article, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is enacted in the lives of refugee children and their families through the apparatus of public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected on migrant networks in Southern Arizona, a US–Mexico border region that has been marked by increasing anti-immigrant policies and practices, I trace “the remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations” (Wacquant, 2012: 68). Utilizing the conceptual resources of sovereignty thinking and recent literature on neoliberalism, citizenship, and migrant education, I reveal how the everyday practices and policies of one school district are part of the apparatus of sovereignty-making in refugee’s lives in the US. I argue that the ways in which the students are sorted, marginalized, and denied opportunities as learners is inextricable from their positioning as non-citizens by the federal and state governments. Specifically, I demonstrate the linkages between the federal education policy, the Every School Succeeds Act, Arizona State’s Proposition 203: English Language Education for the Children in Public Schools, which eliminated bilingual education, and the school districts’ approach to teaching refugee students. Finally, I offer recommendations for creating more inclusive, assets-based learning environments for refugee students that push back against neoliberal favoring of competition and one-size-fits-all solutions to the needs of culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse students.

Literature review: refugees and education

Globally, more than one-half of the nearly 21.3 million refugees are under the age of 18 (United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), 2015). The US has, until recently, resettled by far the largest number of refugees among countries with refugee resettlement programs; in 2014, for instance, the US settled 67% of the global total of resettled refugees compared to 10% in Canada, 8% in Australia, and 15% across the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, and few other European countries (Dryden-Peterson, 2016b). Of the nearly 3 million refugees who have been resettled in the US since 1975, 37% are school-aged children between 5 and 18 years of age and, as recently reported by Dryden-Peterson (2016a), an estimated 1.2 million refugee students attend K-12 schools in the US. Many speak multiple languages, come from families and communities rich in cultural assets and resources and are eager to learn once resettled in America (Koyama, 2015). However, most have experienced interrupted formal education and are also designated as English-language learners (ELLs). Providing sufficient educational supports for the refugee students can challenge school districts, which are already experiencing decreasing budgets, limited resources, and diminished federal funding in this neoliberal era (Koyama, 2017; Leachman et al., 2017).

Across the links between schools, organizations, and agencies, educational programs and policies vary substantially depending on how the refugees, and their families, seeking education are positioned by their resettlement country (Dryden-Peterson, 2016b) and their new school districts (Koyama, 2015). In the US, refugee children have the legal right to attend public education. According to the US Refugee Act of 1980, Public Law 96-212, refugee youth should be enrolled in schools as soon as possible, usually within the first 30 days of their arrival. This requires procuring the necessary documents, including a birth certificate, immunization records, and proof of residency. (www.acf.hhs.gov/programmes/orr/resource/the-refugee-act). Yet, once enrolled, refugee students, depending on which schools they attend, may have very disparate academic and emotional supports provided to them (Koyama, 2015, 2017; McBrien, 2005).

The rights of refugees to education in the European Union (EU) is also legislated. However, according to Essomba (2017), the right to education “is currently being threatened and even violated in Europe” (207) due to the sudden and disorganized arrival of large numbers of asylum-seeking families and the inconsistent integration of those seeking such status into European institutions, including schooling. He argues that each EU Member State, “using national sovereignty arguments,” interprets the policies variably: “Denmark (for example) does not apply EU-wide rules which relate to immigration, visa and asylum policies (opt-out) and Ireland and the United Kingdom choose on a case by case basis, whether or not to adopt EU rules” (207). Essomba does note, though, that compared to the first country of exile, the EU Member States have protected the rights to education for refugee children. In a qualitative study, comparing two secondary schools in Germany, Faas (2008) finds that Germany still has work to do to integrate the refugee and asylum-seeking students into its education system. While multicultural values were promoted alongside European values in one school he studied, German schools in general are replete with cultural insensitivities, fail to implement an assets-based curriculum, and have a persistently low ethnic minority representation of teachers.

Yet there exists scant literature on the actual schooling experiences of refugee youth in Europe or the US. Much of what is available centers on schooling and educational programs provided by international organizations, often in refugee resettlement camps and countries of exile (Healey and DeStefano, 1997). What is known about such education is often presented in reports by the international organizations providing the education, including UNESCO (2011) and the World Bank (2005). Essentially, this literature points to the need for more funding, greater coordination among agencies, and also the challenges to sustaining educational programs as the numbers of internally displaced people and refugees rise.

