‘We Are Not Freeloaders:’ Harmful Welfare Narratives and Counter-Narratives Among Resettled Iraqi Refugees in the United States

(Counter-)Narratives, Power, and Social Harm

Narratives are stories which are embedded in social context, arranged temporally and causally, and therefore grounded in and productive of social realities. There are two related but distinct dimensions of narrative which operate in this study. The first refers to narrative as an individual statement. It contains the accounts and stories produced by participants, amenable to linguistic analysis of verb use, agency, and coherence. The second refers to narrative as shared cultural logic, seen in the master narratives and institutional frameworks that organize collective meaning and shape the conditions under which individual stories are told. Narrative as shared cultural logic forms the structural backdrop against which individual narration occurs. The two levels of narrative are connected, shaping each other (Bamberg, 2004; Presser & Sandberg, 2019; Sandberg, 2009, 2022). Indeed, cultural narratives are consequential because they pervade the self, shaping individuals’ sense of moral worth and providing the terms through which people evaluate themselves and others. The cultural narrative of the American Dream, which carries the stigma of poverty and needing public assistance, is paradigmatic in this respect. It is not background ideology but an internalized moral framework that renders public assistance a marker of character weakness and personal failure (Hancock, 2004; Salman, 2023).

Further, under a criminological lens, narratives can be understood as ‘criminogenic’ because they can reproduce social harm and narratives that construct subjects as criminal or deviant (Fleetwood, 2015; Maruna & Liem, 2021; Presser, 2018; Sandberg, 2016). To be sure, not all narratives are equally powerful in shaping our perception of the world. Powerful institutions and actors circulate and embed hegemonic narratives in social life (Presser & Sandberg, 2019). They become schematic ways of interpreting the world; what Bamberg (2004) calls master narratives, or what Fleetwood (2016) calls narrative habitus. In this way, hegemonic narratives reproduce inequalities and forms of social harm while appearing natural (Althoff et al., 2020). Hegemonic narratives constrain subjects’ agency and shape the conditions under which counter-narratives emerge (Bamberg & Wipff, 2020; Lundholt et al., 2018).

Yet, hegemonic narratives do not go unchallenged. Individuals engage in narrative struggles to uphold their identities against negative discursive framings (Sandberg & Andersen, 2019). Counter-narratives are not simply different stories. They are stories told in relation to dominant narratives, intended to contest the social meanings produced by dominant narratives and to challenge exclusionary narratives (Althoff et al., 2020; Plummer, 2019; Sandberg & Colvin, 2020). However, counter-narratives and dominant narratives are not mutually exclusive. Counter-narratives emerge in dialogue with the narratives they resist. Complicity and resistance through countering go hand in hand, making a clear distinction difficult (Bamberg, 2004). Significant here is whether counter-narratives challenge the premises of dominant narratives or operate within those premises, accepting their terms while repositioning the speaker within them (Lundholt et al., 2018). Understanding the potential limits of counter-narratives requires attending to the specific institutional settings in which hegemonic narratives operate. In the context of welfare administration: Do resettled refugee counter-narratives challenge the deserving/undeserving binary that structures welfare stigma, or do they prove deservingness within it?

Bureaucratic Violence and Criminogenic Welfare Narratives

In the context of welfare administration, narratives become criminogenic by legitimizing structural and bureaucratic violence against welfare recipients. Bureaucratic violence is harm enacted through normalized administrative processes such as categorization of eligibility and inaction (Bhatia, 2020; Cooper & Whyte, 2017; Elsrud, 2023; Herd et al., 2023; Katz, 2013; Norberg, 2022). Disruptions to public assistance are connected to stringent administrative processes that categorize applicants by eligibility, operating as symbolic violence against welfare recipients assumed to be fraudulent. Bureaucratic violence creates harm against populations receiving assistance, which is an ‘intended consequence of the bureaucratic structure’, not an accidental byproduct (Gren et al., 2023, p.6).

Furthermore, bureaucratic violence is founded on welfare stigma. In his seminal study on stigma, Goffman (1974) defines it as a disjunction between one’s virtual social identity, the identity others impute, and one’s actual social identity, one’s actual attributes. For welfare recipients, this disjunction is built into the design of the American welfare system, which constructs a spoiled identity of dependent individuals. Welfare stigma both shames individuals and provides narrative legitimation for bureaucratic violence (Rogers-Dillon, 1995; Tyler & Slater, 2018). Here, stigma becomes part of policy and practice through institutional narratives. Indeed, welfare stigma also operates epistemically. Drawing on Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, welfare recipients are subject to testimonial injustice: a systematic denial of their credibility as narrators of their own experiences owing to their position as welfare recipients. In narrative criminological terms, epistemic injustice is a form of marginalization that compounds bureaucratic violence. Organizational narratives stigmatize welfare recipients and render their experiential accounts of disruptions incredible before they are spoken (see Sandberg & Colvin, 2020).

