But, but, but….we are told that refugees are self-sufficient very quickly—that they are not costing federal, state and local taxpayers much! In fact, we are told repeatedly that they are actually adding to the local economy!
Although it’s an overt pitch for more taxpayer dollars for refugee resettlement, there are a couple of points worth making about this opinion piece by Dr. Jill Koyama at The Huffington Post.
First, for long time readers, you know that the Resettlement contractors are always bragging about how quickly refugees become self-sufficient and get off welfare. You know it can’t be true or why would this author and others suggest refugee programs need more money from the US taxpayer. The contractors can’t have it both ways! Either refugees are in poverty or they are quickly self-sufficient. Which is it?
If they need more money from the taxpayer to survive, then we are led to two obvious questions: WHY ARE WE IMPORTING POVERTY? And, if we can’t afford them, why not lower the numbers being admitted to the US each year?
Dr. Koyama, in her op-ed, is pushing for more English language training and says of the system now: “…refugees are funneled into pipelines of poverty, with little hope of upward mobility.”
Here she makes a point we often make on these pages—a driving force behind refugee resettlement, for all its talk of helping the world’s downtrodden, is driven to a large degree by employers wanting cheap reliable laborers. Once the first refugees move upward, employers need to import more at the lower rungs.
My two-year anthropological study, ending last March, of the educational and employment networks of 100 refugees in upstate New York confirms that a lack of English proficiency pigeon-holes refugees into low-wage service and shift work with limited possibilities of promotion. In fact, one fourth of the 12 employers interviewed preferred to hire refugees with “just enough” English skills who were, as one employer stated, “less likely to leave when they landed better paying jobs with more English.” According to the director of a refugee resettlement agency in the area, the focus on getting a job quickly leads many refugees to accept positions below their abilities, especially because refusing any job can jeopardize the receipt of benefits used to support their families, especially their children. This has multi-generational effects on educational outcomes and livelihoods for refugee children and children born in the U.S. to refugees.
A reminder to readers, the Refugee Act of 1980 also foresaw a public-private partnership where the contractors were supposed to use some of their own resources and not use the federal taxpayer as a piggy bank. I am fully convinced that contractors could, if they worked at it, find enough people willing to do charitable work to teach refugees English without further dipping into the US Treasury.