One notable exception is the scholarship of Dryden-Peterson (2016b), in which she interrogates the pre-resettlement education of refugee children in their first country of exile, often adjacent to their countries of origin, prior to being resettled to North America, Europe, or Australia. Drawing on interviews with key informants in 14 countries and ethnographic data in 4 countries of first asylum, she demonstrates that language challenges, discrimination, and a lack of student-centered or assets-based pedagogy are common. Thus, by the time the children reach their countries of resettlement, many have not necessarily had consistent and high-quality education experiences.

A handful of other studies (Betancourt et al., 2012; Halcón et al., 2004; Hyman et al., 2000) investigate the ways in which educational programs/schools in North America must attend to the refugees’ post-migration stress and trauma. The results are mixed. Some refugees, like the young Somali and Oromo migrants in Halcón et al.’s (2004) survey-based study, continue to suffer after resettlement in the US from issues associated with violence and war, while others are adapting more easily to education, and to their lives in America. Hyman et al. (2000) find that Southeast Asian refugee youth, including the children of refugee parents, are often challenged by the stressor of school, among other stressors.

An emerging body of scholarship examines newcomer programs and international schools, in which, at least in New York City and Oakland, California, many refugee students enroll. However, such programs and schools are not exclusively for refugees. According to Garcia and Bartlett (2007) and Feinberg (2000), newcomer and international schools provide school districts with a way to adequately and compassionately attend to the education of “emergent bilingual” (García and Kleifgen, 2010) students, or those most often labeled “English Language Learners.” These schools can offer respite from the marginalization and isolation often experienced by immigrant students in large comprehensive schools. Recent research (Bajaj and Bartlett, 2017; Bajaj and Suresh, 2018; Bartlett et al., 2017; Mendenhall and Bartlett, 2018) draws much-needed attention to how international schools often have a flexible, assets-based curriculum and create meaningful family engagement opportunities for refugee and migrant parents. Mendenhall and Bartlett (2018) find that refugee students benefit from a critical transnational curriculum and note that afterschool and extracurricular programs provide important academic, language, and social supports to refugee youth.

Theoretical considerations: neoliberalism, sovereignty, citizenship, and migrants

Ong (2006) draws our attention to the ways in which neoliberal forms impose “market criteria on citizenship” (1) and “as a technology of governing (neoliberalism) relies on calculative choices and techniques in the domains of citizenship and governing” (4). Neoliberalism both situates and unsettles established practices of citizenship and sovereignty, according to Ong (2006), by creating “exceptions” that recalculate and reorder social criteria for contemporary citizenship differently across, and within, nation-states. Sovereignty thus becomes “manifested in multiple, often contradictory strategies that encounter diverse claims and contestations, and produce diverse and contingent outcomes . . . (which) allows for a measure of sovereign flexibility in ways that both fragment and extend the space of the nation-state” (7). The production and destruction of citizenship become enacted not only through official governing, but are also distributed across the policies and practices of institutions, such as public education. If we consider government, as Ong (2006) does, “as the administration of populations” (76), we see how control and regulation is exerted across a range of everyday practices and spaces.

Exerting sovereignty in the lives of migrants is part of what Omi and Winant (1994) refer to as the “racial project,” or the act of establishing ideas and structures that ingrain a belief in difference that is then used to justify violence against a particular group (Provine and Doty, 2011: 264). This “involves targeting unauthorized immigrants and dispersing authority to take strong action against them. In this process, legal immigrants are subjected to increasing scrutiny, a reminder of their provisional membership status” (Provine and Doty, 2011: 264). This creates a situation wherein enforcement becomes an act of aggression even upon citizens and creates a norm for some citizens that is not experienced by others, thereby creating an immigrant “other” (264) within the already stratified hierarchy of belonging and citizenship.

We know that

(c)itizenship is a slippery category. At the top of the slippery slope of citizenship are those who enjoy both de jure and de facto citizenship in wealthy, democratic countries—in effect, the lucky holders of hard citizenship rights. At the bottom are those who are stateless, enjoying neither de jure nor de facto citizenship anywhere. (Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts, 2015: 5)

In the US, “multiplicities of citizenship—from the official and institutionalized conceptions of citizenship that are codified in policy to the enacted forms of belonging and participation—simultaneously exist” (Koyama, 2015: 6). These multiplicities are not necessarily based on legal statuses, but rather include aspects of identity that have nothing to do with citizenship rank.

