Refugees--Government policy--United States

The Refugee Act of 1980 established the first comprehensive U.S. refugee policy. It codified a refugee definition and created the annual consultation process, which requires the president to consult with Congress before determining annual refugee ceilings and resettlement plans. While the Refugee Act of 1980 remains intact, the annual refugee admissions and resettlement plans have changed considerably. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze this policy to explore its changes from 1980-2018 through the lens of social construction theory. According to this theory, the social constructions of target populations affect policy designs that are adopted with respect to these populations. Policy designs can create and legitimize divisions among different target populations causing some to be perceived and treated as more deserving than others.
This dissertation uses a qualitative research design to analyze narratives within presidential proposal documents and congressional hearings that are held as part of the annual consultation process. These documents serve as the data for this dissertation. I undertake a detailed analysis of the documents of one annual consultation process and related congressional hearings for each president in the period between 1980-2018. In these documents and hearings, different policy actors (congressional members, representatives of the executive branch and state and local governments, and other experts) provide testimony and expert opinions on refugee admissions and resettlement. It is in this context that refugees as a target population are constructed and policies to deal with refugees are debated and discussed by various policy actors. To understand these constructions and the context in which they are created, the narrative analysis elements offered by the narrative policy framework are used as a method.

Refugee movements comprise one of the major forms of international migration in the world today. These movements are precipitated by a variety of inextricably linked factors, which make the prevention of such movements difficult. The three recognized solutions to the global refugee crisis are repatriation, local integration, and third-country resettlement. This thesis focuses on the resettlement of African refugees in the United States. Ethiopians are the largest African group to settle in the United States and they are more widely dispersed than all other African refugee groups in the United States. Their spatial distribution coincides with the regional distribution of refugee sponsors and voluntary agencies that help in the resettlement of refugees. Secondary migration of African refugees is a reflection of the availability of economic and educational opportunities, as well as the presence of a large ethnic community.