1975 New York Times article

Lesson #2: If religion was a source of tension, it was also a source of generosity. Refugee resettlement has long been a public-private, church-state endeavor, and religious institutions have been central to the administrative apparatus of American refugee care. 

Scholars of American political development have observed that the United States frequently delegates work to private institutions. Refugee resettlement is an example of this style of “public-private governance.” However, refugee resettlement is unique in that those private institutions are predominantly religious institutions.

Religious institutions have been central to refugee resettlement since before the Second World War. Religious voluntary agencies, church-affiliated charities, and congregations have worked with the government to support refugee relief and resettlement at all levels—internationally, nationally, at the state level, and locally. They have not only aided refugees in the immediate period after resettlement, but they have also been critical to facilitating refugees’ long-term integration, years after their initial arrival.

The government’s reliance on religious institutions has myriad advantages. For one, this system offers social and cultural benefits. Congregations that sponsor refugees and run outreach ministries can offer a network of caring support for refugees. As is clear in the events at Shelbyville, religious groups can also serve as a bridge between refugee and non-refugee communities and help to broker more peaceful relations when tensions arise.

The involvement of religious organizations also allows the government to expand capacity, provide resettlement and relief to a greater number of refugees, and reduce the public cost of refugee resettlement. In 1975, Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Minneapolis found that it cost $5,601 to resettle one Vietnamese refugee family, a cost that eclipsed the $500 per capita grant offered by the federal government.⁴ This imbalance continues into the present. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) conducted a study in 2008 that found that the State Department funded only 39 percent of the actual cost of resettling a refugee, while private giving covered the remaining 61 percent.⁵ This study revived the long-standing concern that the government consistently underfunds the refugee program and shifts most of the cost unfairly to private (especially religious) groups. Whether or not the current system is fair, the point is still clear: American refugee care runs on the labor and resources of religious groups.

Lesson #3: Delegating work to religious institutions comes at a cost.

Importantly, voluntary agencies like LIRS and congregations like Bethlehem Lutheran are not simply another type of private institution on which the government relies. They are first and foremost religious institutions, with overlapping but nevertheless distinct goals from government. And while these religious institutions have offered undeniable assets—for example, well-established networks of eager volunteers—they have also introduced some important complications.

One issue is that religious organizations are operating in a changing context. Historically, religious voluntary agencies resettled members of their own religious or national community: Catholics resettled fellow Catholics, for example, and Lutherans resettled fellow Lutherans. However, beginning in the 1970s, the predominantly Christian voluntary agencies that had contracts with the federal government to do refugee resettlement began to serve new religious groups—at first, a small group of Ugandan Asian refugees, who were Muslim and Hindu, and then later, a huge wave of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, who were Catholic, Buddhist, animist, and ancestor worshipping. Christian voluntary agencies and churches have adapted to these new circumstances in different ways, to varying degrees. However, they have not always been effective or consistent in their efforts to resettle refugees in accordance with their own stated commitment to accommodate religious difference.

Indeed, questions of religious freedom and religious pluralism in the American system of church-state refugee care remain crucial and, unfortunately, relatively understudied. In general, much of the conversation about government collaboration with faith-based organizations tends to focus on the religious freedom of service providers and the question of whether or not the rights of Christians are imperiled. What has received less attention is the religious freedom of service recipients and, in particular, service recipients who are religious minorities. What do these arrangements look like from the vantage point of non-Christian refugees? Do they see their freedom compromised?

A look at past efforts to resettle Southeast Asian refugees offers insight into these important questions. In general, Christian agencies and churches that resettled Southeast Asian refugees sincerely strived to serve refugees in a way that respected religious difference. There were some genuine efforts to accommodate religious difference. All of the voluntary agencies, for example, created elaborate guides offering recommendations for church sponsors about how to understand and respect the religions of the refugees. Catholic and Lutheran voluntary agencies even made efforts to help Buddhist refugees find monks and temples, out of the belief that supporting refugees in practicing their religious traditions was essential to the long-term success of the resettlement process.

