Christina Hughes

In light of current deportations of Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants who arrived in the United States in the wake of the American War in Vietnam and Secret War, Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of the Global North considers Southeast Asia and Orange County, California as an important transpacific site from which to critically interrogate the moral economy of refugee deportability. In the wake of French imperial collapse and U.S. military withdrawal, the mass arrival of Vietnamese refugees to suburban Southern California during a period of post-industrial decline portended the emergence of several instances of refugee crime as discursive flashpoints, animated by the law-and-order and ‘family values’ austerity politics of the Reagan years. Particularities around Southeast Asian war displacement, refugee resettlement, and racialized criminalization worked to shape the “crimmigration” turn in migration governance, demonstrating how the convergence of mass incarceration and migrant criminalization in part hinged on constitutive innovations in local and federal responses to the emerging Southeast Asian "gang problem." In tracing the imperial continuities and carceral afterlives of the wars in Southeast Asia as they have come to shape current deportation politics and technologies, Bad Refugees ultimately elaborates on a framework—refugee racial capitalism—to make sense of the refugee as an ethical figure in the global economy from colonialism into the late capitalist present.