Transnationalizing Reception: Racial Scripts,Institutional Logics,and Congolese Refugee Processing in the United States and Brazil

Abstract

While national reception contexts formatively shape immigration possibilities and experiences, we argue that transnational racial dynamics play an underappreciated role. Juxtaposing two independent ethnographies of the U.S. resettlement program and Brazilian asylum system, we show that Congolese refugees encounter strikingly similar racialized logics of reception as they move through these formerly distinct national institutions. Bridging transnational perspectives in immigration research and critical race theory, we argue that frontline practitioners tasked with implementing credibility and vulnerability assessments diffuse across the global refugee regime draw on shared racial scripts to interpret, process, and receive Congolese refugees. Although manifest within local contexts, these scripts stem from ongoing global and transnational histories that undergird common views about Blackness and African migrants across the Americas. Our findings have three implications. First, we demonstrate the importance of transnational analytics in understanding dynamics of immigrant reception. Second, we show how racial notions permeate these dynamics through the entanglement of globalized racial orders and institutional logics across disconnected national contexts. Finally, we identify the cultural work of policy administrators as a mechanism through which transnational dynamics of racial domination are instantiated in everyday life.