The two African refugees arrived in Oneonta, New York—a quaint, upstate college town of just over 12,000 people—in summer 2023. By then a group of volunteers had been preparing for them for "six, seven, eight years."
Mark Wolff, communication chair of The Otsego Refugee Resettlement Coalition (ORRC), says his group had to put its hopes of helping refugees on hold during the Trump administration, which cut the refugee cap to its lowest level ever. Even after Joe Biden's inauguration, with promises of a more humane immigration policy on the horizon, things didn't look good for their plans: Oneonta was more than an hour away from the requisite refugee caseworkers in Utica. During the bitter upstate New York winters, help would be even slower to arrive.
The ORRC had already begun to raise money and identify community partners. It had done its homework and it had momentum. So when the Biden administration announced the Welcome Corps—an initiative that would let private citizens take the lead on sponsoring and supporting refugees, rather than the longstanding government-led approach—the coalition knew it had found its way to welcome newcomers. "We were one of the first [private sponsor groups] in the United States to get approval," Wolff says.
A handful of people make up the sponsor group's core steering committee, which meets weekly. But around 100 volunteers support the refugees in a broader capacity, with everyone from the mayor to the local Rotary Club getting involved. When some townspeople expressed concerns about the newcomers—particularly as New York City dealt with an influx of asylum seekers and bused many of them upstate—the Republican-dominated Otsego County Board of Representatives let Wolff give a presentation to dispel myths about refugees and describe the sponsorship effort.
"We seem to have a lot of support that crosses political divides," Wolff observes. "A lot of people often take a stance for or against immigration as a concept, but once you meet refugees, it's kind of hard not to like them. They've been through so much, and just to see them and to relate to them as people I think really does a lot to get people to come together."
The Welcome Corps is one of several private sponsorship schemes to be rolled out in the last three years. From the Sponsor Circle Program for Afghans to Uniting for Ukraine to a program specifically for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), Americans who are moved by scenes of suffering around the world can put those feelings into action.
Wolff's sentiment speaks to the promise of these young private sponsorship schemes: getting more Americans directly involved in the welcoming process, getting newcomers to the point of self-sufficiency more quickly, and improving outcomes for immigrant and native communities alike. At a time when Americans are increasingly concerned about migration into the country, these community-driven approaches could be key to rebuilding trust in both immigrants and immigration.
'Looking Back in the Past'
The U.S. has a long history of using private sponsorship to welcome newcomers. "It actually predates the traditional resettlement system," says Kit Taintor, former vice president of policy and practice at Welcome.US, a nonprofit that helps inform Americans interested in sponsoring refugees. "It was really only after the passage of the Refugee Act in 1980 that it became sort of the model that we know as traditional resettlement"—that is, conducted through refugee resettlement agencies with coordination and funding from the federal government.
Voluntary organizations "sponsored and funded the resettlement of displaced family members overseas" throughout the early 20th century, wrote David J. Bier and Matthew La Corte in a 2016 Niskanen Center paper. "Religious and ethnic groups provided resources and sponsors to refugees without families in the United States," and after World War II "these private associations and societies were the primary sponsors for refugees, funding almost all refugee resettlement to the United States with private money."
Even after the Refugee Act created the government-led refugee resettlement system, the Reagan administration launched an initiative that let private organizations finance refugee arrivals that fell outside of the normal quotas. The organizations provided "food, housing, medical insurance, and cash insurance," explained Bier and La Corte. From 1987 to 1995, the program resettled over 16,000 refugees, the vast majority of whom were Cubans or Soviet Jews. The Clinton administration didn't renew the initiative, citing financial challenges for sponsoring organizations. (A complex application process for those organizations didn't help matters.)
"In some ways," says Taintor, the Welcome Corps grew from "looking back in the past to find things that worked well and applying them to the current situation."
The traditional refugee program wasn't ready for two major international crises that displaced millions recently—the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As of late 2021, with the refugee system still reeling from the Trump administration (and already dysfunctional and backlogged long before then), refugees could expect a resettlement wait time of anywhere from two to 10 years. Unsurprisingly, in the first month after the Russian invasion, just 12 Ukrainians came to the U.S. through the traditional program. On top of that, the vast majority of Afghans and Ukrainians didn't qualify as refugees under the U.S. government's definition of the word.