Migrants’ bodies, for instance, have become a means by which one can be denied access to legitimacy and the rights of citizenship. One can be made “illegitimate,” simply by one’s personhood. Pandey (2016) emphasizes that this “othering” is contingent upon creating “the unmarked national, the obvious, axiomatically natural citizens” and the “marked” and “hyphenated” individuals born in the same land or of immigrant origin and forever deemed as “not quite belonging” (89–90). McNevin (2009) calls attention to the “racialised and gendered discourses through which citizenship takes on specific embodied meanings, raising questions about whether particular kinds of bodies ever really belong to the nation-state, despite their formal citizenship status” (166). The legitimate “American” body is contingent upon Whiteness and Christianity as they are “the two strands of the double helix of American identity” (Joshi, 2006: 213). Such sovereignty, as Ramsay (2017) notes, is not only “determined through the legal classifications of citizenship or enforced at the physical borders of national territories but is also realized through implicit forces of racialization” that render some groups as suspect, threatening, and ungovernable (517). In US public education, students are often tracked into different ability classes, and, according to Giroux (2012), “poor white, brown, and black youth are now tracked out of school into what is often called the school-to-prison pipeline” (ix). The government further selectively produces subjects out of students in each school, as they sort, and then evaluate their academic achievement, into subcategories based on socioeconomic status, English-language proficiency, and race.

Those labeled as refugees, who do not hold citizenship status but are nonetheless legal residents, can be positioned as additionally suspect. Resettled refugees can “continue to be subjugated as threats to sovereignty even after, and as a result of, being provided with a legal national identity” (Ramsay, 2017: 517). Depending on the host country and the particular context within the country, “refugee status as a legal status functions socially in complex ways”; it may “be experienced as a protection or a constraint or something else (including a threat)” (Malkki, 2002: 358). To quote Ramsay (2017) at length:

In a world that is, according to Liisa Malkki (1992) organized as “national order,” the “refugee,” as a legal category defined by statelessness, has long represented a “problem” to the enforcement of territorial sovereignty (Hage, 2016). The refugee has been a crucial figure in theorizations of sovereignty precisely because the ambiguity of statelessness demonstrates how territorial sovereignty is both threated by and maintained through control over the physical bodies and political lives of displaced peoples (Agamben, 1998). (Ramsay, 2017: 517).

In the US, the ambiguity of the refugee status defies the easily recognized racial, ethnic, and class categories so ingrained in the America’s political forms of organization and control.

Although the category of refugee serves as an order-making tool for nation-states, it actually invites multiple interpretations. Malkki (2002) notes that the refugee is not an “ideal-typical, generalizable figure” (357), but rather, as Rodríguez Gómez (2016) argues, refugee is “a blurry category” (63), replete with inclusion of, and contrast to, the ethnicity and nationality by which individuals most identify. But, “refugee-ness is negotiated (by persons who are refugees and the institutions who mandate they are) in a world in which immigration and the complexities of immigrant status are ever more acutely politicized and economically consequential” (Malkki, 2002: 356). In this paper, I utilize the contested term “refugee,” because unlike the participants in Rodríguez Gómez’s (2016) study, the refugees in my study utilized this term to refer to themselves and others, as did those who worked with them in schools. I refuse, however, notions of any refugee category that assume refugees to be passive victims in a state of liminality. I am much more interested, as is Ramsay (2017), in focusing “on the experiences of people resettled as refugees . . . (to) consider how sovereignty is imposed on them through the very processes designed to resolve their displacement” (516). I consider this in the context of public education.

Methods

I collected data in an ethnographic study of refugee and other migrant networks in Arizona between December 2013 and January 2016, and again between January 2017 and August 2017. Embedded within that larger ethnography, I led a group of four researchers in conducting a case study of a Desert Unified School District (DUSD), the pseudonym for a large Arizona school district’s response to refugee students. The study was driven by one broad question: In what ways does a school district attend to the education of refugee children? In particular we traced the work of DUSD’s Refugee Services Department, which aims to integrate refugee youth into schools and help refugee families to transition to living in Southern Arizona. The department was comprised of a director, 10–11 full-time student-family mentors (referred to as mentors in this paper), and one part-time coordinator. Together, they provided educational services, such as assistance with school registration, tutoring, and language support, that were geared to counteract the refugee’s initial limited English-language ability and intermittent schooling. Social supports, such as translating school information for parents, transporting family members to medical appointments, securing mental health services for youth, and providing programs in citizenship and adult English as a second language (ESL), were also provided by the mentors.