Institutional narratives of welfare are hegemonic narratives that enact symbolic and structural violence by constructing identities of individuals that legitimize policy and administrative practices (Loseke, 2007;Schneider & Ingram, 1993;Starke, 2020). These narratives categorize populations as fraudulent or genuine. They thus provide street-facing bureaucrats, such as DHHS caseworkers, with what Bhatia (2020, p.289) terms ‘permission to be cruel’, the authorization to inflict harm while appearing to simply fulfill professional duties. In turn, organizational narratives, which are derived from institutional narratives, transform structural problems of inadequate assistance and unemployment, into client failure. In this way, welfare narratives reflect harm and generate the conditions under which harm is administered.

From Cultural Narratives to Street-Level Narratives

Cultural narratives are formula stories that create schematic arrangements of self and other, which pervade collective and individual stories as archetypes (Loseke, 2007; Sandberg, 2022). The cultural narrative of poverty is an enduring stigmatizing narrative that is founded on the social belief in the American Dream, where success is within reach of anyone who works hard enough and where public assistance is a marker of moral lack and character weakness (Rochman et al., 2021; Rogers-Dillon, 1995; Salman, 2023). Stigmatizing narratives of poverty pervade institutional narratives, legitimizing the punitive erosion of public assistance programs since the 1980s and racializing welfare, creating a stereotypical black welfare recipient (Hancock, 2004; O’Connor, 2001).

Street-level narratives translate institutional narratives into everyday interactions with welfare recipients. They are organizational narratives of identity generated by organizational staff who administer services to people deemed as having ‘troubled identities in need of repair’ (Loseke, 2007, p.670). While this movement is not strictly unidirectional, nor is it inevitable, as individual staff can shape and reshape narratives, the overall direction of institutional power means that cultural and institutional narratives exert enormous influence on personal narration. At social services offices, staff interact with, classify their clients, and administer assistance according to organizational outcome-measured funding (Barnes et al., 2023; Soss et al., 2011). Notably, organizational narratives seep into personal narratives. Clients must narrate a certain story, embodying the characters that the organization serves. Personal narratives of identity interact with the narratives that pervade the organization and shape the interactions of resettled refugees with each other, case managers and other welfare recipients. As such, personal narratives are dialogical; they contain multiple stories (Barrera, 2019). The dialogue is asymmetrical: Organizational narratives are imposed on resettled refugees, and refugee stories do not fully escape their parameters.

Refugee Resettlement and the Welfare Narrative

For resettled refugees, the narrative movement operates across different levels. In addition to the stigmatizing narratives of poverty that shape all welfare recipients, resettled refugees encounter organizational narratives that frame cultural difference and professional background as barriers to employment and successful assimilation (e.g., see Hadley & Patil, 2009; Yigit & Tatch, 2017). Furthermore, cultural differences are often framed as obstacles to self-sufficiency, with refugees seen as being held back by cultural attitudes toward certain types of work, gender roles, and acculturation (Camino & Krulfeld, 2005; Ferwerda et al., 2017; Interiano-Shiverdecker et al., 2022). Indeed, unlike Americans receiving welfare, refugees arrive having been displaced by violence, often with professional backgrounds and educational credentials that organizational narratives render invisible, framing their unemployment instead in terms of cultural inflexibility and dependency (Cicek-Okay et al., 2023). Countering organizational narratives of resettlement, resettled refugees often understood success in the United States holistically while also being aware of the contempt that comes with public assistance (Shaw et al., 2020, 2021).

However, narratives that construct the American poor as undeserving also shape refugee resettlement, because resettled refugees receive public assistance. The Refugee Act of 1980 establishes economic self-sufficiency as the primary goal of resettlement programs (Brown & Scribner, 2018; Bruno, 2011; Nawyn, 2011a; Refugee Act, 1980). As such, resettled refugees become people who must be managed in the same way as Americans living in poverty (Frazier & van Riemsdijk, 2021; Grace et al., 2018). Through the lens of narrative criminology, such organizational narratives function as street-level criminogenic narratives that translate institutional narratives into practices of social control. This raises the questions of how resettled refugees interpret the organizational narratives of welfare and poverty, how they respond as they produce personal narratives of identity, and what the relationship between those narratives reveals about welfare administration as a site of social harm.

Study Setting

The current study is based on the accounts of resettled Iraqi refugees, and case managers at the WMCO in Wayne and Macomb counties in Michigan. The WMCO is a large nongovernmental organization (NGO) that serves resettled refugees as well as low-income families receiving government assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The organization provides comprehensive services including social services such as welfare and unemployment application support and job placement.

Sampling Frame and Strategy

I focused on Iraqi adults who arrived in the United States in the 2010s on Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) because of their role in assisting the American war efforts in the Iraq War. The families were at various points in their financial self-sufficiency pathways; however, they were all receiving some form of public assistance at the time of the interviews. In addition, I interviewed case managers who worked directly with resettled refugees. I conducted all the formal interviews in 2014. The interviews were conducted in the aftermath of the Great Recession, a period of high unemployment and constrained public resources that form the backdrop against which the organizational narratives analyzed here must be understood (Salman, 2023, pp.56 and 57).

I relied on snowball sampling to recruit participants. The WMCO served as the primary recruitment site, and snowball sampling proved valuable given the tight-knit nature of the Iraqi refugee community and the cultural importance of personal referrals. As participants developed confidence in the research process, they referred others from their networks. I formally interviewed each participant once, with a total of 50 semi-structured interviews: 30 with resettled refugees and 20 with case managers and other staff.