The Biden administration launched a private sponsorship program for evacuated Afghans in October 2021, in hopes of "complementing the work of the State Department's non-profit resettlement agency partners." In April 2022 it announced another capacity-building program, called Uniting for Ukraine, which provides two-year residency and employment authorization to Ukrainians who are sponsored by groups of private citizens. While the Afghan program has been small—as of April 2022, just 415 Afghans were being sponsored by citizen groups—Uniting for Ukraine has seen Americans sponsoring more than 117,000 Ukrainians as of February 2023.
One of those sponsors is Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University—and contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog hosted by Reason—who writes regularly about migration. From the time he submitted the necessary sponsorship forms in November 2022, it took just nine days for the U.S. government to authorize the Hasanovs, a Ukrainian family of three, for admission to the country. They arrived five weeks later, a stark contrast to the years refugees currently wait under the traditional resettlement system. The Hasanovs now live in Jacksonville, Florida, and the Somins have already sponsored another family, who arrived in the U.S. in late October.
These programs helped lay the foundation for the Welcome Corps, which launched in January 2023. Groups of five U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents may qualify to be sponsors if they commit to financial requirements and support expectations. "What we're doing here is we're just streamlining the ability for all of these folks, whether they are in Denver, Colorado, or whether they are in Lansing, Michigan, to allow them to participate more directly in the welcoming of newcomers," says Taintor.
Private sponsors are now active in around 10,000 zip codes. Under the traditional model, by contrast, refugees must be placed where there are refugee resettlement agencies, limiting them to 340 communities. Groups like Oneonta's ORRC benefit from the lack of location requirements—and so do the refugees. Those smaller towns often have lower housing costs and tighter community bonds than the urban centers that traditional resettlement efforts tend to favor.
The federal government has also begun to embrace private sponsorship as a partial solution to pressures at the U.S.-Mexico border. As of January, Americans can sponsor Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, an effort intended both to help people who want to flee turmoil in those ailing countries and steer them away from illegal migration pathways. In its first six months, the program welcomed nearly 160,000 migrants.
Though private sponsorship isn't a new concept, it's being applied to new challenges—and by many counts, it's been wildly successful.
'A Hugely Transformative Experience'
There are a number of factors that predict how well and how quickly a refugee will integrate into a new community—speaking English, for instance. "One of the things that really drives integration is friendships with members of the receiving community," Taintor notes. "What research has shown over time is that if a newcomer really develops a relationship with somebody who is from the community they're resettling in, their integration is accelerated in the same way that their integration will be accelerated through knowing English."
In this way, private sponsorship models have a distinct advantage over government-led resettlement. Refugees arrive with a built-in network. Privately sponsored refugees in Canada, which has the longest-standing private sponsorship program in the world, "generally adapt more quickly to Canada than those who arrive through the government-assisted pathway," according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Sponsorship isn't just "a hugely transformative experience" for refugees, says Taintor. It "allows sponsors to really get to know the family that they are welcoming and put their skill sets…to work to help that newcomer find success here in the United States." She points out that Americans have "innate wisdom"—knowledge about good school districts, how to use libraries, where to find health care—that refugee resettlement agencies simply might not have. The smaller-scale process means that existing networks and local knowledge matter a lot.
Oneonta's two privately sponsored refugees—one from Burundi, one from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—might find people from their home countries if the government settled them somewhere like New York City. But they'd miss out on the personal connections they've been able to build with Oneonta locals, the kinds of connections Taintor says are predictors of successful integration. "We're small enough that we can invite them over to our house, they get to meet the mayor, they get to meet other community leaders," says Wolff. "I think we sort of offer a kind of hospitality that a larger city might not be able to offer as well."
Because sponsors are financially responsible for refugees, they have a strong incentive to get refugees working and self-sufficient. The Niskanen Center has found that 70 percent of privately sponsored refugees in Canada secured a job within a year of arrival, compared to just 40 percent of government-sponsored refugees. Private sponsorship could thus infuse new life into the U.S. economy at a critical time, given ongoing labor shortages and economic pain.
One of the biggest selling points for private sponsorship is one of its most intuitive results: When people have an opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. legally, they're far less likely to immigrate here illegally. According to a 2023 paper Bier wrote for the Cato Institute, the CHNV program, combined with an app-based admission process at the border, has transformed migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela "from mostly illegal to mostly legal in less than a year." This reduces the government's enforcement burden and creates a more orderly border. The latter directly addresses many Americans' concerns about immigration.
