Why do some displaced groups embrace the label ‘refugee’ while others reject it? Drawing on 70 semi-structured interviews with Afghan and Ukrainian women fleeing wars to Canada, this paper highlights that race impacts refugee labelling at macro- and micro-levels. The Canadian government categorises Afghans as refugees and Ukrainians as special category immigrants. Further, self-identification appears as mirroring state categorisation, where Afghans accepted the refugee label for its legal and residency rights while noting its constraints. Ukrainians rejected the racialised refugee category and identified as European immigrants as a strategy of belonging in Canada. I argue that the state’s use of categories reflects a postcolonial continuity in categorical treatment of European and non-European populations. I use Du Bois’s ‘wages of whiteness’ to explain why Ukrainians refused the label, arguing that the affective rewards of European whiteness outweigh the advantages of refugee status. In effect, Canada’s two-tier resettlement programme for Afghans and Ukrainians – resembling the policies of most Western countries – separates protection while publicly distancing that protection from the refugee category, thereby legitimising the stigma attached to ‘refugee’ and refugee groups. States must decouple access to rights from stigmatised labels and reassess how special visa regimes reproduce hierarchies among displaced populations.
Aryan Karimi (Thu,) studied this question.