Hierarchies of Worth: Race and the Politics of Costly State Action
Why did Europeans open their homes to Ukrainian refugees in 2022 while turning away Syrians fleeing a comparable catastrophe in 2015? Why did the United States deport Haitian families at the southern border while offering Afghans and Ukrainians temporary protection? And why did Western sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine reach historic severity, while atrocities in Tigray, Myanmar, and Yemen produced narrower and more procedurally constrained responses?
Hierarchies of Worth argues that these are not separate puzzles. They reflect a single conditional logic that runs through costly state action in the international system. Economic scarcity, foreign-policy salience, and racialized worthiness interact to determine which populations are welcomed, sustained, neglected, or excluded. The book develops a structural account of when costly state action becomes politically feasible, and it shows that the same logic that produces selective welcome toward refugees also shapes humanitarian aid commitments and the imposition of economic sanctions.
The argument is tested across four quantitative domains and one comparative historical case study: 1. cross-national asylum policy across twenty-two Global North destinations from 1962 to 2020; 2. U.S. border enforcement under Title 42 and the Uniting for Ukraine and CHNV parole programs, where the same legal authority produced expulsion rates that varied by a factor of seven across nationalities; 3. humanitarian aid through the UN OCHA Financial Tracking Service, organized around the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Türkiye-Syria earthquake of 2023; 3. economic sanctions, where bilateral racial distance predicts the most discretionary instruments of coercion; and 4. Carter administration archives on the divergent treatment of Vietnamese and Haitian boat people in 1979 and 1980.