Embodied movement within and across national borders has been increasing. Prompted by intensifying local–global unsettling, it has led to a series of tensions concerning the way even the most supposedly cosmopolitan of countries now treat the refugees and migrants. Those who seek refuge have become a problem. In this conflict-ridden world in which the displacement has become endemic – and in this mediated world where the hope of finding a better place to live is held out as part of the dominant global imaginary – countries across the globe are now attempting to manage the global flow of non-citizens. Here the visceral immediacy of human needs and hopes is confronted by the abstracting machinery of state surveillance and management. This chapter explores the tensions between the continuing embodied movement of those who seek refuge and the intensifying abstraction of state engagement with those persons. The chapter takes three liberal democracies as its focus – Australia, Canada, and the United States. These are settler colonial countries which we might expect to be cosmopolitan and welcoming. The history of refugee reception is, however, a movement away from that sensibility.