Getting Refugees to Work: A Street-level Perspective of Refugee Resettlement Policy

Refugee resettlement organizations in the US are tasked with implementing employment policies for newly arrived refugees, yet there is limited research explaining how refugee resettlement organizations operate. Workfare literature that deploys a street-level perspective to understand welfare-to-work policy explains that with the expansion of privatization and contracting, street-level organizations are in a position to determine what workfare policy looks like on the ground. This article draws on original data from an organizational ethnographic study of two urban refugee resettlement organizations and a street-level analysis of the implementation of refugee employment policy. The major contributions of this article are an analysis of the formal and informal mechanisms by which performance measure pressures associated with employment policy contracts were conveyed to refugee resettlement organization staff, and the identification of a novel practice behaviour I call broadening the resource pool.