Alma Gottlieb

Once upon a time, Sophia Balakian was a doctoral student at the University of Illinois. Once upon a time, I was (with Ellen Moodie) her co-advisor. We have both moved on from that space and those roles. I am now writing and researching full-time in Rhode Island and New Mexico after having retired from teaching at UIUC, while Sophia is an assistant professor of Social Justice and Human Rights at George Mason University’s School of Integrative Studies in Fairfax, Virginia. Today, I am honored to feature a conversation with Sophia about her brilliant new book, Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship (Stanford University Press, 2025).

The book has its origins in Sophia’s doctoral research, which was based on long-term ethnographic research that she conducted in (primarily) Nairobi, Kenya and (secondarily) Columbus, Ohio with refugees fleeing civil wars in East and Central Africa, hoping to gain legal pathways to migrate to the U.S. through the resettlement process. That process — which only grants a path to citizenship to 1% of the world’s refugees, after multiple rounds and years of scrutiny — has increasingly come under attack by conservative politicians. Spending nearly 2.5 years conducting research with refugees — speaking with them, as anthropologists classically do, in their languages (KiSwahili, Somali) — allowed Sophia to train her careful ethnographer’s eye on people’s lives, challenges, and aspirations. The book she has produced challenges so many misunderstandings, misconceptions, and misreadings that are commonly circulating in the U.S. (and elsewhere), now more than ever, about African refugees’ lives.

Unsettled Families centers the role of kinship and family in refugee resettlement programs, and how policy definitions of “the family” intersect with the ways in which refugees rebuild their families and communities in the aftermath of displacement. The book was recently selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2025. (Of 6,000 titles reviewed by Choice, 343 books and digital resources were selected for this honor.)

Sophia’s research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and other institutions. In 2019-20 and 2022-23, she was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Academy for International and Area Studies. She has published in American Ethnologist, the Journal of Refugee Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Anthropologica, African Studies Review, and in the edited volume, Global Perspectives on the United States, and she has been interviewed on the Ottoman History Podcast (Episode 469: “Refugee Families in the Era of Global Security”).

Please feel free to share this conversation on this desperately urgent issue.

Alma (AG): How do the experiences of the East and Central Africans you have worked with — Somalis, and others — speak to the ongoing policies of the Trump administration for dealing with immigrants and refugees?

Sophia (SB): The research and writing of this book spanned from around 2013 to 2024, and the book came out a month after Trump took office in 2025. There has been a lot of change during that period – from the later years of the Obama administration, through Trump I, COVID and Biden. The first Trump administration marked a substantial change from previous administrations in which the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program had bipartisan support, and refugee admissions caps were similar between Republican and Democratic administrations. Refugee admissions had been seen as both a humanitarian good, and as a geopolitically expedient program that supported US interests. Trump scaled back admissions manyfold, and “refugees” became politicized in new ways.

But these changes don’t compare in scale and significance to changes since January 2025. Dominant discourses around refugees and immigration have become even more openly vitriolic. Policy actions have been monumental in their scope: revoking student visas, revoking Temporary Protected Status, the (unsuccessful) order to end birthright citizenship, massive funding for I.C.E. and more violent deportation tactics, and the halting of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, among others.

To try to answer your question, the research I did in the decade prior to this administration demonstrated the ways in which refugees began to be framed as risks to national security in new ways after 9/11. Increasing securitization of refugee resettlement shaped life for people living as refugees in East Africa: sometimes endless waits, black holes of information, the separation of families and communities, for example. In this moment, I don’t see what’s happening now to be as much an extension or amplification of those trends, as an overhaul of an old system and the beginnings of something different. The dominant discourse from the current administration seems to no longer be, “This is an important program that serves the interests of the U.S., that involves risk, and thus that requires extensive involvement of the security apparatus.” Instead, this administration’s message is: “This program drains resources needed for Americans and has no place in the work of U.S. government.” The major caveat is the resettlement of white South Africans over the past several months, which makes it fairly obvious that the central problem of immigration for this administration and the MAGA movement is about race.

