"Integration is a Gift from God": Blackness, Externalization, and the Figure of the Refugee

Focusing on the case of Italy and border externalization mechanisms in the Horn of Africa, this article argues that refugeehood has become interpellated with Blackness in the Mediterranean world and beyond. Departing from integration discourse and bringing together the Black Mediterranean and Anti-Refugee Machine frameworks, I demonstrate how the move to elide the refugee category with Blackness has attenuated violence, disenfranchisement, and mechanisms of preemptive detention against Black Africans and other racially marked groups. Moreover, externalization policies have fundamentally altered broader institutional policies, making meaningful integration almost impossible to achieve in either the Global North or South. Refugee integration is a "gift from God" insofar as it maintains the categorical exceptionalism that constitutes the category.