Despite all this promise, some aspects of the private sponsorship schemes could threaten their success. And some critics want the programs gone.
'Permanent Homes'
Congress hasn't passed broad immigration reform in decades, which means that a huge amount of decision making on the issue rests in the president's hands. That's a problem for programs like Uniting for Ukraine, which Biden authorized. "The executive aspect," Somin says, makes it "by nature temporary and potentially revocable by a future executive." House Republicans have already passed one border bill that would effectively shut down the programs for Afghans and Ukrainians, were it to become law.
The CHNV program faces a much more immediate challenge: a lawsuit brought against it by Texas and 19 other GOP-led states. They claim it lacks congressional authorization. Somin, conversely, argued in an amicus brief that immigration law authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to grant temporary "parole" entry to migrants "for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit," both of which apply to CHNV nationals. "Officials from the very states challenging the program have themselves repeatedly talked about how horrible the communist governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are," Somin says. "They should listen to what they themselves have said and drop the lawsuit."
Even if the sponsorship programs survive, their beneficiaries could face serious obstacles.
The CHNV, Afghan, and Ukrainian programs let migrants live and work in the U.S. for two years. Once those two years are up, they have to rely on stopgap status extensions, still unsure of their ability to build permanent lives in the United States. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that "the vast majority" of Ukrainians will want to go home eventually. But "many of them will want and need permanent homes," says Somin. "Most post–World War II refugees who came to the U.S., for instance, never ended up going back, because their original homes were destroyed."
Congress has previously passed adjustment acts to give permanent status to large groups of people who fled authoritarianism and war, such as Cubans and Vietnamese refugees. "That's good for them, but it's also good for the U.S. economy," Somin argues. "People with permanent status can be more productive. They can make long-term plans for their work and education, for the upbringing of their kids." There are Ukrainian, Venezuelan, and Afghan adjustment acts before Congress, but none have gotten close to full passage.
The CHNV program has a unique problem: It's capped at 30,000 recipients per month, which led to a backlog of 1.7 million applicants not even a year into its existence. "That has actually mitigated the program's effectiveness in stemming problems at the border," says Somin. "If there's this massive backlog, people who need to flee are less likely to rely on the program if all they can do is get into a queue that they can't get out of for several years or longer."
Officials could learn from these flaws and combine the best of each private program to create more streamlined and effective pathways. Instead, private sponsorship may be evolving into yet another battleground in the unproductive war over immigration policy.
'We Need Them'
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called the Welcome Corps "the boldest innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades."
There's truth to that. Private sponsorship schemes have ended a decadeslong government monopoly on welcoming refugees. They're providing quick relief to migrants who otherwise might have waited years to reach a safe haven in the U.S., or who would have never made it here at all. And they're bringing newcomers far beyond city centers, helping to revitalize economically depressed areas. They've proven that a smaller-government, community-driven approach to immigration can be good for both immigrants and native-born Americans. Proponents of private sponsorship often say that it's not meant to replace the government-led approach, but even so, it's an invaluable complement.
As international conflicts and humanitarian disasters displace millions of people worldwide, it's critical that countries give their citizens an opportunity to act on their goodwill and live out their values. Thousands of Americans have shown that, given that opportunity, they're more than willing to help. Reducing the financial burden on the government gets around one of the most common criticisms of welcoming refugees, and putting more Americans into direct contact with refugees fosters better relationships than the government-run system does.
For communities like Oneonta, welcoming newcomers is more than just a matter of immigration policy—it could be a matter of survival.
"We're losing population and there's a labor shortage here…Our community needs new people, and refugees are a great source to revitalize a community," Wolff says. "We need them."
There have been bumps in the road. The refugees were supposed to come with Social Security cards in hand when they arrived in July, but they didn't get them until late September. Many employers were hesitant to hire them until they got those. The local social services department wasn't quite sure how to help the newcomers, having never really seen refugees before.
Despite those struggles, Wolff is hopeful. "If we can find employment for them, if they become self-sufficient, then we will have figured out how to do it," he says. "And then we can bring more over and hopefully build a community within our community."
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