Immigration

Fiona Harrigan | From the April 2024 issue

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.

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........

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