During the case study, all of the 10 mentors and director of the DUSD Refugee Services Department completed a survey, participated in either 1 or 2 semi-structured interviews, and were observed across 10 different schools. In total, nearly 50 pages of observational fieldnotes were collected in DUSD. Five teachers and 5 principals who worked directly with refugee students in their schools and 10 refugee parents whose children attended these same schools were also interviewed. All of the interviews were audiotaped and later transcribed. ¹ Throughout the study I volunteered as a tutor and ESL teacher at two different refugee support organizations, served on an advisory council for a center serving refugee youth, and was a member of the Southern Arizona strategic planning board on refugee education in the state’s K-12 public education system. My familiarity gave me greater access to the DUSD staff and refugee families. Utilizing a team approach, though, also allowed for consistent checks for bias. Other research team members, less known to DUSD staff, conducted the interviews and the majority of observations.

Data for the case study were managed, coded, and analyzed by the research team. First-level a priori coding was done according to a set of codes developed by two of the researchers, including the author of this paper. These codes were developed from the initial survey data and emic codes were added after the first few interviews were transcribed. Codes were also made to denote descriptive identifying information, such as demographic information, policy, names of documents, and agency information. Secondary and tertiary inductive coding were created as needed. The researchers reached an 80% intercoder reliability, indicating that when the two researchers coded the same interview transcript, separately, and then compared how they had coded the data, they had coded 80% of the transcript the same.

The Arizona context

Arizona, whose southern edge is marked by the US–Mexico border, is home to more than 70,000 refugees and, until 2016 when the overall resettlement of refugees in the US was dramatically reduced, it had been among the top 10 US states annually in the numbers of refugees resettled. Since 2016, the top three countries of origin of resettled refugees in Arizona have been the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and Somalia. Arizona also has approximately 226,000 undocumented immigrants living within its borders. ² The governor of Arizona and much of the state’s populace support nativism and protectionism, and several laws, including the 2010 Arizona Senate Bill 1070: The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods, often referred to as “show me your papers,” allow law enforcement officials of the state, county, city, town, or other political region to determine the immigration status of an individual during a routine stop, detention, or arrest, thus officially serving as part of the enactment of sovereignty. However, Arizona consistently ranks among the top 4 states in the numbers of refugees per capita it resettles annually, and approximately 70 different agencies, organizations, and groups offer services to refugees in the state.

Arizona closely follows federal regulations with regard to refugee rights—specifically, chapter 2, title IV of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which contains the Federal Refugee Resettlement Act of 1980. To mediate the refugee’s perceived threat of dependency on the US government, the INA, Section 411 mandates that “employable refugees should be placed in jobs as soon as possible, and often with minimal English training, after their arrival in the United States’ (1) (B) (iii). Resettlement agencies are to: make available sufficient resources for employment training and placement in order to achieve economic self-sufficiency among refugees as quickly as possible (1) (A) (i); provide refugees with the opportunity to acquire sufficient English-language training to enable them to become effectively resettled as quickly as possible (ii); and ensure that cash assistance is made available to refugees in such a manner as not to discourage their economic self-sufficiency (iii). Following this mandate has been shown to constrain the ability of adult refugees to find meaningful and sustainable employment, to communicate in English with their children, and to get their families out of poverty (Koyama, 2013). Also, because refugee parents are often employed in low-wage shift work, they are less available to attend their children’s school functions (e.g. parent–teacher conferences held in the evenings) and events (e.g. school soccer tournaments held over an entire weekend).

