New Borders of Precarity in the U.S. Agrifood System: Refugees, Labor, and the State

This article analyzes how government regulation, refugee resettlement policies, and industry practices converge in an industry-state nexus that positions refugees, paradoxically, as uniquely “protected” but precarious workers. Bringing scholarship on precarious labor into conversation with immigration, citizenship, and critical refugee studies, and drawing on interviews and document analysis, I study the case of refugee employment in the meatpacking industry in Colorado from 2005–2024. I show how federal policy resettles economically vulnerable refugees in areas with few labor options and pushes them toward work at all costs, while deregulating meatpacking in ways that normalize degrading work. Meatpacking firms, meanwhile, recruit and hire refugees to replace undocumented immigrants in order to exploit the former’s “legal” but vulnerable status, all while positioning themselves as benevolent employers of “deserving” workers. Finally, the outsourcing of refugee resettlement to structurally constrained NGO actors affords the state bureaucratic distance from a process that effectively supplies firms with citizen-workers for dangerous, low-status jobs. Together, I argue, these practices constitute a refugee labor regime that exploits and maintains refugee workers’ precarity, while leveraging it to divide and stratify immigrant workers more broadly.