How Refugee Resettlement Works and Who Decides Where Families Go

Ask ten Americans who decides which town a refugee family lands in, and nine will say "the government." The tenth will say "the town." Both are wrong, and the real answer is stranger than either.

It is a process that begins in a refugee camp thousands of miles away, passes through a State Department office, is administered by a handful of national nonprofit agencies, and ends with a family opening the door of an apartment in a city whose mayor may have learned about it from the newspaper. Let me walk you through it, step by step, because you cannot argue about a system until you know how it works.

Three terms, defined

Refugee. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a refugee is a person outside his own country who is unable or unwilling to return because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. That definition came into American law in the Refugee Act of 1980, which borrowed it from the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. The full history is in The Refugee Act of 1980 Explained, and the Promise It Actually Made.

Resettlement. A refugee is resettled when the United States selects her from abroad, vets her overseas and admits her in refugee status before she ever sets foot on American soil. Compare that with asylum, where a person arrives at the border or inside the country and asks for protection after the fact. The two have different doors, different screens and different politics. This post is about the first door only. For the second, see How the Credible Fear Screen Works and Why Its Bar Was Set So Low.

Voluntary agency. Nearly all of the on-the-ground work is done by private, mostly nonprofit organizations that the State Department funds under cooperative agreements. The field calls them "volags" or national resettlement agencies. Several are faith-based. They operate through local affiliates in cities and towns.

Keep those three terms in your head and the rest follows.

Step one: the referral

Most refugees do not apply to the United States. They are referred.

A person who has fled across a border usually registers with the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, in a first country of asylum. A tiny fraction of the world's refugees will ever be resettled anywhere; the UNHCR identifies those with especially urgent needs or no hope of safe return and refers some of them to resettlement countries. American embassies and certain nonprofit organizations can also make referrals in particular cases, and some groups designated by the government can access the program directly.

A referral is not an acceptance. It is a file. From there the file goes to an American processing contractor overseas, which the State Department calls a Resettlement Support Center. The center collects biographical information, conducts a pre-screening interview and prepares the case for the next stage.

Step two: the overseas vetting

This is where the process is slow, and where conservatives who say "we can vet anyone" and liberals who say "refugees are the most vetted people in the world" are each telling half the truth.

The case goes to officers of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who travel to interview the applicant in person. The applicant must show that she meets the legal definition and is not barred. The grounds that bar admission include persecution of others, serious crimes, terrorism-related activity and security threats. Her fingerprints and biographical details are run through the government's security databases, and the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies take part in the checks. She also gets a medical examination.

So far, so reassuring. Here is the honest limit, and I say it because the strongest argument for the program has to deal with it. A background check can only find what a record contains. In a collapsed state, in a country with no functioning civil registry, or where the government that kept the records is the government that did the persecuting, there may be no record to find. Officials call the problem the "information gap," and every administration has had to say out loud that vetting is only as good as the data that exists. Both the supporters and critics of the program accept that fact, and arguing about it is a legitimate policy question, not a slur on refugees.

Step three: the ceiling and the consultation

Now the part that belongs to the Constitution's design, not to the bureaucracy.

How many refugees may be admitted in a year is not set by a clerk. Under the Refugee Act, the President, after consultation with Congress, determines the number each fiscal year, and may adjust it in an emergency. That "consultation" is a formal step with hearings and a report. The figure is a ceiling, not a quota: actual admissions can and do fall short of it.

I would ask the reader to notice one thing, and then I will move on. Congress wrote the law in 1980 so that the executive branch would carry the details. That is the pattern of the modern administrative state: the legislature sets a framework and hands the controls to the President. You may think that is an efficient arrangement or you may think it is an abdication. What it means for resettlement is that the single most important number, how many, is a presidential determination that changes with each administration. Families on the receiving end, and the towns that host them, have to plan around it.

Step four: Reception and Placement

Once a refugee is approved and cleared to travel, the case is assigned to one of the national resettlement agencies, and the central process of this post begins: who decides where the family goes?

The program is called the Reception and Placement program, or R&P, and it is run by the Bureau of Population, Refugee, and Migration at the State Department. Each of the national agencies sits at a table, in effect, and the case is allocated to one of them. The agency then assigns the family to one of its local affiliates, in a specific city.

