The Tough and the Brittle: Calculating and Managing the Risk of Refugees

Abstract

This chapter aims to demonstrate how new techniques of power and new imaginaries of risk have influenced the government of refugees within the Danish welfare state. It is based on a governmentality study of the 2005 reform of Denmark’s selection process of refugees for third-country resettlement, often called quota refugees (Kohl, 2009). The reform was presented as an initiative aimed at increasing the employment of immigrants. It exemplifies a “commodifying” solution to new social risks by seeking to overcome barriers to labor market participation (cf. chapter 1). Introducing integration potential¹ as a selection criterion, it reflected a paradigm shift in Danish immigration policy, from a ban on third-country labor migration combined with a relatively liberal approach to humanitarian migration in the 1970–1990s to the combination of restrictive refugee policies and schemes targeting high-paid and skilled labor in the 2000s. In analyzing the reform and its practical interpretation, the chapter treats the new selection as a technique for calculating and managing the refugees’ levels of risk to society. The governmentality perspective allows for a critical examination of the risk imaginaries and assumptions underlying the reform and its interpretation in practice.