Discrimination, DNA Testing, and Dispossession: Consequences of U.S. Policy for African Refugees

Abstract

This article seeks to expand the ways in which Marxist theory has explained the interaction of race and immigration policy. The article lays out the historical discrimination deeply embedded in U.S. refugee policy and then delineates the development, implementation, and ramifications of a new precedent-setting policy of DNA testing African refugees. The article argues that DNA testing is, in fact, a new mechanism to reassert the exclusion of Africans from refugee admissions. David Harvey has pointed out that capitalism is now in a period of “accumulation by dispossession,” and DNA testing functions to maintain Africans’ dispossession. DNA testing helps enforce African “warehousing” in refugee camps, a cheap alternative to joining African Americans in what Loic Wacquant has referred to as the warehouses of U.S. prisons and ghettos.