Many people who care about refugees have taken to asking themselves, especially in the past few years, what happened in the United States to make the country turn so decisively against displaced people. Although the United States has certainly never been consistent in protecting everyone who has sought refuge on its shores and has been politically calculated in who it classified as a refugee, it has been a long-standing part of American identity to pay lip service to the idealized notion of being a beacon of freedom for the persecuted of the world. Alice Coen's Reconfiguring Refugees helps us understand what happened to undermine the consensus behind that commitment.

The book looks at the specific case of the 2015–2016 election cycle in the United States to understand how threat construction can change the course of refugee policy. It argues that 2015–2016 was something of a critical juncture in American refugee policy history and provides us a close examination of how global and national narratives interacted and influenced each other, arguing that discourse is powerful and matters for policy outcomes.

Reconfiguring Refugees is boundary challenging in several ways that are important for the discipline of political science. First, the book does not fit neatly into one of the “big four” subfields. It bring