In the latest episode of Immigration and Mobility Decoded, we chatted with Betsy Fisher, the U.S. Director at Talent Beyond Boundaries. Fisher is an advocate and expert on helping displaced individuals access employment opportunities.
Throughout the conversation, we delved into the intricacies of U.S. refugee assistance programs. Fisher highlighted the Refugee Resettlement system, asylum process and programs like Special Immigrant Visas and Temporary Protected Status. She underscored the limitations of these programs and emphasized the pressing need for broader, more inclusive approaches to refugee assistance.
Check out the video and transcript below. Below is a brief and lightly edited transcript of this conversation.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
What are some examples of current or prior of U.S. programs designed to help refugees come into the U.S., set up a life, work, and have a fulfilling life?
Betsy Fisher:
There are two main opportunities for people who are displaced to come to the U.S. and to have long-term status.
One is for people who are outside the U.S. and need a long-term residency and opportunity to belong. That’s called the U.S. Refugee Resettlement system, or the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
The other is for people who arrive in the U.S. and fear going home, which is the asylum process.
There are other programs as well, notably for Afghanistan. For people who had connections with the U.S. government in Afghanistan, there’s what’s called the Special Immigrant Visa program. There are many forms of temporary protection where people are able to come to the U.S. but don’t have the same bridge to citizenship as people in resettlement or asylum programs.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
And that would be the TPS program?
Betsy Fisher:
TPS or parole. TPS is temporary protected status, which protects people who shouldn’t be asked to return because of some humanitarian crisis or natural disaster in their home country. Parole is a very flexible method that the U.S. government can allow people to enter the country, and neither of these programs provide a bridge to long-term status or citizenship in the U.S.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
Why is that?
Betsy Fisher:
Temporary protected status is a temporary measure. The hope is that conditions will stabilize, so it’s a way to ride out a temporary situation. But once we know that things are long-term or people can’t go back, should we look at ways for them to remain long-term? Congress used to pass adjustment acts that would allow people who arrived in the U.S. on parole or other similar statuses access green card status. We haven’t seen the same engagement from Congress recently.
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Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
It feels like a lot of immigration falls to whatever power the executive branch has, and that can go either way and also be turned back. It’s kind of a mess when it comes to making changes to the U.S. immigration system.
Betsy, how does the current U.S. immigration system help refugees?
Betsy Fisher:
There are programs including asylum and resettlement. Asylum is for people who are here.
But the U.S. government also has an extremely narrow interpretation of the refugee definition. It imposes barriers that are not present in the definition of refugee status. We deny people status if they had an offer of residency somewhere else, even if they couldn’t access that anymore. We deny people access to status if they didn’t file for asylum within one year of entering, even if they didn’t know that they couldn’t access asylum, and even when the results of that one-year filing deadline is that they would be returned to forcible harm because the backup form of protection has an even higher evidentiary standard referring to withholding of removal and convention against torture protection.
The U.S. falls short of its obligations of not returning people to places where they would be harmed, and it can also certainly do more to provide opportunities for people to come to the U.S. affirmatively through resettlement or other programs.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
Why does the government take such a limited definition approach?
Betsy Fisher:
There’s a concern that many people want to come to the U.S. and the more flexible the standard, the more the program is vulnerable to abuse. That’s also why the U.S. government restricts access to work permits for people with employment authorization.
The alternative risk is that people end up facing persecution, torture and serious harm because we’re afraid that we’re protecting too many people. We’ve also seen in the U.S. that immigration programs are really important, and they are meant to be humanitarian become a lifeline for the U.S. economy also in times of labor demand.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
Do you ever see a situation where the U.S. expands the definitions and takes a different approach?
Betsy Fisher:
In the 1990s, in the midst of the Chinese policy of limiting families to having one child, U.S. Congress passed legislation that recognized people who are facing forcible sterilization as having a well-founded fear of being persecuted on the basis of political opinion.
That’s statutorily recognizing a group of people as refugees without requiring them to establish those elements independently for each person by person. We’ve also seen the U.S. government provide temporary forms of protection like parole to large groups of people without requiring them to meet the refugee definition. But again, that’s a temporary form of protection and doesn’t provide the same rights and benefits.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
Are there gaps in the system?
Betsy Fisher:
Absolutely. However, only about one percent of refugees are ever considered for resettlement globally. Most refugees live in countries where they lack long-term residency, often very close to the situations they were displaced from. Most refugees from Syria, for example, are in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. They’re not in the U.S. If you’re somebody in that region, you would be asking where the avenues for protection are, not where the gaps are.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
How do other countries help refugees and what are they doing differently that the U.S. isn’t doing? Or maybe what aren’t they doing that maybe the U.S. is doing?
Betsy Fisher:
The U.S. has been a historical leader in the number of people resettled. That stopped when Canada had the largest numbers in absolute terms. However, countries like Canada have often resettled more people per capita. Other countries have a more generous interpretation of the refugee standard and have fewer limitations.
There’s much more that we could discuss in terms of the many challenges with those policies, but we’re seeing countries that are much closer to situations of displacement also offer pretty generous forms of welcome in some instances. And the question is how countries like the U.S. can support those countries and can ensure that displaced people eventually have access to long-term status.
The 2024 U.S. Immigration Trends Report shows that Canada is the most popular location for employers to send their foreign talent outside the U.S. due to its welcoming policies to immigrants.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
What role do refugees play in the workforce and the broader economy? Have they helped the U.S. economy? If we’re looking back to 2022 and 2023, everyone was talking about recession. But now research papers are showing the impact that immigrants have had on the economy and the contributions they make.
Betsy Fisher:
We’re seeing really strong empirical evidence that immigration was a huge contributor to what we’re calling the soft landing from the expected recession. The Federal Reserve released a paper indicating that immigration was a huge boon to the economy. The Congressional Budget Office has also had very similar findings.
We’ve seen really robust studies in the past that people who come to the U.S. through resettlement initially received services from state, local, and federal governments and, over time, become net contributors just in their taxes, which doesn’t even consider their contributions to the local economy as consumers and as employees.
Immigration & Mobility Decoded:
Betsy, in January you wrote a letter to the editor in the New York Times that the Biden administration can adopt changes to facilitate displaced people’s access to employment opportunities without legislation.
What are some of these changes you think the administration can make?
Betsy Fisher:
We’ve been working extensively on improving visa processing policies for people who don’t have a current travel document. Many refugees can’t renew a passport because they can’t contact their embassy because it would place them at risk. Stateless people often have never had a current travel document.
A second is something that people far beyond our spheres have been advocating for, and that’s a Schedule A update. Schedule A is a list of occupations that don’t have to get a labor certification, demonstrating a shortage of qualified workers. Updating Schedule A is something that the Department of Labor appears to be looking at. The only occupations with nationwide labor shortages right now are not just physical therapists and nurses, so we’d obviously be supportive of efforts to make that policy consistent with reality.
Learn more about the benefits of immigration to the U.S. economy, along with employers’ concerns about retaining skilled foreign talent in the country, by downloading our 2024 U.S. Immigration Trends Report:
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