Refugees in schools at DUSD

Despite its anti-immigrant legislation and politics, and its English-only language policies in schools, several thousand refugee children attend Arizonan schools. On average annually, 900 refugees, who have gone through the government’s legal vetting process while in a refugee camp or other location outside the US, are then flown to and officially resettled in Southern Arizona. Fifty percent of those resettled are under the age of 24, and approximately 350 become students each year in the school district, that we refer to as DUSD. During 2013–2016, the time frame in which we situate our case study, there were between 771 and 1104 refugee students enrolled in DUSD, a large district in Southern Arizona with approximately 48,000 students, 62% of whom were identified as “Hispanic.” The refugee students came from 52 different countries, with the majority hailing from Bhutan, Somalia, or Iraq. Of the 89 schools in the district, all but 10 had at least one refugee student. Two district high schools had the greatest percentage of refugee students; 22% of the total refugee students attended one and 10% attended the other. In 2013, 38% of the total population of refugees had been attending a school in DUSD for three years or less. Smaller districts adjacent to DUSD, private schools, and some charter schools, in the aggregate, enrolled nearly 200 refugee students annually, as well. Most of the refugee students had experienced limited, interrupted formal educations, or had even had no formal education prior to being enrolled in schools in these Southern Arizona districts. All but a handful were enrolled in English language development classes.

National education mandates, Arizona language acquisition policy, and DUSD practices

The ways in which refugee students are sorted, marginalized, and denied opportunities as learners in DUSD is inextricable from their positioning by federal and state legislation and policy. Specifically, there are linkages between the federal education policy, the Every Student Succeed Act (and its predecessor, No Child Left Behind), Arizona’s Proposition 203: English Language Education for the Children in Public Schools, and DUSD’s approach to teaching refugee students and to interacting with refugee families.

Federal education policy: the Every Student Succeeds Act

Although the current Every Student Succeeds Act is less punishing to individual schools that do not meet particular student achievement marks than its predecessor, No Child Left Behind, it retains a focus on numeric and comparative accounts of academic achievement, which are justified in the name of global competitiveness, nationalism, and economic dominance. The focus of the policy is presented as a public benefit. Demands for increased measures of accountability in education are shaped by neoliberalism, leading Sobe (2018) to point to the ubiquitous “computational creep” and “the advancement of big data analytics” in education (325). In Arizona, the state’s Department of Education compares the annual achievement of public schools on an A–F scale. Arizona Revised Statutes § 15-241 mandates that each school’s profile include:

year to year student academic growth, proficiency on English language arts, math and science, the proficiency and academic growth of English language learners, indicators that an elementary student is ready for success in high school and that high school students are ready to succeed in a career or higher education and high school graduation rates. (https://azsbe.az.gov/f-school-letter-grades)

As the Every School Succeed Act, like No Child Left Behind, measures progress toward particular objectives, according to subgroupings of students, such as ELLs, refugees, along with other emergent bilinguals, are of numerical import in the calculations of achievement and progress. They also complicate the demographic of the DUSD student population, which is identified as 62% Hispanic, or what I refer to as Latinx. According to one principal:

If it weren’t for the handful of refugees here, we’d be about an even mix of Mexican and white kids . . . not sure how to deal with them, deal with them as a group yet . . . We have to report out our (test) scores by race because of (name of legal order against DUSD), and well, some other things, but these (refugee) kids don’t have a category per se. (Interview, 16 April 2015)

The principal was not alone in her concern about “what to do” with refugees in reporting student achievement. In fact, throughout DUSD, I heard conversations at meetings and informal discussions about how refugee students did—but more so, did not—fit into the pre-established reporting categories.

The mentors in DUSD’s Refugee Services Department were aware of the ways in which refugee students’ test scores were, according to Dante, one of the mentors, “shifted around to make it (the annual report) look better.” He asserted:

They move the (refugee) kids into this category or this category . . . depends on how the numbers will stack up, where they will do the smallest harm or best good . . . not about reality of teaching these kids or figuring out the classes they need. (Personal communication, 25 January 2015)

While I also observed teachers working closely with refugee students, school and district administrators in the study talked about the refugee students as a monolithic group to contend with in reporting, especially when reporting the academic achievement of ELLs.

A DUSD administer bluntly explained: “They really have the least amount of English among them and they drag down even the beginning (English language development) classes” (personal communication, 20 March 2014). The refugee students, especially those who had only been in the US, and enrolled in DUSD schools for less than a year, did have, on average, low marks in English proficiency, but a closer look at DUSD data showed that refugee youth, especially those in elementary schools, made substantial gains within their first three years, often transitioning out of English language development courses by year three. Yet the mandates to measure and report achievement at the federal level framed the refugee students’ learning as not only quantifiable, but also as a reporting element that could be moved from category to category to improve, or at least less hurt, the A–F grade and the Every Student Succeeds Act required reporting.

