Haunting the B/Order: Ablenationalism and Disability in U.S. Perceptions of Central American Asylum Seekers

Abstract

Disability is rarely acknowledged in scholarship on refugees and asylum‐seekers, despite the trauma of fleeing conflict, migration's impact on physical and mental health, and the stigma that accompanies the way refugees and asylum‐seekers (disabled or not) are expected to be self‐sufficient. Like disabled communities, asylum‐seekers are often framed as social burdens, valued for their potential economic contributions. This study applies Bérubé's concept of narrative deployments of disability and the frameworks of ablenationalism and debility to ask how public perceptions of Central American asylum seekers in the United States are shaped by neoliberal‐ableist logics, and how the ideology of ability undergirds systems of inequality even in the absence of an explicitly disabled figure. To address these, we draw on open‐ended survey data from a politically diverse US sample ( N  = 270), analyzing responses about resource allocation for refugees using qualitative abductive analysis. Findings show that perceptions of asylum‐seekers reproduce compulsory able‐bodiedness, reinforcing economic productivity as a prerequisite for citizenship. This aligns with historical trends in which disability metaphors have shaped im/migration policies to restrict access to rights. By centering disability, we argue that ablenationalism operates alongside racialized political economies to uphold borders, both material and social.