Jennifer Erickson's Race-ing Fargo offers a crucial glimpse into the politics of refugee resettlement in the United States Midwest. Drawing on interviews and relationships forged over a year of ethnographic research, Erickson focusses on the city's two largest refugee groups, Bosnians and South Sudanese, to offer a “case study for how citizenship is practiced and how diversity is approached in Fargo, North Dakota, and what the consequences of these practices are” (3). Through a detailed analysis of the resettlement process, Erickson explores how nonprofit and government organizations, city administrators, local citizens, and refugees themselves have navigated the bureaucracy and logistics in settling in a city whose inhabitants and climate have been less than welcoming. Ultimately, Erickson's thoughtful examination of individual refugees, case workers, and the place they have forged in local communities portrays New Americans not as victims to be pitied and given aid, but as agents of change who provide crucial economic and cultural benefits to the city.

Race-ing Fargo reorients scholarship on refugee and immigrant politics to a small city in the upper Midwest to examine the diversity in a place with a reputation for not being diverse. While much of the literature on refugee resettlement has focussed on large metropolises on either coast, Fargo, North Dakota, Erickson posits, provides a much-needed look at a small city in a region that scholars often overlook as “flyover country, homogenous, provincial,” but that is representative of many refugees’ first encounter with the United States (5). Erickson positions Fargo as both an exceptional and prototypical example of small-city refugee resettlement. A booming economy thanks to oil “fracking” and a place in the coldest of the contiguous forty-eight states set Fargo apart, but nonetheless, Erickson positions the city as a “mirror for the state of refugee resettlement in the country (17).”

The first half of Erickson's study (chapters 1–3) offers background into the places and organizations with which refugees came into contact over the course of their journey. A thoughtful treatment of Fargo's history as a Native American space settled violently by Scandinavians shifts into a look at the complex politics of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is followed by a brief history of the wars in Sudan, which were fought over religion, oil, gold, and water. After establishing refugees’ reasons for leaving their places of origin and outlining the traumas they carried along their journeys, Erickson offers a complex and thorough examination of the NGOs and welfare agencies tasked with resettling and funding refugees once they reached Fargo. Revealing the structural inequalities embedded in the bureaucracy of resettlement, Erickson argues that because these organizations tend to be staffed by white, Christian women who must adhere to inflexible rules, they cannot serve New Americans equitably or even equally. Ultimately, she argues that training on “how structures of inequality operate, both locally and globally,” would help case workers and welfare administrators foster deeper understandings of refugees’ concerns (116).

While the first chapters offer glimpses of the racial discrimination confronting refugees in Fargo, racialized notions of citizenship become central to the last three chapters of the book. In Fargo, local white residents who saw themselves as a particular brand of “North Dakota nice” that hinged on superficial friendliness and a perceived work ethic disparaged New Americans who did not smile or engage in small talk. Locals justified their racial anxieties with comments about the perceived unfriendliness of New Americans or misguided ideas about the economic burden they placed on Fargo. Refugee communities, however, were not fooled by the superficial friendliness of Upper Midwestern culture, nor were they monolithic communities that shared common values or even languages. Within the Bosnian communities, Erickson emphasizes the differences between urban and rural, Bosnian and Herzegovinian migrants, most of whom scorned the Roma majority, a group who maintained their own culture and interacted little with fellow Bosnians. South Sudanese shared a violent past and a general commitment to Christianity, but tribal and ethnic differences meant that few shared a language and that most conversed in Arabic or English. Erickson speaks Bosnian, making her analysis of this community more comprehensive, but her attention to Roma families and diverse South Sudanese tribes expertly points to the racial, ethnic, and religious diversity within refugee populations. As a group, South Sudanese and Bosnians bring racial and religious diversity to Fargo, while also bolstering the local economy by maintaining manufacturing jobs and providing a consumer base. Ultimately, Erickson's book uses an understudied region of the United States to make the case that refugees benefit small American cities both culturally and economically. Despite Fargo's unique economy and climate, Erickson demonstrates that, to truly understand refugee economies and broader immigration patterns, scholars must begin studying settlements in small cities across the United States.