The most egregious miscalculation and manipulation of refugee students’ data was seen in the counting of refugees from North Africa and even the Middle East as “African Americans” in the school demographics. Under a court order, DUSD had for years been aiming to better integrate their schools. The following excerpt from DUSD Refugee Services Department staff reflects how the practice was perceived by the mentors:

Tam, the director of the Refugee Services Department: Well, it looks like they’ve (DUSD) again counted African nationals as African Americans . . . Yep, African refugees are coded as African Americans, so 20% of the data on African Americans is really (on) refugees . . . You’d think they might say: “Hey, why are all these African Americans in ELD (English language development classes)?”

Jan, a mentor: We’re not even worth counting.

Dante, a mentor: Not everybody is for our kids . . .. They show up as African Americans. Fine . . .. There’s no reason to talk about refugees for them. (Fieldnotes, 29 January 2015)

In a one-on-one conversation after the meeting, Sara, another mentor, added that she worried about “the bigger picture of refugees being just numbers” and thought that because the population of refugee students was so small compared to the number of Latinx students, they were seen as a “small clerical annoyance” in state and federal reporting accountabilities.

Further, Tam’s reference in the meeting to “undercounting” referred not only to refugees reported as African Americans. It also pointed to the DUSD policy narrow guidelines for categorizing students as refugees, which include: residence in the US for less than three years; being school-aged when arrived; and being under the age of 18. During the study, this policy did not account for nearly half of the refugee students attending schools in DUSD because they had either been in the US for more than three years or they were older than 18. This undercounting resulted in less funding and resources allotted in DUSD to support the refugee students. Tam’s accounting showed that for every 10 undercounted students, several thousand (depending on the year) fewer dollars were allocated to the department’s total budget.

Even though the refugee students had a legal national identity, through the practices currently comparing and ordering students to meet particular objectives, they became culturally, racially, and linguistically “unpositional.” Instead, they were “positioned as threatening and in need of intervention” (Ramsay, 2017: 518)—threatening not to the nation directly, but to the achievement of the school, and, by association, to the nation’s ability to produce educated and skilled citizens. As Ramsay (2017) reminds us: “Conditions of precarity are also arenas of subject making” (519); and, in DUSD schools, refugee students are in an uncertain categorical state, embedded in the neoliberal federal and state accountabilities.

Arizona State Proposition 203: English language education for the children in public schools

According to the United States Refugee Act of 1980, Public Law 96-212, refugee youth should be enrolled in schools as soon as possible, usually within the first 30 days of their arrival. Although refugee children have the legal right to attend public education in the US, they are often denied access, opportunity, and quality school opportunities. In 2000, Arizona voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 203, English Language Education for the Children in Public Schools. It mandates a four-hour block of “English-only” or structured English immersion (SEI) instruction for students who are “English Language Learners (ELL).” SEI, which was adopted in three states, including Arizona, and which has not been shown to be effective in English-language acquisition (López et al., 2015), reflects changes in the federal Every School Succeed Act in which the word “bilingual” has been eliminated in all of the sections of the policy addressing English-language proficiency and English instruction.

The students required to enroll in English Language Development (ELD) classes become stigmatized by their racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds and are subjugated as “English Language Learners.” Mandating four-hour blocks of SEI serves to physically separate, and thus control, the refugee students in public schools. They not only become isolated from other students; they also, because of the four hours spent in ELD courses, are unable to enroll in courses required for graduation. Studies of SEI (Gándara and Orfield, 2012; Wright, 2005) demonstrate the intensified student experiences of isolation, stigmatization, and limited accessibility to required subject matter. In need of targeted instruction, the refugee students are restricted to particular spaces—the ELD classrooms—and their interactions with other students are limited, for at least half of their days, to other students in ELD.

Within the four-hour blocks of English instruction, the mentors pointed also to a “Spanish-speaking bias in all the schools,” which they blamed on the difference between the low numbers of refugee students and the high numbers of students of Mexican and Central American descent in DUSD. Tam, the director, said that the department had worked on getting refugees’ home languages recognized by the district and had created information about each language for the English language development department and teachers. Still, she admitted: “It’s still an issue. They are used to teaching to kids who speak Spanish. Our kids don’t speak Spanish . . . It just adds a new layer of confusion for them” (personal communication, 2 December 2014). Sara, a mentor, shared similar concerns during a department meeting. She stated: “Spanish-speaking bias in all of the schools, in English Language Development makes refugees invisible anyway . . . they don’t exist.” Jan, another mentor, responded: “Yeah, the numbers (of refugee students) are too small to make a big dent . . .. The kids get pushed off with a bunch of Spanish kids most of the day . . . They get no individual help” (fieldnotes, 29 January 2015). Within the intervention, the ELD four-hour block classes and spaces, the refugees were often excluded from some of the basic communications of instruction, which happened in Spanish, although using Spanish in the classroom was not legal.