However, accountability was difficult to ensure, given the complex structure of refugee care. Resettlement involved a variety of public and private institutions, connected in a long chain of delegation. In this system, there was a big gap between the professionalized voluntary agency employees who practiced refugee care in a largely secular way and local church volunteers who viewed refugee care as a religious ministry that did not have anything to do with government. It was often these local church volunteers who had the most interaction with refugees. At the same time, these volunteers were not always the most experienced, skilled, or knowledgeable about how to practice pluralism in a meaningful way. Refugee resettlement was sometimes a church volunteer’s first chance to have a close relationship with a non-Christian person.

In these circumstances, church volunteers sometimes made unfortunate missteps. When church groups resettled Ugandan Asian refugees, for example, a strictly vegetarian Brahmin man was given work in a poultry processing plant, which produced psychological and emotional strain. Church volunteers brought Muslim refugees to the mosque—but did so on Sundays, rather than Fridays. While church volunteers by all accounts had good intentions, they struggled to accommodate refugees’ religious differences, in part because they lacked reliable information about the groups that they were aiding. For example, one of the most widely circulated resettlement manuals that voluntary agencies gave to church sponsors drew heavily from a dissertation written by a 1950s Christian missionary, who portrayed indigenous Hmong religion as primitive demon-worship.

Finally, on occasion, church volunteers considered refugee care to be an opportunity to evangelize. Because many of them were already engaged in international affairs and humanitarian work, missionaries were often the people who were most interested in getting involved in refugee care. But along with enthusiasm and global experience, they also brought clearly missionary purposes. In the context of these missionary goals and also the dependent relationship of refugee sponsorship, refugees sometimes reported frustrating experiences of religious pressure. Hmong refugees shared stories of how church sponsors would show up at their door on Sunday and bring them to church, sometimes against their will.

Lesson #4: Delegating work to religious groups raises big issues that are rooted in a very basic question: What is religion?

First, there is the matter of what is religious in public-private refugee work. In trying to ensure that refugees do not experience religious coercion, voluntary agencies tried to manage the religiousness of refugee work and make a distinction between the nonreligious work of resettlement and the religious work of the church. Much depended on one’s interpretation, though. For example, some resettlement manuals encouraged sponsors to bring refugees to Sunday services, in order to allow refugees to develop a network of friends and to experience the hospitality of the church community. Voluntary agencies and church sponsors, therefore, did not consider bringing refugees to church to be an inappropriate religious activity because doing so had a nonreligious objective. However, many refugees did see being brought to worship services on Sunday as a religious act, and sometimes a coercive one. More fundamentally, the distinction between religious and nonreligious work was an artificial one that did not always make sense to church volunteers, many of whom approached refugee care as a ministry animated by deep religious conviction.

Second, there is the question of what gets to count as religion in the lives of refugees. Some aspects of religious life are not immediately legible as “religion,” especially when groups adhere to traditions that are not familiar and recognizable to Christian service providers. Somali refugees who are Muslims have a religion that church sponsors immediately recognize as a legitimate, rightful religion, but others, like the Yazidi people or the Hmong people do not. What about those refugees? How can people respect refugees’ religions if they do not see refugees’ beliefs and practices as “religion” in the first place? There are important consequences of forcing refugees to engage with Americans through a common universal category that is called “religion”—a category that is rooted in the Christian West and that refugees might not necessarily use to describe themselves, at least until they arrive in the United States.

In 1976, Congress passed a law that prohibited the U.S. Census from asking Americans to identify their religion. However, that same year, the United States was directly asking Southeast Asian refugees to identify their religion when they applied for resettlement. This question was a tricky one for Hmong refugees to answer. The government form had check boxes, and they could select only one of several options: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, animist, or ancestor worshippers. The truth is that Hmong people could select multiple categories. They could not even fill out the form properly because the assumptions embedded in the form completely lacked literacy of the religious lives of Hmong people. For a short period of time, the government did away with the check-box question and allowed a free response, and Hmong people simply answered the religious identification question with two words: “Hmong religion.”

When the United States resettles refugees, people in both government and religious institutions need to ask themselves: Are we forcing refugees into boxes that do not make sense? Are we understanding refugees on their terms, or ours? And to what degree do our flawed assumptions and our misapprehensions of other people undermine our shared objectives of integration, inclusion, and freedom?