To come back to the people I’ve worked with themselves, there are many people in places like Nairobi and Kenya’s refugee camps who had been approved for travel to the U.S. when Trump took office and who are now stuck in limbo, probably for years and possibly forever. Many people who, through the sheer chance of when and where they were born, are living indefinitely as refugees, and at the whims of foreign policy and immigration policy of countries like the U.S. So, we also need solutions beyond resettlement to manage the problem of mass and protracted displacement. For their part, different African states are experimenting with different solutions that are also an important part of the conversation.

AG: In your book, you evoke, and problematize, the notion of the “fraudulent refugee” and, even more troublingly, the “fraudulent family.” Can you talk a little about what you intend to do in these discussions?  

Language about fraud is all around us in political life, and as part of political institutions. Fraud is a serious allegation, and real fraud can cause harm to people and systems designed to help them. But accusations of fraud have long been used to malign and mischaracterize the people who rely on systems of aid, as in the welfare system in the U.S. Recently, the Washington Post ran an article about fraudulent disability claims in the Veterans Administration system. One disabled veteran wrote a letter that the Post published expressing the pain of seeing the VA system characterized as vulnerable to exploitation. He wrote, “Think about the most traumatic events of your life, and then imagine having to go to someone and relive them in as much detail as you can remember and hope that it’s enough to obtain the care you deserve.” I was struck by how this statement could apply to people in asylum and refugee resettlement processes, as well.

AG: In your book, you write about how DNA testing has now taken on a central role in defining “fraud” when it comes to admitting refugees to the U.S. As a cultural anthropologist, can you talk about how you approach DNA testing differently from how geneticists or biological anthropologists discuss this scientific process?

SB: When I first started looking at US Refugee Admissions Program, I learned about a 2008 DNA testing program, piloted with refugees in African countries, that intended to identify the scope of what was being called “family composition fraud.” This got me started looking at ideas about fraud, and I began to see that, particularly after the September 11th attacks in the U.S., with the advent of the Department of Homeland Security created in 2002 and its new role in the U.S. refugee program, identifying and combating fraud became a major preoccupation that shaped how the program was run. The program seemed to be oriented around sorting people into three categories: exceptionally vulnerable, honest but non-exceptional, and fraudulent — people telling stories to make themselves fit into special categories, or include non-nuclear family members in their cases.

Fewer than one percent of people documented as refugees around the world are resettled in a country that will offer a path to citizenship each year. The total number is only shrinking as the Trump administration has essentially ended a fairly robust resettlement program in the U.S. With these numbers in mind, the resettlement system is set up to operate under an assumption that only the most vulnerable and deserving can receive the privilege of resettlement. But people in refugee communities understand that who is selected can be arbitrary, and that while fewer than one percent of people living as refugees will be resettled, a much, much larger number meet the basic qualifications according to the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, as well as many foreign governments. I was interested in exploring the gap between the logic of humanitarian systems that perceive fraud as something that is primarily the fault of refugees, and that is clearcut and combatable; and the logics of people living as refugees who understand themselves to be deserving of an intrinsic right to mobility and political membership.

AG: How does your critique draw from, and move beyond, classic kinship theory in anthropology?  

SB: Classic kinship theory took the nuclear family and genealogical descent as universal building blocks of kinship systems that could be compared across societies. The next generation, starting in the late 1960s and ‘70s moved beyond the idea of descent systems as self-contained, organizing structures. Instead, scholars like David Schneider, Janet Carsten, Kath Weston, and many, many others demonstrated the vastly different ways that kinship could be reckoned (“families we choose,” posthumous conception, etc.), and the different cultural meanings assigned to features like marriage and reproduction. U.S. immigration law’s definition of “family” is a product of the early- and mid-twentieth century — the period of classic kinship theory! So, it should be no surprise that that definition is attached to the biological, nuclear family. My book follows later kinship theory, while showing how older ideas about kinship still have a powerful life — in law and policy, for example. In my research, I learned that while genealogical descent is crucial to the identities of the people I worked with, the nuclear, biogenetic family model is a poor fit for people recreating social worlds in the aftermath of war in an age of global migration. Households that desire to resettle together are often composed of people outside of the policy definition of “family.”

AG: Beyond the issue of refugee rights, how might your critique speak to contemporary political realities in the U.S., with fights about what constitutes a “family” at the heart of many troubling policies now propounded by the Trump administration?   

