Exploring US Federal Policy Discourse on Refugee Access to Post-secondary Education

Multiple refugee crises are taking place simultaneously in several regions of the world. Despite the fact that large numbers of refugees are children and youth, research on policy discourse related to the educational access of refugees beyond remains limited. This situation is particularly acute in the USA even though over 3 million refugees have resettled in that country over the course of the last three decades. In this paper, we take a policy-as-discourse approach (Ball in Education reform: a critical and post-structural approach, Open University Press, Philadelphia, 1994; Discourse Stud Cult Politics of Educ 36(3):306–313, 2015) to analyze policies related to post-secondary education access among refugees in the USA. This analysis reveals refugees’ status in US policy as an invisible group, frequently confounded with other groups under the euphemistic umbrella term “New American.” Moreover, in these policies, refugees are represented as economic burdens, and their economic independence is presented as the key priority of relevant US policies.