WMCO staff participants included case managers working in various capacities at the organization. The staff ranged in age from staff members in their 20s to experienced staff in their 50s. The staff are broadly speaking co-ethnic, identifying as Arab or Arab American. Most of the senior staff were first generation immigrants, while the junior staff were typically second-generation immigrants. For this article, I draw on the accounts of five staff members who worked in social services and business programs. This subset engaged most extensively with me. They also worked closely with resettled refugees on public assistance, imparting organizational narratives of welfare. Resettled refugee participants were demographically diverse in terms of religious and ethnic identity, family composition, and length of time since resettlement. They ranged in age, with most of the participants in their 30s and 40s. With very few exceptions, they held higher education degrees and came from professional backgrounds. Resettled refugees narrated similar stories about their lives in Iraq, displacement, and access to assistance. In this study, I focus on six participants who spoke at length about their experiences, and as such most usefully illustrated the interaction between personal and organizational narratives of identity.

Data Collection

Interviews were conducted at the WMCO, public places chosen by interviewees, and homes of interviewees (resettled refugees). Staff members were asked about the services provided by the WMCO, the experience and challenges of resettlement, their roles in the organization, and their experiences assisting resettled refugees. Resettled refugees were asked about their experiences of resettlement, encounters with DHHS and WMCO staff, and access to services.

Data Analysis Strategy

The interviews were transcribed verbatim by the author. The coding of the transcripts proceeded in three phases to generate a thematic analysis. In the first phase, I read over the transcripts to identify salient points, paying attention to how staff described issues facing welfare recipients and resettled refugees, and how resettled refugees described their experiences of arrival, accessing assistance, and narrating their identities. The second phase focused on refining initial themes, attending to emerging patterns, commonalities and divergences. The third phase focused on defining the final themes.

Following Presser and Sandberg (2015), I focused on two dimensions of narration. First, I examined how speakers constructed their agency through linguistic and verb choices. Specifically, how staff and refugees used language to position themselves and others as active or passive, and responsible or constrained in their stories. Second, I attended to coherence and plurivocality by looking at how participants produced unified narrations, as well as locating tensions or multiple voices that may have unsettled narrative coherence. Underpinning both dimensions is the understanding that narratives produce social reality (Sandberg, 2022). Grammatical choices, verb use, and narrative coherence are analytically significant, attending to what participants said, how they said it, and what narrative work their stories were doing. The cultural narratives of poverty, dependency and deservingness identified in this study did not surface as explicit topics in interviews but emerged through choice of words and literary devices. They appeared in the moral conclusions staff drew, the framings they reached for, and the identities refugees felt compelled to contest. I identified patterns through iterative comparison across the full interview set, with thematic saturation reached as themes stabilized and recurred consistently across participants. In addition, I took the stories on their own terms, as narratives that reveal how people make meaning of their experiences rather than conclusions about people’s moral coherence.

A Note on Positionality

I am Arab with personal knowledge of exile and familiarity with the cultural codes of the Iraqi professional and middle class, and a sociologist who studies structural inequalities and state violence. My social and cultural proximity to the staff and the resettled families helped me gain trust and access. However, access was negotiated. Entry was facilitated through the director of the WMCO, but the staff varied in their reception. Senior staff were forthcoming, speaking at length, while junior staff were less so and careful not to disclose things that may cause them problems with management. Resettled refugees varied in their willingness to share their experiences. They asked about my ethnic identity, which I attribute to the sectarian divisions that shaped the displacement of Iraqis at the time. I navigated this tension by acknowledging the reality of sectarian divisions in Iraq. Bearing in mind the challenges faced by staff and refugees, participants were not pressed on painful details of displacement or trauma, allowing them to share what they chose and redirect when topics became sensitive. I followed their lead rather than pursuing lines of inquiry that may have caused distress.

Findings

Staff typically channeled organizational narratives that reproduced institutional framings of resettlement as a question of employment and exiting welfare, positing unemployment as a problem of refugees’ personal choices. By contrast, refugees narrated themselves as families doing their best against insurmountable obstacles, refuting organizational narratives of entitlement.

Structural Obstacles and Individualized Responsibility

Staff unanimously acknowledged that employment was not easy to secure and that good paying jobs are rare and expressed sympathy for resettled refugees looking for work. However, the sympathy was constrained: Refugees are struggling, but the most important thing is possessing the correct orientation to employment. The organizational narrative that emerges from staff accounts is consistent: unemployment among resettled refugees is primarily a problem of individual motivation and cultural inflexibility rather than structural constraint. Staff positioned themselves as providing every resource necessary for self-sufficiency, while locating the source of failure in clients’ attitudes and choices.

The tension in staff narratives is an illustration of plurivocality: several voices are in dialogue in the narrative (Frank, 2010; Presser & Sandberg, 2015). Plurivocality in this instance disrupts the coherence of narratives and generates incongruence. The tension, even if unresolved, serves to assert the staff’s professionalism and righteousness.

For instance, Staff member Zayne, who is an employability skills counselor, stressed that the lack of jobs is a feature of the job market in Michigan:

I can submit this in one simple sentence: in the 70s 80s and part of the 90s to a certain extent, if there were 10 jobs, there were only two or three job seekers. Nowadays, there is one job and probably 1000 job seekers in any given field, at any given time, in any given state. Some states are better than others.

