Refugee Resettlement and Integration As a Complex Policy Problem: How Economic Self-Sufficiency Discourse and Institutional Design Overshadow Social Inclusion at State and Local Levels

Background:

Refugee resettlement in the United States can be seen as a complex policy problem both in so far as multi-level implementation strategies across individual states, as well the often-conflicting discourses that lie behind policy and implementation and stated goals at different levels of implementation. From a federal standpoint, resettlement policy, and its concerns in relation to integration, is decidedly economic in focus, but this has been contested locally in practice. Based on ORR’s overarching policy guidance, each state government is then responsible for developing and implementing specific resettlement and integration goals. Drawing political science theories of discursive institutionalism and institutional design, this paper examines the ways that refugee resettlement policy goals and values filter down through varied institutional scales or tiers of governance.

Method:

As part of a broader ethnographic study, data were collected via 12 months of fieldwork (January 2024 to January 2025) in Michigan as site of study. Data include participant observation, archival/documents research and in-depth interviews (n 10) with refugee resettlement stakeholders at the county and state level in Michigan. Interviewees include refugees themselves and leaders and workers/staff in resettlement agencies, state- and county-level governments, and civil society and nonprofit organizations, as well as business or for-profit organizations. To supplement our site-specific approach, we conducted archival/documents research to examine state and county level governance of resettlement at a national scale. Specifically, we searched governmental documents and websites to trace the institutional structure of state-level Offices of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

Results:

In applying political science theories of discursive institutionalism and institutional design, results illustrate how regional and local levels of government reflect overarching federal policy goals of economic self-sufficiency. We argue that economic self-sufficiency discourse and institutional design guide policy implementation efforts in resettlement at the local level (state, county). This, in turn, produces gaps in economic empowerment for certain refugee individuals. It also leads to an overdetermination of employment as an indicator of refugee and immigrant inclusion, rather than uplifting other markers and outcomes of social inclusion and wellbeing. The federalist system in relation to resettlement is changing towards strategies of emergent governance, in this case the development of regional community collaborators (RCCs). This allows policy implementation to be done in less hierarchical ways. Yet this shift to inter-organizational policy governance is still shaped by federal discourse centered on economic self-sufficiency and population growth in relation to labor markets.

Conclusion/Implications:

The paper argues that a focus on economic self-sufficiency discourse in resettlement policy implementation may obscure integration goals outcomes for those not considered as income earners, particularly individuals in a family unit such as non-working spouses and youth. It also may cause an undermining of markers of other domains (education, health, social care, housing, leisure, civic engagement) that can be equally critical to successful social inclusion. Therefore, it is important to promote strong stakeholders at the county and state level of policy implementation that advocate from a social inclusion perspective, rather than only the economic integration domain.