Liminality of Forced Displacement: Syrian Refugee and Immigrant Lives in the US

Background and Purpose:

Forced displacement is often conceptualized as a phenomenon in which people have left their countries and been forced to seek refuge in another nation-state or internally displaced persons who have fled violence but have not crossed another national territory. Broader discussions about integration largely overlook how forced migrants across different humanitarian protection statuses are placed into circumstances where there are blurred boundaries between the temporary and the permanent. Increasingly, scholarship has pointed to the need to look to temporality, precarity, and liminality in the context of forced displacement in which more people face higher degrees of uncertainty and instability, alongside exclusion, xenophobia, and racism. Precariousness is part of the reality of many social workers working with people who have experienced forced displacement, and the meanings and consequences of precarity and liminality take on many shapes for individuals and families’ everyday lives. Legal categories that offer temporary forms of humanitarian protection, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and those pending asylum claims often leave individuals and their families in precarious realities. For instance, individuals and families find themselves “stuck” for months or years waiting for legal documents, have their asylum claims rejected, or find themselves in deportation proceedings.

Methods:

This is a phenomenological study, and 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 Syrians who arrived to the US after the start of the Syrian war (after 2011) and were granted different humanitarian protection statuses. The Life History Calendar was incorporated into the interview guide to cue participants with questions that help connect migration histories with life domains. Targeted sampling was used to sample Syrians who currently or previously held one or more of the following statuses: Refugee, Asylee, Asylum Seeker, and/or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis for used for the data analysis and incorporated memo writing in the post-interview and post-initial coding and analysis.

Findings:

Syrians describe the experience of learning how to live in a liminal and precarious space, referring to how individuals fall under the gray areas of immigration processes and where rules are unclear or not strictly defined. This included those who arrived in the US as refugees, in which many people experienced discrimination and precarious living conditions in neighboring countries to Syria, as well as those with TPS and Asylum Seekers, as immigration bureaucracies often place them in legally uncertain circumstances. Syrians reported the experience of prolonged family separation, structural barriers to family reunification, and its impact on family life for Syrian families across the Syrian diaspora.

Discussion and Conclusion:

This study delineates the meanings of living in the liminal stage for forcibly displaced people as they manifest in individuals and their families. It offers directions for critical perspectives of forced displacement and an understanding of precariousness imposed by immigration legal institutions and how it shapes peoples’ being in the world. That deeper awareness may be an opportunity for resistance and organizing alongside forced migrant communities to change the structural conditions that create much of the precariousness that they experience.