Zayne’s acknowledgment of structural reality functions narratively as a setup for his individualist argument. Zayne then attributes his clients’ difficulties to individual deficits:

We deal with a population that is usually either unemployed and collecting unemployment or on welfare. And those people come to us lacking the basic skills and knowledge especially about the new labor market since the economy has changed a lot [. . .].

Reflecting the plurivocality of his account, Zayne returned to structural obstacles:

I don’t expect a client to say yes, I’m going to take a job and I’m willing to do it because I’m good at it, that is 5 miles from their home. They can’t commute, they need the means to commute. Do we have a healthy mass transportation system? [. . .] absolutely not. [. . .] If any of the clients comes three hours late, I definitely understand because they missed the bus by five minutes and the next bus is coming in two hours. Now, is this coming from the fact that the client is not willing to be here or get better? No, it’s coming from the fact, who is responsible for having buses running on schedule [. . .]?

Yet, Zayne then addressed me directly as researcher:

By the way, this is a major thing that has to be [in your writing] if you’re not biased: half of the journey has to be done by them not by us. One of the things I tell them is: ‘I’m going to send you a job [. . .] ‘but the only issue is that I cannot get to that job’, and I ask why? and you say ‘because I don’t have transportation’. Well, we have supportive services, we can get you a car. [. . .] ‘I don’t know how to drive’. We will send you to driving school. ‘I’m not quite sure I know the way’, I’ll give you a map [. . .] if you don’t go it’s because you don’t want to go and you wasted my time and the resources. Does this happen? Many times.

Zayne positions himself as patient, resourceful, and problem-solving, while the client occupies a lesser role, squandering opportunities. This positioning is enacted grammatically: Zayne is consistently the subject of active verbs. He is sending, getting, and providing. This is a narrative mechanism that linguistically locates agency and responsibility (Presser & Sandberg, 2015). The conclusion ‘if you don’t go it’s because you don’t want to go’ arrives as the logical endpoint of a grammatical pattern that was already established throughout the story. The grammar of Zayne’s narrative does the job of establishing his agency, while constructing his clients as willfully resistant. Zayne’s story does not simply describe the client’s behavior but produces the client’s intent to evade employment.

The narrative draws on the master narrative of the American Dream and individual responsibility, transforming structural unemployment into moral lack. It is a narrative that produces a social reality where the harm of inadequate assistance is legitimized as something that is caused by the client, not the job market.

Similarly, Khalid, a case manager who specializes in assisting Iraqi resettled refugees notes,

Now with the situation in [Michigan], the [Department of Health and Human Services] doesn’t want people to be lazy and sitting, they want them to work. We encourage them to find work, anything [. . .] The point is to survive [. . .].

Khalid referenced the economic hardships facing Michigan in the 2010s in the aftermath of the Great Recession (e.g., see Detroit News, 2014). Here, the economic situation, which resulted in mass unemployment, was presented as the reason why people should seek work. In this story, the unemployed are making things worse for Michigan – a struggling state that cannot absorb the costs of unemployment.

Khalid uses his own story to show his clients that they can overcome dependency on welfare. He presents his efforts as pleas: Iraqi refugees can maintain their dignity if they get to work:

I encourage them, I tell them I used to do my masters’ degree and work in a parking lot. It doesn’t mean that you lose your dignity because work is work. As long as you’re not hurting others, you’re doing something for your family, for your kids, and at the same time you get experience.

Khalid’s framing aligned with the organizational framing of the unemployed client. The organization provides everything for the client to get on their feet and secure work. Khalid’s use of his biography functions as a narrative device that grants him agency. He positions himself as someone who overcame dependency and maintained dignity through various paid work. Khalid is the subject of active verbs, enacting the ideal responsible and self-sufficient subjectivity. He encourages, he tells, he works. In his story, resettled families’ struggles are implicitly self-inflicted by unemployment. However, the narrative obscures an omission. Khalid’s biography of being a graduate student studying in the US is a different situation from that of Iraqi refugees displaced by war and navigating a foreign system. That structural difference is multiple: Khalid was young, without family dependents, and pursuing graduate education. None of these conditions map onto his clients’ situations as displaced families, headed by middle-aged adults with foreign credentials. In discounting this gap, Khalid’s narrative transforms his experience into a generalizable model of self-sufficiency.

Accountability and Surveillance of Public Assistance

As the staff accounts show, the organizational narrative consistently identifies the primary problem as securing employment rather than accessing assistance. Public assistance comes with administrative burdens which are presented as necessary to incentivize work.

Rami, a staff member who coordinates the Partnership, Accountability, Training, Hope (PATH) Program, a Michigan state program designed to identify and overcome barriers to employment aimed at families that receive TANF Cash Assistance, explains:

So, a few years ago, we started assisting the refugee population and what that entailed was not just assisting them with finding a job [. . .] but also getting them to be ready for whatever they may encounter in a new country [. . .]

