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Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non‐state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti‐migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work‐related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis‐gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced displacement – the involuntary movement of people from their homes and livelihoods – has captured public attention through diverging discourses of humanitarianism and global xenophobia. 2.5 million asylum claims were lodged in the European Union (EU) in 2015–16 leading to national and region-wide strategies of border securitization. Refugee governance in the EU is marked by contradictory ideological positions where liberal humanitarianism, through refugee acceptance, dovetails with racial violence evidenced by ongoing detention and circuitous displacement. These divergent positions, and their resultant policies of refugee management, avoid the social reality of neoliberalisation as it pertains to widespread homelessness and work-related insecurity in major EU cities such as Paris. This disavowal occurs in a raced market and impedes the survival of refugees through insistence on self-reliance – a disciplinary logic endemic to neoliberalism and imposed on refugees upon relocation. I argue that self-reliance transforms refugees into disposable subjects in capitalism at various stages of the asylum process from escape and detention to relocation and ongoing displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]