This ethnographic study investigates the lives and identities of immigrant youth in Arizona. It explores their efforts to resolve their Mexican and American identities as shifting immigration policies threaten their immigration status. These youths are DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients, former unauthorized migrants brought to the United States as children by their families and granted temporary lawful status and work authorization by the Obama administration in 2012. Arizona is home to nearly 26,000 DACA recipients. Through participant observation, and in-depth interviews (structured and unstructured), this study examines DACA recipients' distinctive and ambivalent integration as Americans. The author's own experience as a DACA recipient provides an insider's perspective, creating an auto-ethnographic exploration of identity that opens insights into the experiences of others. Narratives elicited from eleven DACAmented young adults provide an ethnographic lens through which to explore the complex concept of belonging, an often-contradictory attempt to find acceptance in American society while also embracing their cross-border cultural formation. Examination of their everyday experiences shows that the acknowledged privileges granted by the DACA program do effectively further enculturate DACA recipients into American society; yet capricious U.S. and Arizona immigration policies simultaneously contest the legitimacy of DACA recipients' decisive inclusion into the state and the nation. The coherence of their identities is thus destabilized, obligating them to adopt identities that are either fixed, conflictual, fluid, or new.

Protracted Refugee Situations (PRS) are of serious concern due to their adverse impacts on human rights and stability in host countries. This thesis profiles three, so-called, durable solutions for refugees: local integration, third country resettlement, and voluntary repatriation. However, refugees living in PRS are not given any durable solutions, and they remain confined to refugee camps while the conflicts that forced them from their homelands continue. Refugees usually find themselves in PRS as a result of the restrictive policies of the country in which they have sought refuge. These conditions not only deprive refugees of basic human rights, but act as catalysts for political violence, insurgency, and radicalization. This thesis examines, in detail, one such case: Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon where refugees have been living in PRS for decades due to stringent refugee policies that contributed to violent clashes that took place in May 2007. The denial of human rights for Palestinians in Lebanon has effectively marginalized already disempowered refugee populations, thereby increasing the likelihood of instability and radicalization. The denial of rights, a lack of opportunities, and confinement to the poor conditions of the refugee camp, are driving forces of political violence and militant rhetoric. This situation can endanger the refugee host country as well as the refugees, who are civilians in need of international protection. Therefore, there is a strong connection between the inclusion of rights for refugee populations in a host country, and peace and security. The case of Palestinians in Lebanon is examined as a microcosm of the notion that human rights and state security are interdependent. Recognition of this interdependence necessitates a paradigm shift in perspectives and policies of international refugee protection and state security, from regarding PRS as an indefinite state of emergency to be contained, to acknowledgment that the indefinite duty to protect refugees in protracted situations simultaneously serves the host country's security concerns.