Refugees, as a category of students, when discussed by English language development teachers, were often compared to the students who spoke Spanish. Notably, the ELD teachers spoke about how refugee students in their classes having challenged their teaching. One English language development teacher explained:

It’s a whole different thing now . . . used to be more, just Spanish-speaking kids. Now I’ve got it all in here . . . the refugee kids, especially the ones from Somali, seem lost, I mean lost in a big way not just in class. What is this place to them? Why are they here? They must be wondering. (Interview, teacher, who is Spanish-English bilingual, 29 January 2015)

Echoing this English language development teacher’s sentiments, the principal at the same school shared: “The teachers are stressed. The kids are stressed. It’s just too challenging—too many moving parts, so to speak. Too many languages . . .. And honestly, I’m not sure it’s the best way to teach English” (interview, principal, 29 January 2015). A principal at a nearby school offered a similar perspective. She stated: “The addition of the refugees in ELD changes the dynamic, the curriculum, the lessons, the whole way the teacher needs to work” (interview, 11 March 2015). She elaborated by noting that without refugee students, teachers would often rely on “some, not a bunch, of Spanish” in lessons, “you know, just to help the kids.” Refugee students experience what one refugee mentor articulated as a “double disadvantage, language wise”: for not understanding a second language they have never spoken (Spanish), which they are asked to draw on to help them learn a third (English) (interview, 24 March 2015).

Tam and the mentors expressed unease also about what they discussed as the broader “invisibility” of the refugee students in DUSD. According to one mentor, Leonidas, because the principals and teachers did not take the time to learn and assess the refugee students’ needs or “even learn about their home languages or their cultures, other than just some food and clothing, superficial things,” the refugee children were not included as a part of the larger district (interview, 19 January 2016). Tam also pointed to what she saw as an issue of marginalizing the refugees. She said:

They are here legally. We, our government, says come here. You can live here. You can have a better life here . . . You can go to school here . . . But, we (in DUSD) say, you will never really belong . . . How do we do this? Well not us, not the mentors, but the teaching staff, the people in schools, isolate them in SEI. They don’t learn their names. They don’t meet their families . . .. Principals see them as trouble, as threating their numbers . . . They use them to meet certain integration orders, but only on paper. (Interview, 17 August 2015)

The uncertain educational needs of refugees rendered them simultaneously unseen but counted in a way that legitimated segregating all students in English language development classes, and inaccurately categorizing refugee students. They became numerical objects. Ong (2006) notes that migrants can “become exceptions to neoliberal mechanism and are constructed as excludable populations in transit” (16), but in DUSD, refugee students, at least, became integral to neoliberal mechanisms which placed accountability above equitable education.

Some teachers, staff, and administrators even spoke of the refugee students as being both “lucky” to have been resettled in the US, a country with a free public education system, and also “complications” to the norms in DUSD, in which there were nearly even numbers of English- and Spanish-speaking students. Of the refugee students in his school, one principal stated:

We are responsible for educating them and we do, but I don’t think that we are the right place for them . . .. They, the ones just here, just resettled need way more than we can offer . . . maybe a separate school, a newcomers school would be good, to put them all together . . .. As it is now, they are in ELD (English language development courses) with the Spanish-speaking kids and they don’t seem to learn much. (Interview, 1 March 1017)

This principal was not alone. Throughout DUSD, there was talk of creating a separate newcomer school for just the refugee students. The assistant superintendent during the study supported its creation, but Tam and the mentors strongly opposed it, arguing that a separate school would only further stigmatize and marginalize the refugee students in the district. Such a targeted intervention marked a particular way of governing, of exerting control over a population of students. While some argued that the refugee students would achieve more academically and be more comfortable together in one school, it was undeniable that grouping the refugee students in one school would also increase the average test scores in the reported ELL category at the schools from which the refugees were moved. In essence, it could improve the ratings of schools that had the largest numbers of refugees moved to the newcomer school. The newcomer school proposal, which failed to be approved when the assistant superintendent left DUSD, also had no provision to hire additional English language development teachers, who were already in short supply in DUSD, nor did it have a plan to hire more mentors in the Refugee Services Department to work solely in the school.