Rami acknowledged that assistance may not be financially adequate, but asserted:

You are getting financial assistance; you are on the state’s dime [. . .] you’ve got big brother and big sister looking over your shoulder. So, even though in some cases, they are looked at as, I don’t want to say barriers, but hindrances towards getting on with your life. You’re still obtaining all that assistance in order to live your life. The way I look at it is you have a job, this is your job. You’re getting all the benefits and assistance, whether it’s enough or not is another story, but you’re receiving that assistance in order to live your life. Now, if you have a job, how are you surviving or living? If it’s not enough, what do you do? You look for another job [. . .] and you move on.

Rami presents administrative burdens as necessary surveillance, reframing welfare as payment to search for work. This moment of linguistic self-correction is where the coherence of Rami’s narrative briefly falters. By rejecting ‘barriers’ in favor of ‘hindrances’, Rami works to contain a word that could undermine his framing. Barriers are structural while hindrances are minor. Rami’s narrative reveals the labor required to maintain the organizational position that bureaucratic violence is reasonable. The inadequacy of assistance works as an incentive because it pushes people into work. Rami’s narrative reframes surveillance and administrative burdens as reasonable conditions of receiving public assistance. Neutralized, bureaucratic violence is thus reframed as incentive to exit welfare.

Overall, the staff observed that the administrative burdens that come with public assistance are sensible: People should not expect to sit at home without work while collecting benefits. For the staff, resettled refugees are struggling in the US because they are unemployed. This was a judgment: Resettled refugees are resisting American ethos of work and that is why they struggle with public assistance. Their attitudes toward work are cultural.

Culture as an Explanation for Unemployment

Rami shares a story that he frames as a success story of overcoming cultural obstacles such as cultural taboos about certain types of work:

I have a young lady from Iran, and she obtained employment. She would always wear [. . .] the veil, and everyone thought. . . it’s going to be hard to place her. She’s got a job in Ford. You know, she just wore long sleeve shirts and tucked her veil so it wouldn’t be a safety hazard, she was working on the line! [. . .] She went from, you know, a single mom that needed assistance in everything she did to a single mom who’s completely self-sufficient [. . .] she didn’t let other people’s stigma hold her back.

In this story, the success of one individual is represented as generalizable. Rami’s story functions as a formula story. It is a narrative of a typical actor overcoming typical obstacles to reach a righteous and triumphant moral outcome. The individual success story does narrative work: it transforms a structural problem into a cultural one, and positions cultural flexibility as the solution to unemployment: resettled refugees can secure employment if they are not held back by cultural barriers. Notably, the client is the subject of active verbs in Rami’s story, where he is absent. Rami’s absence from the narrative allows individual agency to carry the full explanatory weight, leaving no space for structural accounts of unemployment.

Because of the emphasis on culture as a barrier at the organization, staff note the importance of acculturation programs as well as developing culturally appropriate employment. The staff often used Iraqi traditional gender roles as an explanation for unemployment. In response, the WMCO offered a Home-Based Childcare Center Certification Program for Iraqi women. Rawand, the program director, describes the primary aims of the program in terms of self-actualization:

We help empower women, especially refugee women, to help open their own home-based childcare business. To have self-independence, to rely on themselves, plus to get to take care of their children at the same time. It’s very hard for them to enter the job market because of their English and because of the lack of transportation. We have them stay at home, have an income and support their families. [. . .] A lot of [the obstacles] have to do with the fact that they have to take care of the kids, husband mainly works, that’s how the culture and the Arab world is.

Rawand added that the program is available to those who want it:

We pay for the application fee, we pay for the fingerprinting, we do the training ourselves [. . .] They just have to have the willingness and the passion to take care of children [. . .].

Rawand acknowledges structural obstacles like transportation and lack of childcare yet offers a culturally specific solution: Iraqi women stay home because of their culture and so a business opportunity that keeps them at home is the way out of unemployment. Rawand is the subject of active verbs which position the organization as generous and assisting. The burden of failure is then placed on the individual through the word ‘willingness.’ The implication is motivational lack rather than lack of public transport. This is symbolic boundary work that reframes structural constraint as personal choice.

The cultural obstacles as a framing narrative extended to Iraqis more generally. Bassim, an employment coach at the WMCO, helps clients find jobs through resume preparation and networking. He acknowledges obstacles facing resettled refugees searching for employment that include the mismatch in credentials and professional experience, as well as health issues, recognizing that it can be challenging to place them. However, when asked about obstacles to employment, Bassim returned to the obstacle of cultural expectations, often referring to the problem of ‘mentality:’

You need to learn how the system works, you need to learn about the culture, you need to learn about the mentality of people you need to learn pretty much about everything. If you come here and you don’t have the knowledge and you’re not willing to learn I don’t think you will make it, you won’t make it.

When I asked Bassim to explain what he meant by mentality, he used the Arabic word for it and then added:

Some people are still connected to where they came from. . . You can’t do that. You can’t be in both places. [. . .] Let’s say if I want to start a business in Iraq, I can’t bring everything from the US and say, ‘well this is successful in the US, so it has to be successful here.’ [. . .] You can’t bring whatever you have from Iraq and say this is right.

In Bassim’s narrative, structural obstacles are displaced by ‘mentality’ as the primary explanation for Iraqis’ inability to integrate. His repeated use of the second person places the burden of failure squarely on the individual, positioning resettled refugees as agents of their own hardship and framing unemployment as a problem of culture and attitude.

