UC Santa Barbara

The United States has a long and varied history of accepting refugees though a national admissions and resettlement program was not codified until 1980, primarily in response to the refugee crisis generated by the Vietnam War. Since that time, over three million people have come to the United States bearing the official designation as refugees and have become part of the fabric of this country. Yet the refugee resettlement program has mostly existed out of the public eye and has developed into a complicated power-sharing system of public and private actors and institutions, layered on the existing system of American federalism. Lost in the development of the resettlement program was a focus on the quality of the integration outcomes demanded by the federal government.

The focus of this dissertation is a study on the politics of refugee resettlement through an analysis of policies and their implementation. In particular, I am interested in the differences between two very different states, Georgia and California, to understand how each carries out their respective resettlement programs. In order to achieve this goal, I have conducted extensive interviews with 18 policy implementers and 26 Bhutanese refugees in both states. While resettlement and integration have been studied before, this dissertation makes an important contribution in the field of American Politics by focusing on the qualitative experiences of integration through the lived experiences and opinions of those who implement policy, and those who are the recipients of it.

I have three sets of findings collapsed into two empirical chapters. First, while Georgia and California both oversee their respective resettlement programs, which is only a feature of 28 of the 49 states that accept refugees, the frameworks are remarkably different. Resettlement is carried out mostly at the county level in California whereas the local affiliates of the national refugee resettlement organizations (RROs) do the heavy lifting in Georgia. An important and overlooked aspect of the frameworks is also the role of the state refugee coordinator (SRC). In California, it is a former refugee, whose leadership and expertise are appreciated by everyone who comes into contact with him. In Georgia, by contrast, it is someone who has little faith amongst other policy implementers and by his own account is not actually in charge of resettlement. The importance of the SRC becomes more pronounced when one considers the role of veto points or areas where policy disagreement can quickly give way to abrupt stoppages and even reformulation of existing statutory objectives. When the SRC can minimize veto points despite a more complicated resettlement structure, as in California, the program is implemented more effectively.

The second major finding is how implementers view resettlement. While disagreements amongst implementers should not be a surprise to anyone, it was unexpected to see just how little connection there was between the hierarchical integration that was so strong in California with the implementers’ perspective in that state towards resettlement. The implementers in Georgia also had similarly desultory perspectives on integration. So should it be any surprise that refugees in both states had poor perceptions of the integration efforts and the resettlement process? Not at all, I argue. The program of subnational, sub-federal refugee resettlement is implemented with so little care to the actual benefit of refugees, and it shows. Refugees in both states suffered what I have termed “integration distress” due to a slipshod, haphazard, and poorly implemented resettlement paradigm