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 were significantly weakened or dismantled. The infrastructure that once processed tens of thousands of cases per year had atrophied. Resettlement agencies closed offices, trained staff moved on, and the pipeline of approved refugees stalled.

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 lived in uncertainty for years. Challenges continued after arrival. Unless refugees had a friend or family member already in the U.S., they had little say in where they’d be resettled. Government support was limited, and many families had to navigate housing, employment, transportation, education, and health needs with minimal time and help.

What was challenging when I first arrived? Everything.

At the same time, many policymakers lacked a full picture of the end-to-end refugee admissions and resettlement experience. Individual officials understood their slice of the process but couldn’t see how the pieces connected or where handoffs failed. Rebuilding the program required not just policy change, but a clearer understanding of where the system was failing refugees in practice.

The solution

Rebuilding a program that had processed tens of thousands of cases per year couldn’t start with policy levers alone. It had to start with the people the system was supposed to serve. Led by Ariana Berengaut of the Penn Biden Center and Eric Hysen of NCoC, our team took a user-centered approach to developing recommendations that could support the goal of admitting 125,000 refugees in FY2022, up from roughly 15,000 in 2020.

Trauma-informed interviewing surfaced candor that traditional policy interviews never would. Across video calls, we spoke with people involved in refugee policy, operations, advocacy, and implementation. We also spoke with refugees who had personally experienced the admissions and resettlement journey. The interview techniques helped us gather candid insight into what made the process difficult, where it broke down, and what changes could most improve outcomes for refugees and their families.

Publicly available data provided the quantitative complement. It helped us identify refugee populations, understand processing barriers, and model the potential impact of proposed recommendations. Combining the two approaches grounded our recommendations in both human experience and operational reality.

The research produced concrete action plans organized into 100-day, one-year, and two-to-four-year strategies. Recommendations included:

• Expanding the use of virtual interviews for follow-up sessions and hard-to-reach refugee populations
• Prioritizing the completion of security checks for refugees who’d 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

A journey map made the full refugee experience visible to policymakers who’d only seen their own slice. Most stakeholders had worked on one part of the system. The journey map — showing the full admissions and resettlement experience from the perspective of a refugee — made the end-to-end process and its pain points visible in a way many had never seen before. It became a tool for building shared understanding across agencies and advocacy organizations.

Source: Penn Biden Center/NCoC

The results

• Conducted more than 100 interviews with policy experts, operators, advocates, and refugees who experienced the admissions process firsthand — grounding the roadmap in lived experience
• Produced a 50-page report outlining a concrete, phased roadmap for rebuilding USRAP across 100-day, one-year, and two-to-four-year horizons
• Published a complementary paper proposing an agenda for restoring U.S. global leadership on refugee protection
• Created a journey map of the refugee admissions experience from the perspective of a refugee, helping policymakers visualize the full end-to-end process and its pain points
• Informed administration hiring and policy implementation — two project leads later joined the Biden administration in roles positioned to carry the recommendations forward: Eric Hysen as Chief Information Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, and Ariana Berengaut as Senior Advisor to the National Security Advisor