Resettled Refugees Narratives

Yet, narratives of resettlement told by Iraqis tell a different story. Resettled refugees were aware of the significance of personal responsibility in the organizational narrative of success through employment. In narrating their stories, resettled refugees often emphasized their eagerness to secure employment, while also describing the hardship that characterized their access to public assistance. Their stories resisted organizational narratives of motivational and cultural deficit. It is a narrative act that refuses the imposed identity and asserts an alternative self. Five themes emerged, with several participants appearing across multiple themes, showing the layered work of narrative resistance.

Compliance With Administrative Requirements

In all the interviews, resettled refugees noted their compliance with the DHHS requirements and highlighted their active search for work. Participants typically narrated their identities as hard-working people seeking employment first and receiving assistance second.

Faris, a 40-year-old father of three who arrived in the United States in 2013, described his search for employment:

With PATH, ¹ you have a certain number of hours for job search [. . .] They are paying you; you have to do something with your time. You can’t just sit comfortably at home, and I consider the job search a service to society [. . .] how else can one demonstrate that they are not being lazy but to show up and volunteer? For me, I also want to get experience [. . .].

Faris presents his access to assistance as conditional, demonstrating compliance and understanding of welfare requirements contrary to the organizational narrative. He also presents himself as proactive about employment. He is the subject of active verbs, using the second person to counter the organizational narrative; yet he does not completely subvert it. Faris channels the organizational language of conditionality, letting me know that ‘they are paying you, you have to do something’. However, conditionality is repurposed as evidence of his own righteousness rather than as a constraint imposed on him.

Assertion of Professional Identity

Resettled refugees often narrated themselves in professional terms. With the exception of three participants who were stay at home mothers, participants referenced their professional backgrounds in Iraq as they narrated their experiences of searching for work and fighting with social services over disruptions to their assistance.

Faris expressed restlessness about his unemployment, asserting an identity of a working man:

Especially for Iraqi men, we have to work [. . .] I’m used to working 14 hours a day. I don’t know how to just stay at home, I used to be the head of a refrigeration company that was a multimillion-dollar company [. . .] It was a high-stress job, but this is what I’m used to doing. Arriving here without a job with nothing to do does make me anxious. [. . .] Right now, I’m focusing on improving my language, by volunteering and showing up to job fairs [. . .]. I have a bachelor’s in business administration, and I’ve always worked.

Faris constructs his identity coherently as a worker and provider. He counters the organizational narrative that frames resettled refugees as yet-to-be accustomed to the US. Faris ties his identity as a worker to his understanding of American work culture. He is not inflexible, contrary to what the staff may suggest: Faris is working to improve his English and taking up employment opportunities that do not match his qualifications. The coherence of Faris’ narrative rests on simultaneously holding his pride in his professional identity and his willingness to adapt to American culture. For Faris, his hard-working identity undermines any notion of irreconcilable cultural differences and asserts his deservingness of assistance.

Professional identity was expressed among women in my interviews as well. Hala, a wife and mother of two, used to be a college instructor in Iraq. After a year in the United States, Hala continued to struggle with the loss of her job and the reality of starting over:

Don’t think for the moment that anyone who relocated to America is comfortable [. . .] the problem is I used to work, you’d have a workday, it was something you did [. . .] you have your degree, you are confident enough to take care of errands and handle your own affairs with anyone. But here [. . .] obviously you don’t want to spend your whole time at home, that is not a good thing, that you are at home reduced to a machine that spins and does housework. . . I’ve been thinking about work [. . .] what are the jobs that are available here. This is what you should study.

Hala articulates grief over the loss of a job that defined her. Yet, she returns to finding work. She recognizes that she may have to retrain and obtain American credentials. Hala enacts resilience grammatically, moving from past tense to present and future tense. The shift from loss to recovery performs the narrative movement from grief to agency, which reasserts a self that is resilient and knowledgeable about the ‘American way’ of work.

Assertion of Right Bearing Status

In addition, resettled refugees observed that the larger issue of resettlement is the humiliation of disrupted public assistance. Although resettled refugees lament the difference between Iraqi and American ways of life, all the interviews pointed to the financial strain of irregular assistance as the most unsettling part of resettling in the United States. What the organizational narrative frames as necessary accountability and surveillance to fend off welfare dependency is experienced by resettled refugees as humiliating and disruptive. The most challenging aspect of resettlement as a lived experience is irregular assistance, not cultural differences. Resettled refugees do not accept the organizational framing and counter it by asserting a right-bearing identity. As far as resettled refugees are concerned, the disruptions from high administrative burdens must be fought by all available legal means.

Faris describes his experience of filing for assistance:

I went to the DHS (sic). . . filed the necessary paperwork. This is not hard for them to process, because as refugees we have the right to Medicaid and food stamps, and our caseworker knows that. My cash assistance for the first three months was below the set amount I have the right to receive. I was told that it would be restored after three months. But after three months, the cash assistance amount I received was even less than what I was told it would be [. . .] I had trouble with my caseworker when I tried to inquire about the error.

Faris then raised his voice, imitating the caseworker’s response:

‘You can’t come and see me every time you have a problem; you’re not my only client. [. . .]. It is not my job to translate documents for you.’

