Once upon a time, Sophia Balakian was a doctoral student at the University of Illinois. Once upon a time, I was (with Ellen Moodie<\/a>) 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\u2019s School of Integrative Studies<\/a> 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<\/a><\/em> (Stanford University Press, 2025).<\/p>\n The book has its origins in Sophia\u2019s 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 \u2014 which only grants a path to citizenship to 1% of the world\u2019s refugees, after multiple rounds and years of scrutiny \u2014\u00a0has increasingly come under attack by conservative politicians. Spending nearly 2.5 years conducting research with refugees \u2014 speaking with them, as anthropologists classically do, in their languages (KiSwahili, Somali) \u2014 allowed Sophia to train her careful ethnographer\u2019s eye on people\u2019s 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\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n Unsettled Families <\/em>centers the role of kinship and family in refugee resettlement programs, and how policy definitions of \u201cthe family\u201d intersect with the ways in which refugees rebuild their families and communities in the aftermath of displacement. The book was recently selected by Choice<\/em> as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2025<\/a>. (Of 6,000 titles reviewed by Choice<\/em>, 343 books and digital resources were selected for this honor.)<\/p>\n Sophia\u2019s 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\u2019s Academy for International and Area Studies. She has published in American Ethnologist<\/a><\/em>, the Journal of Refugee Studies<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Ethnic and Racial Studies,<\/a> Anthropologica<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0African Studies Review<\/em>, and in the edited volume, Global Perspectives on the United States<\/em>, and she has been interviewed on the Ottoman History Podcast<\/a> (Episode 469: \u201cRefugee Families in the Era of Global Security\u201d).<\/p>\n Please feel free to share this conversation on this desperately urgent issue.<\/p>\n Alma (AG)<\/strong>: How do the experiences of the East and Central Africans you have worked with \u2014 Somalis, and others \u2014\u00a0speak to the ongoing policies of the Trump administration for dealing with immigrants and refugees?<\/p>\n Sophia (SB)<\/strong>: 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 \u2013 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 \u201crefugees\u201d became politicized in new ways.<\/p>\n But these changes don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t see what\u2019s 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, \u201cThis 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.\u201d Instead, this administration\u2019s message is: \u201cThis program drains resources needed for Americans and has no place in the work of U.S. government.\u201d The major caveat<\/em> is the resettlement of white South Africans<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n To come back to the people I\u2019ve worked with themselves, there are many people in places like Nairobi and Kenya\u2019s 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.\u00a0Many 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.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong><\/strong>: In your book, you evoke, and problematize, the notion of the \u201cfraudulent refugee\u201d and, even more troublingly, the \u201cfraudulent family.\u201d\u00a0Can you talk a little about what you intend to do in these discussions?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/em> ran an article about fraudulent disability claims in the Veterans Administration system. One disabled veteran wrote a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0that the Post<\/em> published expressing the pain of seeing the VA system characterized as vulnerable to exploitation. He wrote, \u201cThink 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\u2019s enough to obtain the care you deserve.\u201d I was struck by how this statement could apply to people in asylum and refugee resettlement processes, as well.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: In your book, you write about how DNA testing has now taken on a central role in defining \u201cfraud\u201d 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?<\/p>\n SB<\/strong>: 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 \u201cfamily composition fraud.\u201d 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 \u2014 people telling stories to make themselves fit into special categories, or include non-nuclear family members in their cases.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: How does your critique draw from, and move beyond, classic kinship theory in anthropology?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n SB<\/strong>: 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 \u201870s 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 (\u201cfamilies we choose,\u201d posthumous conception, etc.), and the different cultural meanings assigned to features like marriage and reproduction. U.S. immigration law\u2019s definition of \u201cfamily\u201d is a product of the early- and mid-twentieth century \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u201cfamily.\u201d<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: 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 \u201cfamily\u201d at the heart of many troubling policies now propounded by the Trump administration? \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n SB:<\/strong> 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\u00a0century norm maintains a fantastical power, and its political deployment causes harm \u2014 material and ideological \u2014 by undermining the real social worlds of \u201cWe the People.\u201d<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: 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\u2019s social programs during the COVID pandemic. <\/a> In response, Trump has canceled the \u201ctemporary protective status\u201d of Somali and some other refugee groups, although these actions (like so many of Trump\u2019s) are under litigation<\/a>. Last year, you published an op ed piece in the L.A. Times<\/em><\/a> decrying Trump\u2019s cancellation of the U.S. refugee program (\u201cRefugee Program, Halted by Trump, Had 40 Years of Bipartisan Success\u201d). Given these latest developments, and the horrendous murders in Minneapolis of two protesters deploring ICE agents\u2019 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?<\/p>\n SB<\/strong>: The statements made by members of the Somali community that are cited in the article you\u2019ve linked to are a good starting point for understanding what\u00a0is happening to the community in the aftermath of what appears to be a serious fraud scheme. As filmmaker Abdi Mohamed is quoted as saying,\u00a0\u201cThe actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down.\u201d A conservative activist has made\u00a0false<\/strong>\u00a0claims 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\u2019s\u00a0dehumanizing and xenophobic tirades<\/a> against the community as a whole, and the administration\u2019s termination of Temporary Protected Status<\/a>\u00a0for 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: This sort of \u201ccollective punishment\u201d is now a hallmark of Trump\u2019s modus operandi. <\/em> It is a political version of what the literary folks term synecdoche<\/em>, a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole \u2014\u00a0as in: \u201cThe White House announced that they would be putting boots on the ground in Minneapolis,\u201d where boots <\/em>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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> (or vod\u00fan<\/em>), 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\u2019s moral failings? The difference is that, in the case of Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n SB<\/strong>: Yes, and we should also ask: Whose scams are seen and prosecuted, and who makes rules to insulate themselves from accountability and judgement?<\/p>\n I think that anthropologists\u2019 perspectives are important here because anthropologists are interested in power, in questioning \u201ccommon sense\u201d 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\u2019 dehumanizing rhetoric about \u201cothers\u201d 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\u2014often 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":363615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11767],"tags":[13189,184901,2268,17011,12822,184900,13575,31930,17886,12666,6692,16512,28201,82489],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-363614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-anthropological","tag-balakian","tag-book","tag-brilliant","tag-conversation","tag-desperatelyneeded","tag-families","tag-humanitarianism","tag-kinship","tag-perspective","tag-politics","tag-refugees","tag-sophia","tag-unsettled"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/almagottlieb.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Sophia-Balakian-Headshot-225x300.jpg\")
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nRelated<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n