How do they choose a city? The rules and the agencies' practice reflect a handful of factors:

• Family ties. If the refugee has a relative already in the United States, the agency tries to place her near that relative. The relative is called an "anchor."
• Affiliate capacity. Does the local affiliate have staff, housing and the ability to serve the family's language and needs?
• Cost of living and the availability of entry-level jobs and rental housing.
• Medical and special needs. A family with a member needing specialized care has to land near a provider.

That is the formal list, and it sounds sensible. It is also notable for who is not on it. Nothing in the process requires the approval of the governor, the state legislature, the county commission or the mayor. The statute does require the federal government to consult with state and local governments on the placement of refugees, and it requires the national agencies to meet regularly with them. But "consult" is not "consent." A town can be consulted and still be surprised.

The program supplies a limited package for the first weeks: a per-person grant the agency uses for housing, furniture, food, clothing and an orientation, plus a requirement that a case worker meet the family at the airport. Those first days are the heart of R&P, and the local affiliate is the one doing the work.

Step five: the Office of Refugee Resettlement

After the first stretch, a different agency takes over the long road.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, sits in the Department of Health and Human Services. It was created by the Refugee Act of 1980. Its job is the medium-term: funding cash and medical assistance for eligible refugees for a limited period, job placement and language training, and support for the states that administer these programs. It also operates the program for unaccompanied minors, a separate and much-debated subject covered elsewhere on this site.

So the system has two federal agencies on two phases of one journey: State for the arrival, HHS for the integration. In between are the private agencies and the local affiliates that turn federal money into a bed and a bus pass. Federal law also lets a state decline to run the assistance programs itself, in which case a private agency administers them under what is called the Wilson-Fish alternative. That variation matters to the argument below, because it shows that the states already make choices about their role.

The steelman: "It already works, and the local role is real"

Let me state the best defense of the current system, in words its defenders would accept.

The defenders say: Resettlement has run for over forty years with bipartisan support. It is a humanitarian program with deep roots in American religious life, and many of the most dedicated people in it are volunteers from congregations of every kind. The national agencies have the expertise to place families where they will succeed. Federal law already requires consultation with states and localities, and a town that wants a say can get one by showing up. Making placement depend on a local veto would let any community close its doors, and the fate of a persecuted family should not turn on the mood of a county board.

That is a serious argument, and the part about faith-based volunteers is true and admirable. The part about expertise is true too. Here is why I do not think it settles the matter.

The conservative case for more local consent

Here is the case I would make, in order.

1. The people who bear the costs should have a voice in the decision. Resettlement places real demands on local schools, local clinics, local rental markets and local budgets. The federal government funds the first stretch, but the long tail of public services is local and state. In every other area of public life we accept that a community which carries the burden gets a say. This is the oldest principle of federalism, and it is the one we argue for in housing, in zoning, in schools and in policing.
2. Consultation without consent is a courtesy, not a check. A statute that requires a meeting and nothing else tells the town it will be heard and then overruled. You do not need to doubt anyone's good faith to see that this is a weak form of accountability.
3. Consent makes the program stronger, not weaker. A resettlement effort that a community welcomed is more likely to succeed than one it learned about last week. A family placed where the church, the employer and the landlord all said yes starts with more allies. Consent is not an obstacle to integration; it is the first step of it.
4. Federalism is the Founders' answer to this exact kind of question. The Constitution gives Congress the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization (Article I, Section 8, Clause 4), and the admission of refugees falls within the federal power over immigration. But the Tenth Amendment leaves to the states and the people the powers not delegated. A federal system that distributes a federal program's burdens while allowing local communities no voice in its placement turns that arrangement upside down.

That is the argument. Now let us see what Washington did with it.

The 2019 executive order and the court ruling

In September 2019 the administration issued an executive order, number 13888, titled "Enhancing State and Local Involvement in Refugee Resettlement." Its core provision required that resettlement in a state or locality proceed only if the relevant state or local government gave written consent to receive refugees. It told the agencies to implement the policy and to put the consent requirement into their funding agreements.

A number of states and localities responded with letters of consent. Many governors, from both parties, said yes. A few declined. Then the order went to court. Several of the national resettlement agencies sued, arguing among other things that the order conflicted with the Refugee Act's design. In January 2020 a federal district judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction against the consent requirement, and the policy did not take effect as written. The argument of the challengers was that Congress had set up a system in which the federal government allocates placement and consults with local governments, and that an executive order could not rewrite that system to give localities a veto.

I want to be fair to both sides here, because the episode is easy to caricature. Critics of the order saw in it a way to shut the door on a group of vulnerable people. Supporters saw in it a modest application of federalism. The court's ruling did not decide whether consent is a good idea. It decided that the President could not impose it on his own under the existing statute. Which leads to the obvious conclusion: if you believe in more local consent, the place to win it is Congress, by amending the Refugee Act, not a presidential order that a judge will enjoin.

That is, incidentally, how our system is supposed to work. The legislature writes the rule. The President carries it out. The courts hold each to its lane. I do not love every outcome of that arrangement, but I do love the arrangement.

The church-led alternative

Now let me say something about the part of this debate that gets lost, which is the part conservatives should be proudest of.

Long before there was a Refugee Act, American congregations were sponsoring displaced families. After World War II the churches and synagogues took families into their communities, and the pattern repeated through the Hungarian crisis of 1956, the Cuban exodus and the Indochinese programs. Several of the national resettlement agencies are the institutional descendants of those congregational efforts. In recent years the federal government has also experimented with private sponsorship models in which groups of ordinary citizens commit to support a refugee family directly. Canada has run a private sponsorship program since the late 1970s, in which groups of citizens take on the financial and personal responsibility for a family, and that model is the one most often cited.

Here is the conservative case for leaning harder into that model, in four points:

1. Subsidiarity. The institution closest to the family does the work. Not the bureaucrat, the neighbor.
2. Consent is built in. A congregation that commits to sponsor a family is a community saying yes. There is no argument about whether the town agreed.
3. Accountability is personal. A sponsor who promises to find a job lead, to teach the language and to stand with a family through the first year is on the hook in a way a grant agreement is not.
4. It is the old American way. Tocqueville marveled at Americans' habit of forming voluntary associations to do what governments did elsewhere. Sponsorship is that habit applied to the oldest charity there is, welcoming the stranger.

I would not want to see the national agencies shut down. I would like to see more of the work done by the churches and civic groups who already do the hard part, and fewer decisions made by people who will never meet the family.

What a reform would look like

If you want to turn this argument into legislation, here is a short menu, labeled as proposals, not predictions.

• Amend the Refugee Act so that state or local consent is an explicit condition of placement in a jurisdiction, with a clear process for giving and withdrawing it.
• Require the State Department to publish, well before the fiscal year begins, the planned placement numbers by state and county.
• Fund private sponsorship by congregations and civic groups as a formal track alongside the agency model.
• Require a public report, every year, on the costs borne by states and localities after the first months, so voters can see what the program costs where they live.

Some of these are modest. All of them can be debated in the open, which is what Congress is for. A reader who wants to see how the broader legal system fits together can start with A Short History of American Asylum Law, From 1948 to the Refugee Act, and one who wants to see what happens when a humanitarian door is stretched beyond its design can read Humanitarian Parole Was Meant for Emergencies, Not Whole Nationalities.

The case in brief

1. Refugee resettlement runs through the State Department's Reception and Placement program, a few national agencies and their local affiliates, with the Office of Refugee Resettlement handling the medium term and the President setting the annual ceiling after consulting Congress.
2. Federal law requires consultation with states and localities on placement, but not their consent, so the communities that carry the long-term costs have little formal say.
3. The 2019 executive order (13888) tried to add a consent requirement, and a federal judge in Maryland enjoined it in 2020, which tells us the fix belongs in Congress, not in an order.
4. The conservative case is federalism and subsidiarity: let communities that bear the burden give their consent, and lean on congregations and civic groups to do the work they have done since before 1980.
5. A system that welcomes the persecuted and respects the consent of the governed is not a contradiction; it is the better version of both.

What you can do: find out which agency or affiliate resettles refugees in your state, attend a county commission or city council meeting where it comes up, and ask your representative, through the my-representatives page, whether the Refugee Act should require local consent.