Most of the world’s 25.4 million refugees have been displaced for five or more years. A sharp curtailment in refugee arrivals to the United States, then, isn’t just a national decision, but a global disruption.
The migration literature contends that, unlike other immigrants, refugees resettled in the US benefit from a federal program of integration. These claims do not consider the barriers that may complicate the implementation of resettlement policy. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a refugee resettlement agency in California, I argue that the organizational structure of the US Resettlement Program shapes how caseworkers provide resettlement services on a daily basis. The financial insecurity of Resettlement Agencies coupled with high stakes government oversight creates an organizational culture of vulnerability where caseworkers rely on discretion as they put resettlement policy into practice. Caseworkers develop coping mechanisms to get by as they simultaneously attend to the demands of their funders and their refugee clients. Given these structural constraints and limited resources, caseworkers instrumentalize paperwork as a discretionary tool. When files and documents are privileged over the quality and extent of resettlement services, caseworkers creatively utilize paperwork to separate policy from practice in order to protect themselves and appease their refugee clients. This policy of integration instead becomes a practice of paper integration, which problematizes prior theories and assumptions about US refugee resettlement. This practice of paper integration ultimately affects the services that arriving refugees receive and the degree to which they benefit from this ostensible program of integration.
The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the application of research on language and culture to educational and societal concerns. Through its work in research, information dissemination, development of instructional materials and language tests, and professional development and technical assistance to schools, districts, and states, CAL serves as a liaison between the academic world of research and the practical world of language education and language-related concerns. CAL plays a leading role in articulating language-and culture-related issues that affect policy decisions; conducting research on language use, language learning, and effective teaching methods; and translating research into practical applications that help language learners succeed.CAL is involved in a variety of research areas related to language, ranging across age, language background, and educational settings for language teaching and learning. Research studies are funded by the US government, private foundations, and state education agencies. The following summaries represent a selection of recent and ongoing research projects related to K-12 (elementary and secondary) English as a second language (ESL) education, and elementary through adult foreign language instruction. Within these two areas of language education research, CAL's work covers such topics as instructional methodology, language assessment, effective program models, and national trends in language learning. (For more information on CAL, visit www.cal.org.)
The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is a private, nonprofit organization with over 50 years’ experience in the application of research on language and culture to educational and societal concerns. CAL carries out its mission to improve communication through better understanding of language and culture by engaging in a variety of projects in the areas of primary, secondary, and adult education, including research on effective strategies for the instruction of linguistically and ethnically diverse students; evaluation of the effectiveness of educational programs for such students; professional development for teachers and other staff working with linguistically diverse students; development of instructional materials and language tests; and services to support cultural orientation of immigrants and refugees.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.