Designing a roadmap to rebuild the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program

Summary

The challenge

When refugees come, they want to be self-sufficient. They are workers, they are doctors, they open businesses, they employ people. We pay taxes. Refugees and immigrants are the backbone of the economy of this country.

Refugee from Angola, resettled in 2015

From 2016 to 2020, refugee admissions under USRAP fell to historic lows. During that period, many of the programs and institutional supports required to resettle refugees in the United States were significantly weakened or dismantled.

The refugee experience was difficult at nearly every stage. Overseas, refugees could wait years in camps or temporary settings with limited access to work, medical care, information, and personal safety. While moving through the admissions process, many had little visibility into the status of their case and often lived in uncertainty for years.

Challenges continued after arrival in the United States. Unless refugees had a friend or family member already living here, they had little say in where they would be resettled. Government support was limited, and many families had to navigate housing, employment, transportation, education, and health needs with minimal time and support.

What was challenging when I first arrived? Everything.

At the same time, many policymakers — including some who worked in and around refugee policy — lacked a full picture of the end-to-end refugee admissions and resettlement experience. Rebuilding the program required not only policy change, but a clearer understanding of where the system was failing refugees in practice.

The solution

To help inform a plan for rebuilding USRAP and supporting the goal of admitting 125,000 refugees in FY2022, our team — led by Ariana Berengaut of the Penn Biden Center and Eric Hysen of the National Conference on Citizenship — took a human-centered approach to developing recommendations.

Across dozens of video calls, we interviewed experts involved in refugee policy, operations, advocacy, and implementation, along with refugees who had personally experienced the admissions and resettlement process. Using trauma-informed interviewing techniques, we gathered insight into what made the process difficult, where it broke down, and what changes could most improve outcomes for refugees and their families.

We complemented those interviews with analysis of publicly available data to identify refugee populations, understand processing barriers, and model the potential impact of proposed recommendations.

From this work, we developed concrete action plans organized into 100-day, 1-year, and 2–4 year strategies. Recommendations included:

• Expanding the use of virtual interviews for follow-up interviews and hard-to-reach refugee populations
• Prioritizing the completion of security checks for refugees who had been stuck in the pipeline for years after interviewing
• Developing a refugee-informed algorithmic approach to determine where refugees are resettled in the U.S.
• Expanding the scale and scope of resettlement support
• Guaranteeing six months of housing support for all refugees, rather than limiting support based on employability or health conditions
• Giving resettlement agencies and states greater flexibility in how funding could be used to meet diverse refugee needs

Because policymakers often worked on only one part of the system, we also created a journey map showing the full refugee admissions and resettlement experience from the perspective of a refugee. This helped make the end-to-end process — and its pain points — visible in a way many stakeholders had never seen before.

Source: Penn Biden Center/NCoC

The results

• Completed more than 100 interviews with policy experts, operators, advocates, and refugees who experienced the admissions process firsthand
• Helped produce a 50-page report and a complementary paper outlining a concrete roadmap for rebuilding USRAP
• Created a journey map of the refugee admissions experience from the perspective of a refugee, helping policymakers understand the full end-to-end process
• Contributed to a body of work whose project leads later joined the Biden administration in roles positioned to influence implementation of the recommendations