Administrative Indentureship and Administrative Inclusion: Structured Limits and Potential Opportunities for Refugee Client Inclusion in Resettlement Policy Implementation

In this article I develop new concepts that I call administrative indentureship and administrative inclusion to describe how resettlement workers interact with refugees. Within a policy structure that creates incentives to deliver specific outcomes, resettlement workers respond by engaging in administrative indentureship: pushing refugees into low-wage labor quickly, structuring service provision in a way that trains refugees how to behave in order to (re)gain access to resources, and constraining opportunities for refugee clients to make claims. Administrative inclusion is the form of belonging that resettlement workers could structure for their clients, in which refugees are encouraged to make demands. I demonstrate the processes of administrative indentureship and inclusion using original data from an organizational ethnography of refugee resettlement policy and practice and find that resettlement workers have the power to shape certain kinds of citizens from their refugee clients, depending on which form of administrative opportunities or constraints they create.