On Jan. 19, the U.S. State Department unveiled a new initiative that promises to “empower” U.S. citizens to play a personal role in refugee resettlement. The “Welcome Corps” would encourage Americans to band together in small groups of friends to create “welcome circles,” fundraising on behalf of specific refugees or their families and taking on the responsibility for greeting and assisting them—roles once largely handled by the federal government in collaboration with civil society organizations.
Ordinary citizens have always volunteered support to refugees through existing civil society networks, but the Welcome Corps is different in two ways. First, it institutionalizes an official role for U.S. citizens to help refugees who have been accepted into the country navigate government red tape, by pooling resources to cover the first 90 days of their resettlement costs. That would replace the “initial resettlement benefits” usually provided by the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees. Second, beginning later this year, groups of Americans would be able to help identify individuals they themselves want to help bring to the U.S. for resettlement, presumably also speeding the asylum process, although details on this aspect of the program are still scant.
At first glance, despite all the accolades, there are some reasons to be skeptical of this new program. As Sigal Samuel writes at Vox, “You might be thinking: why should it fall to private citizens to fork over the cash, time, and energy to resettle refugees? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?” In fact, it is the government’s job under refugee law, which requires governments to receive, house, care for and provide resettlement benefits and support to refugees. Yet some governments have increasingly begun shifting this responsibility to private citizens; Poland’s performance in the early months of the Ukraine crisis was a notable example that eventually resulted in an exhausted, demoralized and angry citizenry.
In an earlier WPR column on the Uniting for Ukraine refugee assistance program the U.S. unveiled last year, I pointed to a similar set of problems:
The program was structured to substitute for, rather than expand, existing refugee application processes under the U.S. State Department. Moreover, it displaced the cost of supporting refugees away from the U.S. government—which is bound under treaty law to provide that support—and onto U.S. citizens. Refugees themselves could not even apply to the program; only U.S. citizens willing to sign a form stating they would ‘financially support Ukrainians and their immediate family members’ could sign up.
This, I as well as some refugee relief NGOs argued, risked falling short of U.S. government obligations under refugee law to provide support for asylum-seekers. And it created the appearance of “doing something,” while excluding the most vulnerable refugees and rerouting refugees away from normal asylum processes. Is the Welcome Corps an example of the same phenomenon?
Maybe, but maybe not. For one thing, the Welcome Corps has been widely praised by the same humanitarian NGOs that were critical of Uniting for Ukraine and helped push through congressional reforms to smooth out the kinks of that earlier program. David Miliband, the director of the International Rescue Committee, stated, “The launch of the Welcome Corps is a much-needed pathway to help additional people find safety through the American spirit of welcome.” Myal Greene, president and CEO of World Relief agreed, saying, “Innovative programs like the Welcome Corps are needed. … For years, faith communities have desired to welcome refugees independently, utilizing their resources and connections to create a sense of belonging for new Americans.” More than 200 other humanitarian and human rights organizations have similarly endorsed the new plan.
So, what is different this time?
Perhaps the most obvious difference is that, at least for now, the NGO sector views this program as a supplement to, rather than substitute for, existing government resettlement programs, which the Biden administration has been slowly rebuilding after the Trump administration dismantled much of the United States’ previous resettlement architecture. According to Samuel, advocacy groups that lobbied for the Welcome Corps program insisted on that, and their support for the new program is contingent on the idea that it will open additional pathways to resettlement beyond those already available to refugees, rather than displacing existing State Department programs.
Even if there are risks, there are still some reasons why the new U.S. “Welcome Corps” program might on balance be good for refugees and refugee resettlement more broadly.
Another reason why NGOs may be on board is that the program creates new governmental funding opportunities for them, even as it may take them away from refugees in favor of citizen fundraising. According to the State Department announcement, the private sponsorship program will be operationalized through the NGO sector. A consortium of six major relief organizations will receive funding to manage vetting, training and monitoring sponsors, and community organizations such as churches will also be able to apply for funding in order to coordinate networks of citizen sponsors.
If the intent and result is to build capacity that ends up increasing the net number of refugees in the country, that could be a good thing overall for refugees. And it is certainly true that refugees in the sponsorship program may benefit from the extra social capital and connections they receive from being immediately embedded in sponsorship circles of invested American citizens.
Still, there are a variety of questions about how this will work and whether it could backfire in practice. Even if the State Department intends to augment existing programs now, would a future administration be able to cut refugee resettlement funding once U.S. citizens have already picked up the slack? The program also privileges individuals rather than families, as the cost of a sponsorship to an American sponsor circle is per person rather than per household. And once Americans can start bringing in their friends and contacts from abroad, it will privilege those refugees with ties to Americans wealthy enough to sponsor them, creating a set of haves and have-nots within the asylum lottery, rather than a more equitable “first come, first served” approach.
Even if there are risks, though, there are still some reasons why this new policy might on balance be good for refugees and refugee resettlement more broadly. Institutionalizing financial and social support for refugees has the potential to augment the existing system, but also to change attitudes. Part of the Welcome Corps’ roll-out marketing strategy is about presenting the U.S. and its political culture—to both those abroad and Americans at home—as a country that by definition is welcoming, a country that wants to help, a country whose communities will naturally see the opportunity to get involved as a privilege rather than a burden.
One could view this cynically as a self-serving way for the government to cut its own costs by displacing responsibility for refugees onto taxpayers. But another way to view it is as a framing strategy aiming to undo years of Trump-era anti-refugee discourse.
Indeed, this strategy of getting Americans personally involved in refugee resettlement could actually have the knock-on effect of reinvigorating and popularizing a “Refugees Welcome” attitude across U.S. society, essentially inoculating Americans against anti-immigrant sentiment to some degree. Some research shows that refugee volunteerism helps reduce implicit bias about refugee communities, even controlling for other factors such as whether or not volunteers self-select into refugee work.
At the same time, the Canadian experience with refugee sponsorship programs suggests upsides and downsides to expanding individual sponsorship compared to government resettlement programs. In Canada, sponsorships began as an adjunct to government resettlement bureaucracies. But Shauna Labman, an associate professor of human rights at Global College, told NPR that in recent years sponsorships have started replacing official resettlement programs as the main pathway into the country.
Anna Rossi, who heads a refugee accompaniment ministry in Oakland, California, has similar concerns about the Welcome Corps’ shift to privatizing refugee resettlement tasks. She told The Catholic Review that the program has good intentions, but is “very naïve,” pointing to the inadequacy of the support offered to sponsorship groups as well as the risk of burnout due to the hard work involved with resettling refugees. This echoes Labman’s comments about the Canadian experience: Among other issues Canada’s sponsorship program created, the burden of paperwork and oversight one could reasonably expect of government employees created resentment among citizen volunteers, driving sponsors to drop out.
Clearly, the Welcome Corps has benefits and potential risks. As such, it warrants close observation and analysis despite its wide trumpeting as a wholly positive innovation in refugee support. But it is not surprising to see NGOs applaud Biden’s effort to shift the narrative on refugee resettlement in the U.S. from the isolationist framings that have taken root since 9/11 back to the country’s historical openness as an immigrant nation.
It remains to be seen if the U.S. can learn from the experiences of Canada, Poland and other countries that have experimented with the balance between private and public resettlement programs. For now, framing citizen sponsorships as an opportunity rather than an obligation, and requiring applications and oversight from the State Department itself, seems to be striking the proper balance for a program that Americans can get behind.
Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter.