Speeding Refugee Employment

Speeding Refugee Employment
Report to the Bryan Foundation
1/26/10

Montagnard Dega Association (MDA) is a small agency with a 23-year history. For the past year, all active job participants was 138 and total jobs 22. We don't have the big perspective of a first-tier agency. We work almost exclusively with tribal groups from Vietnam and Cambodia. We are most able to speak about our clients' lives and how their immediate employment needs could be met.

Most are experienced farmers whose attitudes and knowledge would have been appreciated by Piedmont farmers of 100 years ago. As a business plan, the present refugee model to retrain them to become knowledgeable urban residents within months won’t yield many success stories. Immediately putting them to work in something they know would produce food for themselves and contribute to the emerging market for local produce. It would promote self-sufficiency. It would offset many negative consequences of the current plan: sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, mental depression and other expensive, preventable diseases. Various projects that have included home, neighborhood and urban gardens and alliances with local farmers have been tried but are spottily documented. There's no coordination we know of.

Transportation is a universal problem. It contributes to economic isolation. It prevents innovative projects from ever being tried, because most funders don’t or won’t admit transport costs. Conventional wisdom requires every refugee family to invest thousands of dollars in at least one private car as a condition for future income. The status quo is reinforced by refugees' imitation of the behavior of previous arrivals who've proudly bought cars, making it more difficult to suggest alternatives like the region's limited public transportation system. The alarming trend now is to send refugees to outlying counties to work. This gives funding agencies positive numbers to report to the State but it's a zero-sum gain all around. Employed refugees spend in resources — time, food, transport, and temporary lodging — as much as they make. Individual grit and iron determination will not overcome these cost-benefit numbers. They might be employed out of county but the added stresses they bring home — dads separated from families, weekend visits, and moms alone with kids — are paid for here by overburdened health facilities and too many ER trips. We believe it's time to tackle this problem systemically. We need more transportation options.

Refugee matters are entirely in the hands of a patchwork of private agencies, nonprofits, schools, and government. Succinctly describing the model is impossible. It is too fragile to wait out the economic downturn or respond to historic problems. (Since the writing of this paper in January 2010, Lutheran Family Services announced the closing of its Greensboro office a few months later, citing financial reasons. LFS had been in the region since the 1970s.) The Triad needs a nimble system that can get ahead of the problem, not many agencies in the same job market each equipped with its own employment office. Creating a refugee center would not just symbolize cooperation. A physical facility with collected resources would consolidate the region's efforts and assist in the economic promotion of the region.

Sponsorships work. We believe one way of boosting sponsorships would be to provide more direct support to sponsors and to make it easier to be one. New sponsors must master the same labyrinth of entities, puzzling rules and requirements that baffle the family they're trying to assist. Sponsors don't quit, but over time they become exhausted and overextended. They directly aid their families with needed cash and functional gifts — unaccounted but valuable contributions to the total cost of refugee success. Whenever we see a refugee family making steady progress we see an American sponsor behind it. Since most Americans get jobs through friends of friends, or "weak links" (the term used by sociologists), it's possible sponsored refugees do better because they enjoy the benefit of being in their American sponsors' job network. (Is anyone investigating this? We don't know. MDA is too small an outfit.)

Jerry Leimenstoll, in a talk about the region's future with the Center for Design Innovation (CDI) and the Design, Arts, and Technology Symposium (DATS 2008), said "We have it all here". Meaning, we have the local means, expertise, solutions and resources right here in our community to improve the refugee experience. We can deliberately plan for an organized, multicultural society or we can accept one piecemeal, with all the attendant costs.