Paper integration: The structural constraints and consequences of the US refugee resettlement program

Abstract

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.

Refugee Status, Settlement Assistance, and the Educational Integration of Migrants’ Children in the United States

“…One notable exception, however, is the US governmental provisions for refugee resettlement, established by the 1980 Refugee Act, which some scholars have pointed to as a rare policy that facilitates integration (Bloemraad 2006; Jiménez 2011; Waters and Pineau 2015; Hooper et al 2016; Tran and Lara-García 2020). Nonetheless, the extent to which integration has occurred for new refugee arrivals has been questioned (Brown and Scribner 2014; Fee 2019). Results from our analysis suggest that many of the problems for refugee integration are rooted in the governmental disinvestment that began a few years after the inception of the 1980 Refugee Act itself.…”

Refugees without Assistance: English-Language Attainment and Economic Outcomes in the Early Twentieth Century

“…In the modern period, refugees also benefit from the fact that they enter the US with permanent legal residence (Portes and Rumbaut 2001;Alba and Nee 2003). Although, in some cases, financial assistance is minimal given structural and resource constraints of resettlement agencies (Fee 2019;Fee and Arar 2019;Gowayed 2019), the positive governmental reception and legal status alone are assumed to facilitate refugee integration. Akresh 2008;Tran and Lara-Garcia 2020).…”

Capacity management of migrant accommodation centers using approximate dynamic programming

“…Also, the delay is assumed to be independent on the unit of capacity expansion. This is because in migrant crisis management, significant delays are usually linked to bureaucracy (Fee, 2019;Soederberg, 2019;Werker, 2007). The impact of these two assumptions are investigated in Section 5.3.…”