SB: To support the people of the United States, policy and political rhetoric on the part of leaders should reflect and respect the range of real family formations existing in this country. That includes LGBTQ+ couples, single and divorced parents, single and child-free people, families of children with special needs, undocumented and mixed-status families, and the many households with two working parents who are struggling to make ends meet. Those are just some that come to mind. Imposing and promoting an idealized, 1950s, white and middle-class version of the family is out of touch with social and economic realities. Yet, this mid-20th century norm maintains a fantastical power, and its political deployment causes harm — material and ideological — by undermining the real social worlds of “We the People.”

AG: As we wrap up this conversation, Somalis are, improbably, front and center in the U.S. news, and for all the wrong reasons. The Dept. of Justice is now alleging massive fraud supposedly committed by Somalis in Minnesota’s social programs during the COVID pandemic. In response, Trump has canceled the “temporary protective status” of Somali and some other refugee groups, although these actions (like so many of Trump’s) are under litigation. Last year, you published an op ed piece in the L.A. Times decrying Trump’s cancellation of the U.S. refugee program (“Refugee Program, Halted by Trump, Had 40 Years of Bipartisan Success”). Given these latest developments, and the horrendous murders in Minneapolis of two protesters deploring ICE agents’ increasing, and increasingly brutal, arrests of immigrants, do you have further thoughts about the role that anthropologists can (and should?) play in national conversations about immigration policy?

SB: The statements made by members of the Somali community that are cited in the article you’ve linked to are a good starting point for understanding what is happening to the community in the aftermath of what appears to be a serious fraud scheme. As filmmaker Abdi Mohamed is quoted as saying, “The actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down.” A conservative activist has made false claims that the stolen money was used to fund terrorist groups, following a well-worn trope in the post-9/11 age. Later accusations against Somali-owned daycare centers have also been unproven. Further, individual acts of intimidation against Somalis in Minnesota, President Trump’s dehumanizing and xenophobic tirades against the community as a whole, and the administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Somalia, all comprise forms of collective punishment in which members of a racialized community who committed crimes are seen to represent the entire community. 

AG: This sort of “collective punishment” is now a hallmark of Trump’s modus operandi. It is a political version of what the literary folks term synecdoche, a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole — as in: “The White House announced that they would be putting boots on the ground in Minneapolis,” where boots serves as a seemingly innocuous reference that can stand in for murderous agents of the state. As this example suggests, synecdoche offers a formidable means of obscuring dangerous power relations.

Synecdoche is a variety of metonymy, that broader speech form in which one thing stands for another due to contiguity. The irony is that Westerners have a long history of denigrating non-Western peoples because of a supposed tendency to engage in metonymic thinking and ritual practice, which centuries of Westerners have claimed is a sign of being primitive or inferior. The classic example is the West African/Afro-Caribbean practice of voodoo (or vodún), in which one manipulates an object related to or representing an enemy (a piece of their hair, say, or an article of their clothing, or a doll that looks like them), thereby intending to cause that person harm. Here, the object stands in for its referent. That logic seems absurd to Westerners. But, how different is it from the logic of blaming one Somali immigrant for another Somali immigrant’s moral failings? The difference is that, in the case of Trump’s anti-immigrant-of-color policy, the innocent item standing in for the perceived enemy is not an inanimate object but another human. Perhaps this is one sort of insight into the present moment that anthropologists can offer.

SB: Yes, and we should also ask: Whose scams are seen and prosecuted, and who makes rules to insulate themselves from accountability and judgement?

I think that anthropologists’ perspectives are important here because anthropologists are interested in power, in questioning “common sense” ideas, and in situating events in wider historic and social contexts. This makes it harder to reproduce simple and more digestible narratives that feature good and evil. Those kinds of stories usually oversimplify complex and inconvenient truths, and excise certain voices. Anthropologists, historians, and other scholars of the social and political know that political leaders’ dehumanizing rhetoric about “others” very often lead to dehumanizing acts of violence, which we are now seeing in spectacular form in the streets of Minneapolis and elsewhere. History teaches us that events like the fraud scheme can be used as fodder for discrimination and violence against whole populations—often with vast and devastating consequences. The normalization of dehumanizing rhetoric and violence against immigrant communities, people who are undocumented, and those who support them has to be continually unsettled and undermined using whatever tools we have.