‘Perfect Vision’: An Examination of the Role of Census and Profiling Practices in Visualizing and Crafting Refugee ‘Groups’ under Contemporary Group-resettlement Programmes

Abstract

AbstractThis article demonstrates how the characteristically visual practices of boundary-making around prospective refugee groups comprise an important and instrumentalized version of what Rogers Brubaker (2004) calls ‘groupism’—the assumption that ‘discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups’ are the ‘basic constituents of social life’ (2004: 8). Unlike individual resettlement, group-resettlement schemes (known as ‘Group Processing’ in Canada, ‘Priority-2 group referrals’ in the United States and the ‘Group Methodology’ at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)) involve the resettlement of entire refugee groups. Preoccupations with security and the possibility of identity fraud in these programmes have led to a preference for what are perceived as easily identifiable, finite and homogenous refugee groups. Census and profiling practices permit authorities to visualize and draw boundaries around these types of groups. These practices are the preconditions for the writing of specific narratives of risk, persecution and flight in UNHCR group profiles. An examination of group resettlement reveals how officials do not just choose between pre-existing refugee groups based on racial, national and ethnic categories, but rather attempt to construct an idealized conception of groups reflected in Brubaker’s notion of groupism.