1. The United States Refugee Resettlement Program

1Officially established and standardised in 1980, the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) has historically been the largest resettlement programme in the world, until it was surpassed in 2018 for the first time by Canada, as a result of drastic programme cuts under the Trump administration.¹ The resettlement system can be understood as a public-private partnership, wherein initial processing is done at the national level, but the practical functions of resettlement are contracted out to national NGOs and their local affiliates.

2How does a refugee end up in Buffalo, New York? The location where each family is resettled is determined by a range of factors at multiple scales. Unless they have family members already in the US, refugees do not choose where they will be placed. After a refugee is processed by the UNHCR and the State Department abroad, their case is allocated to one of nine private voluntary agencies (‘volags’) contracted with the State Department. Each volag has local affiliates, or resettlement agencies (RRAs), who are tasked with providing Reception and Placement (R&P) services for new arrivals (U.S. Department of State, n.d.). These basic services include securing housing and furnishings, enrolling clients in school and English classes, securing necessary identity documents, and enrolling in public services (U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, 2011).

3Volags distribute accepted refugee cases amongst their local affiliates according to multiple factors. If a case member reports that they have a friend or family member in a particular city, they will be assigned there, as long as there is a resettling agency within 100 miles to manage their case. For ‘free’ cases without a family tie, there is an effort to place families in locations where existing national communities reside (Singer & Wilson, 2006). Each RRA submits a capacity statement, detailing their school system capacity, language access, employment opportunities, housing stock, transportation system, existing refugee and immigrant communities, any special programmes, and other details about their community. Volags then use the information in these capacity statements to distribute cases among their local affiliates (U.S. Department of State, n.d.).

4While placing families near co-nationals is an implicit priority, the State Department also aims to distribute refugees across sites so as not to place disproportionate ‘burden’ on any one location (Singer & Wilson, 2006). Spatial distribution strategies are nothing new – despite being widely criticised by scholars, dispersal strategies have been a common policy response towards refugees and asylees in Denmark, the UK, and other receiving countries, where clustering of asylum seekers and refugees in concentrated locations is generally considered a problem (Robinson et al., 2003; van Liempt & Mielet, 2021; Darling, 2016; Zetter et al., 2005). Similarly for other categories of migrants, Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program provides province-specific visas for labour migrants according to identified skill gaps (Government of Canada, n.d.). This reflects the assumption that dispersal is the best strategy for maximising benefit and integration opportunities, while minimising supposed negative impacts.

5In the USRAP, resources are allocated to this end through programmes such as Preferred Communities, which targets new resettlement locations. Among other goals, it aims for the ‘enhancement of organizational capacity in resettlement locations where refugees may not have been placed previously’ (ORR, 2016). To be eligible for this grant, sites should offer ‘excellent opportunities for refugees with special needs to achieve self-sufficiency in their identified area/s of vulnerability’, prioritising sites with low cost of living and an environment that allows for ‘favorable quality of life’ (ibid.). Buffalo has been a ‘Preferred Community’ for over a decade. The stated aim of this programme is not explicitly to distribute refugees, but by offering extra support to emerging sites for intensive case management services, it is assumed that the spatial priorities of the programme align with maximising well-being for resettled refugees.

6Another reason smaller cities might be preferred for resettlement is financial considerations. Upon arrival, refugees are granted a one-time stipend to defray initial costs. This grant is allocated per capita, and aside from very small increases to offset rising cost of living, the amount remains quite stable. For FY 2022, the amount is USD 1,225 per capita (PRM, 2021). This award is not given directly to the refugee, but is managed and distributed by the agency, to be used for direct payments to cover the refugee’s material needs and other service requirements (ibid.). As a fixed amount, this money can go much farther in locations such as Buffalo, as compared to costlier cities like Los Angeles.

7Theoretically, then, the best effort is made to place refugees in a location where they will be well-supported and have the tools available to them to achieve self-sufficiency. Still, there is considered to be a ‘lottery effect’ in this system, due to the broad variation in services and opportunities at each resettlement site (Brick et al., 2010). A critique of this dispersal and privatisation is that it shifts responsibility to the local level, and refugees may find insufficient support in peripheral locales (Brown & Scribner, 2014; Singer & Wilson, 2006; Darrow, 2015). Additionally, placement in smaller cities, or farther from shared cultural groups, can heighten transition and integration challenges for new arrivals (Phillimore, 2020; van Liempt & Mielet, 2021).

8These critiques highlight the critical importance of local contexts. While primary funding comes from the federal level, ‘institutional’ resettlement still relies heavily on community resources. An array of specialised service providers becomes necessary in sites of resettlement ­ for example, one of the services that must be completed in the 90-day Reception and Placement (R&P) period is a refugee health assessment, so resettlement sites must have public or private clinics which are familiar with administering this assessment. In most cases interpreters are required for all these services, creating a wide demand for interpretation services, at the resettlement agency as well as at clinics, schools, and public offices. This means that it potentially has more expansive impacts at the local level because it is not only a top-down national programme which places individuals at the municipal level, but simultaneously, it is intimately connected to the geography and sociality of the city.

9Therefore, the USRAP is marked by tensions and complexities: it is driven both by humanitarian impetus and geopolitical concerns (Haines & Rosenblum, 2010), it is a national system but lacks standardisation both horizontally and vertically (Bose, 2018), and it makes assumptions about what refugees need, hoping to bring together these needs and the priorities of host communities. This overview makes clear two main points: first, at no point is refugee resettlement solely a humanitarian endeavour (if such a thing exists): from the beginning refugees are strategically allocated to best support host sites. Second, because of the multiscalar and fragmented structure of the USRAP, the local level becomes an important setting for narrative-building and frame-making, and involves a diverse field of actors who act and are acted upon.

2. Welcoming refugees in US cities

10In early humanitarian immigration and in the first decades of the resettlement programme, refugees were largely placed in traditional immigrant gateways – long established destination cities with existing networks of immigrants and a reputation as sites of multiculturalism and diversity (Singer et al., 2008). However, scholars have identified a shift in the geographies of resettlement, noting an increasing presence of refugees in smaller destinations (Pottie-Sherman, 2020; Winders, 2006; Singer & Wilson, 2006). These cities have smaller foreign-born populations and are neither known as sites of economic growth nor multiculturalism.

11In particular, the ‘Rust Belt’ city has emerged as a new and unexpected champion of resettlement. This new pattern is important because of these cities’ status as archetypical cases of decimated urban cores, segregation, urban poverty, and disaffected blue collar workers (Austin, 2017). The Rust Belt is a geographic classification, but primarily one that indicates a shared history and economic trajectory. It refers to cities that were once major manufacturing hubs, but due to global production shifts and the decline of the American coal and steel industries, their factories shuttered in the 1970s and 1980s. The abandoned mills and the cities around them were left to rust: declining locales reminiscing their glory days. Since then, the central shared characteristic of the Rust Belt has been significant population decline, with these cities losing as much as half of their populations. Further driven by white flight, discriminatory lending practices, and urban policy which prioritised highways and suburbs, the region is often characterised by disinvested inner-cities, vacant housing stock, and concentrated poverty (Pottie-Sherman, 2020; Massey & Denton 1993).