Faris calmly added:

I said, I’m not asking you to translate documents for me, there’s been an error in my cash assistance calculation. I held up the paper and said, ‘Look at this cash assistance figure, it doesn’t match the figure you gave me, does it?’ Then she said, ‘oh give me a second [. . .]’. She returned and said it should take 5 days to be corrected. But the caseworker never filed the paperwork like she said she would. What was supposed to take five days took two weeks.

Faris points to how easy it can be to dismiss resettled refugees because of language barriers:

My caseworker would never admit to a mistake [. . .] It’s easy to blame us because they rely on the fact that many of us cannot speak English well.

Faris positions himself above the shame of being an entitled welfare recipient. In the story, Faris is the subject of active verbs while the caseworker appears only as the subject of failures and refusals – grammatical reversal inverts the structure of Zayne’s narrative of help.

Bilal, a married father of two, similarly narrates his experience:

It took five months for our Medicaid to be activated, and I had to request a hearing to make sure it is activated. The caseworker refused to meet with me [. . .] I only heard from her when I requested two hearings before a Judge about my Medicaid and cash assistance. Only then was I contacted by the supervisor and the caseworker, both apologizing for the error. They asked me to sign a waiver and not go through with the hearings but I refused to sign anything and went ahead with both hearings.

When I asked Bilal why he insisted on going through with the hearings he explained:

If I signed any waivers, I would still be waiting for them [. . .] This is a country of laws. I have the law on my side.

Bilal’s consistently legal and formal language positions him as a rights-bearing subject, using legal avenues to fight for benefits for which he is eligible.

Recognition of Structural Barriers not Individualized Responsibility

Resettled refugees consistently dismissed cultural norms as the reason for unemployment. They emphasized their search for work and rejected the gendered narratives of unemployment. For example, Lana, who used to be a schoolteacher in Iraq, had been a part-time office administrator at the WMCO for years but still searching for work as a teacher. While working, she was studying English and preparing for ESL exams,

I want to study in my field, teaching, I want to become a teacher or even teaching aide. I have a teaching associate degree from Iraq, so I want to teach. [. . .] I’m working part time, but if there are schools that accept volunteers, I would volunteer because it would bring me closer to my work. [Rawand] tried to persuade me to sign up for the Day Care program, but I refused, I do not want to be home. I want to leave the house every morning and go to work.

Notably, I did not ask Lana about the Day Care business venture. Unprompted, Lana told me that she did not want to stay home. Lana’s use of ‘I want’ contests the organizational narrative that positions Iraqi women as culturally constrained, in need of direction, and homebound.

Other women who took up the Day Care venture challenged the framing of it as profitable but dependent on motivation. Deena, who also used to be a schoolteacher in Iraq, dismissed that the venture was set up so that the WMCO staff can claim that they assist resettled refugees,

I’m beginning to realize that these work programs benefit WMCO staff more than they benefit us. I signed up [. . .] and now I’m certified to run a Home-Based Day Care [. . .] it’s been open for 4 months, but there is no business.

In Deena’s story, the organizational narrative is the subject of failure and broken promises, echoing the inversion seen in Faris and Bilal’s narrations. Lana, and Deena, and Hala’s stories trouble the staff’s framing of the gendered cultural barriers to work, in this case challenging both the cultural constraint narrative and the organizational programs designed around it.

Assertion of Honesty in the Face of Welfare Humiliation and Abuse

Despite the assertions of professional identity and knowledge of American cultural and institutional norms, resettled refugees experience psychological violence from the precarity of assistance and abuse at welfare offices, revealed as the final theme.

Shadia, a wife and mother of a chronically ill child, describes the arduous process of applying for Medicaid:

We cannot go to the doctor if we get sick. My husband went to the caseworker to inquire about our Medicaid several times, with no answer but that there is a problem in the system and that it will be resolved soon. We later learned from other families that their Medicaid was restored. Ours was not. So, my husband went to see our caseworker again. She threw the paperwork in his face. [. . .] I can forego Medicaid [. . .] But this is my son, if anything happens to him what will we do? I went to see the caseworker to ask about my son’s Medicaid, and she said “Don’t you understand Arabic?” I thought she was joking, but she started yelling “I told you, it’s frozen and it will be restored soon.”

Shadia added,

I swear we lived the best life in Iraq . . . but if it wasn’t for what happened. . . we lived a very good life, food was abundant even if you were poor [. . .] I’m telling you this because I want you to know that we have always been blessed [. . .] we are not freeloaders [. . .] Mr. Zayne explained welfare here as crumbs distributed to a large number of people. I know many abuse the system. Other people, they use cash assistance to buy drugs and alcohol. We are not like that.

Shadia’s account of humiliation followed by accusations of welfare abuse was not unique; other participants reiterated the same stories. In doing so, they drew on and reproduced the broader narrative of welfare fraud, creating a moral distance between resettled refugees and other welfare recipients. To resist humiliation, Shadia asserts herself as different.

Yet, the coherence of Shadia’s counter-narrative is unsettled by what follows. The same narrative that asserts dignity pivots to accusing other welfare recipients of abuse. The voices of the dignified victim and the suspicious observer of others sit in tension, revealing the extent to which the organizational narrative of the undeserving welfare recipient has been internalized even by those it harms most. The constitutive power of organizational narratives appears in Shadia’s story: the narrative of welfare abuse shapes Shadia’s perception of others while also becoming part of how she constitutes her own identity. This was a common narrative feature which seemed to save refugees from the accusation of welfare fraud.

Overall, staff acknowledged structural barriers and expressed sympathy for resettled refugees; however, staff expressions are better understood as examples of plurivocality rather than exceptions to the organizational narrative. The staff believed welfare enabled moral failure, and resettled refugees believed that other welfare recipients were to blame for this belief. Burnt-out staff collected donations for struggling families. Iraqi families supported each other by setting up carpools and patronizing each other’s small business ventures.

Welfare as a Site of Violence, Organizational Narratives as Criminogenic

Organizational narratives enact what the literature identifies as bureaucratic violence. They are narratives that enact harm by legitimizing and normalizing processes of surveillance, categorization, and inaction (Bhatia, 2020; Gren et al., 2023). The organizational narratives that frame welfare and unemployment in terms of motivation and attitude legitimize the administrative burdens that condition welfare programs. The violence of disruptions and humiliation which degrade resettled refugees are presented as a necessary part of accessing welfare; they are the incentive to seek work. Staff narratives exemplify the street-level translation of institutional narratives into everyday practice. Client-facing staff reproduce institutional narratives of dependency and individual deficit in their direct interactions with resettled refugees, discursively illustrating the permission to be cruel (Bhatia, 2020).

The social harm that is produced by organizational narratives has material and symbolic components that are inextricably linked. Assistance disruptions are represented as the costs of seeking welfare, because welfare breeds abuse. Everyone should work, and those who do not will always be suspected of defrauding the government. Following Sandberg (2022), the findings demonstrate that narratives do not simply describe reality but produce it. Furthermore, the organizational emphasis on cultural barriers produces a reality where structural obstacles are secondary to cultural deficits. Yet, Iraqi narratives assert a different social reality, one where unemployment reflects structural barriers, not cultural preferences.

Counter-Narratives and Narrative Resistance

Refugee narratives resisted the tropes of pathology, entitlement and ignorance of American values. To hold one’s identity as righteous and coherent under conditions of bureaucratic humiliation is a form of narrative struggle against the corrosive material and symbolic harm of welfare administration. However, following Bamberg (2004), counter-narratives are better understood as negotiations of the dominant narrative rather than resistance to it. The findings here suggest that epistemic injustice is a key condition shaping that boundary. Refugees do not step outside the organizational narrative but work from within it, countering some elements while remaining complicit with others. Simultaneous complicity and resistance is not a counter-narrative failure; rather, it is the defining condition.

Counter-narratives emerge under conditions of intense insecurity. Resettled refugees must continuously perform deservingness while navigating a system that is humiliating by design. They resist, but they feel defeated. Resettled refugees counter the powerful organizational narrative that echoes institutional and cultural narratives of welfare, but do not entirely subvert it. As such, the narrative struggle remains asymmetrical. Bilal may have been successful at challenging his caseworker; however, the persistent issue is that clients do not have seamless access to welfare services for which they are eligible. The asymmetry is partly epistemic, with the persistence of testimonial injustice at the welfare office. The credibility deficit imposed on welfare recipients means that refugee accounts of errors and humiliation are structurally disbelieved, constraining narrative resistance regardless of its force (Fricker, 2007). The lack of access presents enormous psychological and material costs. The costs are seen in the stories told by women like Shadia, who speaks with anguish over the way her caseworker speaks to her, holding the power of withholding her benefits over her. Resettled refugees’ counter-narratives reveal a dialogue of multiple stories, in a materially constrained situation, which cannot entirely diminish the power of hegemonic narratives (Bamberg & Wipff, 2020; Barrera, 2019; Lundholt et al., 2018; Sandberg & Colvin, 2020).

Resistance Narrative and the Internalization of Organizational Narratives

Narrative identity formation works under conditions of structural constraint (Sandberg, 2022). Resettled refugees narrate themselves as reasonable figures using the rule of law and asserting their honesty, while constructing others as the ‘bad actors’. Their narratives interact with the organizational narrative which offers two positions: the deserving client, who is motivated and culturally flexible, and the undeserving client, who is entitled and culturally resistant. Resettled refugees’ counter-narratives develop within this binary. In asserting professional identity and demonstrating compliance, resettled refugees claim a ‘deserving’ protagonist status. The antagonist in the story is not always clear: The welfare office staff are understood as cruel. At the same time, the people suspected of causing harm to refugee families are other welfare recipients who are accused of abusing welfare, making welfare access harder for honest families like themselves. Resettled refugees internalize the binary of poverty, a binary that is built into the design of the welfare system (Tyler & Slater, 2018). They accept the premise that deservingness must be proven. By extension, they construct undeserving social others. The most troubling finding is the ways through which resettled refugees distance themselves from ‘others who abuse the system’, offloading the accusation of false entitlement onto other welfare recipients and rationalizing the stringent administrative burdens that harm them. The findings reveal perhaps the most destructive result of bureaucratic cruelty: the fragmentation of solidarity among marginalized groups and the reinforcement of the very narratives that harm resettled refugees.