Sarah R. Meiners is a Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. They are a political and legal historian of U.S. empire and migration, especially refugee and asylum policy. Prior to joining the Dickey Center, Sarah received their PhD in History, with a graduate minor in Asian American Studies, from Cornell University.
Sarah is currently working on their first monograph, Asylum Archipelago: Conditional Refuge in the U.S. Empire of Migrants. Asylum Archipelago examines refugee and asylum policy in the U.S. empire from 1975 to 2003. Moving archipelagically from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean through the Panama Canal to the Northern Mariana Islands, it analyzes how U.S. federal officials, with both cooperation and contestation from territorial policymakers and foreign governments, employed extraterritorial and intraterritorial legal regimes to construct the U.S. refugee migration apparatus. While the externalization of U.S. migration policy infringed upon migrant, territorial, and Indigenous rights, it also provided opportunities for places within the U.S. empire to renegotiate their legal, political, and economic relationships with the United States. Migration control especially emerged as a central pillar in formal territorial status adjustment and decolonization movements. By studying these interactions, Asylum Archipelago repositions the United States as an empire of migrants, rather than as a “nation of immigrants.”
Sarah is also conducting research for their second book project, tentatively titled Guantánamo Kids: Refugee Children and the U.S. Caribbean Refugee Migration Apparatus. Guantánamo Kids unites histories of migration and childhood to compare the experiences of Cuban and Haitian refugee children between 1980 and 1995. It probes how anti-Blackness, criminalization, and notions of childhood contributed to changing standards of care and the eventual detention of child refugees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
