You Get What You Ask for: How Contracts and Performance Measures Shape Refugee Resettlement Policy

Refugee resettlement policy has remained largely unchanged since the adoption of the Refugee Act of 1980 (the Act). There have been small changes made to the Act, mostly in the form of shortened time limits, but no policy overhaul or major adjustments. Rather, the most significant recent changes to refugee resettlement policy have to do with the structure of contracts and performance measures put into place by federal granting institutions. Research in other areas of social policy has shown how technologies of New Public Management have the potential to create shifts in the incentive structure of the organizations tasked with implementing social policies, and how these shifts can effect real change in the way these policies take shape at the ground level. This paper takes up the perspective of street-level organizations research in order to explain the ways in which mangers and workers at two local refugee resettlement organizations responded to shifts in federal management techniques, specifically as they pertained to refugee employment programs and services. 

Data for this paper come from an organizational ethnographic study that uses a street-level approach to understand how resettlement policy is implemented. Qualitative research was conducted over an 18-month period at two urban resettlement agencies operating comprehensive services. Research methods included over 150 interviews with 75 subjects, extensive observation, and archival review of relevant documents and contracts. Subjects included local agency management and staff as well as policy professionals at the state and federal level. Data was coded using a theoretically based matrix, and analyzed with the guide of street-level theory.

This paper finds that shifts in federal refugee resettlement employment contracts impacted the structure of service provision for refugee clients at both agencies, and that the performance measures associated with these contracts created incentives which influenced how workers delivered employment services. A contractual shift reducing the period for which agencies were able to report client outcomes for grant ‘credit’ prompted managers at both agencies to reduce service provision to that same time period. Workers at one agency used discretion to decide when to offer services to clients who had ‘timed out,’ but they did so in an ad hoc manner for clients who were the easiest to serve. Clients who were more challenging to work with often ‘timed-out’ for service, and were rarely ones for whom workers were willing to extend ongoing support. In addition, this paper finds that measurements focused on how many clients were successfully employed created an incentive for workers to forge relationships with employers that would hire as many clients as possible, and to provide services to clients in groups rather than individually. Behaviors influenced by measures attuned to rapid employment included pushing clients to accept the first job offered to them, and sanctioning clients who were choosy about what job they would take. These findings suggest that the managers of resettlement organizations need to find ways to reward workers for making practice choices that respond primarily to client need rather than to contract and measurement pressures.