Concluding thoughts and recommendations for educating refugee students

Many studies (Apple, 2010; Au, 2009; Koyama, 2013) have shown how public schools in the US act as apparatuses of the nation-states in the enactment of neoliberalism. Schools have been shown to be part and parcel of an organized and purposeful sorting system of individuals and groups that certainly leaves some students, mostly poor, culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse youth, behind. For refugees, especially those who have recently been resettled in the US and become enrolled in public schools after years of suspended or minimal education in refugee camps and initial countries of exile, schools can be particularly isolating and constraining. In this study, refugees were segregated in English language development classes, where curricula and pedagogy were targeted primarily at students from Spanish-speaking homes. Literally and symbolically, through Arizona education policy and the practices of DUSD, sovereignty, which was territorialized and spatialized for the refugee children, was enacted daily.

While the refugee students, and their families, held a legal status to residency and multiple rights, including the right to attend public schooling in the US, they were still situated by some in DUSD as suspect, and threatening, in particular, to the achievement measures to which each school in the district was held according to federal and state education mandates. DUSD aimed to “integrate” the refugees as a means to control them, to moderate their effect on the district’s resources and outcomes. This can be viewed as an entangled articulation of governmentality with sovereignty in which knowledge, power, and law interact. The US must, according to law, provide free public education to the refugees, but public schools have become such an embedded part of “an ensemble of apparatuses constitution the conditions for neoliberal capitalism” (Lazzarato, 2009: 109) as to be focused on producing “the new type of individual appropriate for it” (109).

Schools are not neutral places, nor are they separate from the governmentality of nation-states, nor immune from the effects of globalization and dispersed sovereignty through mechanisms diffused and employed across the nation-states. So, while we live in a time of unprecedented movement, in which flows of people, ideas, things, and discourses move with variable speed and impact across borders of nation-states, national sovereignty is distributed across institutions and systems, including public education. Through the enacted policies and practices of school districts and schools like those in DUSD, refugee students can still be made “illegitimate” by their personhood, and also by the challenges they pose to the schools’ accountability measures. As described by Ramsay (2017):

They (refugees) are subjected to a form of neoliberalism and sovereignty in which: a specific mode of governance that normalizes productivity, efficiency, and self-interest which has, in Australia and elsewhere, become a dominant model of “cultural” citizenship (Ong, 1996): a set of expectations, grounded in demonstrative acts of productivity, self-reliance, and individualism, that serve as a model of stratification through which some lives are valued more than others. (522)

The refugee students are left vulnerable to the ways of the schools in a public education system that has been overly influenced by market-driven competition, standardization, and a desire for data at every level and institution of government and society. By applying a market value to knowledge and to children, public education becomes a particularly effective apparatus of sovereignty-making and sovereignty-reifying in the lives of refugees.

However, there is much that schools and school districts—in fact any unit of public education—can do to better attend to refugee students. Because nation-state sovereignty is not absolute and is not, in the way I have documented it here, top-down, it can be challenged and navigated. Another way to frame the education of refugees in the US and elsewhere is for authorities, policymakers, and educators to take education as a serious human right as set forth in 1948, at the end of World War II, by the United Nations in the Declaration of Human Rights. This would act to restrain nation-states’ sovereignty as enacted through apparatuses, such as public education. In such a reframing, human rights would be embedded within, not separate from, nation-states’ sovereignty. This would bring again to the fore the right to have rights to all moral beings simply because of their existence, as argued by Arendt (1951), and with which I began this article. However, we know that human rights are not legally binding and have yet to be practically or consistently enforced in any way. In fact, the Declaration of Human Rights holds very little power at this point globally, and to wait for international enactment of it would be foolish. This does not, however, mean that nothing toward it can be done, especially on smaller scales. For now, those working with refugees in the US and EU public education systems can, through their practices, disrupt the neoliberal movement and pivot to the adherence to human rights, locally. They can re-establish schools, not as apparatuses of governmentality and sovereignty-making, but as contexts in which students are encouraged and trained to participate as critical and engaged residents.