Diana Yoon

Diana Yoon is assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has conducted research in the areas of human rights, political activism and rights discourses around questions of race and gender, and the relationship between U.S. military policies and citizenship practices. Her teaching and research interests are concerned broadly with examining citizenship, immigration, and legal formations of U.S. imperialism through interdisciplinary socio-legal perspectives.

Abstract:
Tensions of Citizenship: Southeast Asian Migrants in the United States, from the War in Vietnam to the War on Terror.

Between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, more than a million people left their homes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to eventually settle down in U.S. cities. What became known as the international Indochinese refugee crisis led to important developments in the U.S., including the formation of first Southeast Asian communities, a comprehensive reform of the nation's refugee admissions policy, and the largest refugee resettlement program funded by the Department of State to date. This paper is a part of a larger comparative project on how people identified as refugees become subjects of humanitarian care, governance, and incorporation within the U.S. regime of membership. It presents findings from my research on postwar Southeast Asian refugee policies in order to analyze citizenship's constitutive exclusions. I develop a concept of "refugee legality," in examining structures of rightlessness in the process through which Southeast Asian refugees became included in the polity, the work of law in creating conditions marked by a suspension of rights, and the connections between citizenship's juridical dimensions and its social technologies. If the refugee resettlement apparatus is concerned with the inclusion of new subjects, deportation consists of techniques of expulsion. While recent deportations of Southeast Asian Americans appear to be the inverse of the inclusion process that took place during earlier decades, I suggest that resettlement and deportation similarly rely on cultural and political logics of foreignness, and both demonstrate how U.S. military projects abroad shape the making and unmaking of citizenship.