U.S. Refugee Resettlement: State Capacity Assessment
Overview & Goals
The U.S. refugee resettlement program had long provided a safe, legal pathway for refugees while helping them reach early employment and self-sufficiency. Beginning in early 2025, the Welcoming Initiative for Newcomers (WIN), World Education Services (WES) and The Shapiro Foundation (TSF) brought together state refugee coordinators to discuss an emerging state-centric approach to refugee resettlement.
These conversations followed changes signaled in the Jan. 20, 2025 executive order on realigning the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and the October 2025 memorandum transferring initial resettlement support functions from the U.S. Department of State to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), in collaboration with states and resettlement agencies.
As the program's core framework faced its most significant transition in decades, WIN, WES and TSF gathered evidence to help states, ORR, and the field understand what a state-centric model could look like – one that reflected community capacity, included labor market needs, and continued the humanitarian foundation of the program.
Potential benefits of a state-centric refugee resettlement model included:
● Building on widely recognized best practices in use across the resettlement system
● Stabilizing and improving resettlement planning before and after arrival, including work placement
● Prioritizing state and community input for humanitarian and workforce considerations
● Using objective data to identify workforce gaps that immigrant and refugee labor could help fill
● Building a clearer, data-informed picture of workforce needs at the state and national level
The project team – which included former state refugee coordinators, national and local resettlement agency leaders, and a former government official – collected qualitative and quantitative data on states' perspectives and community capacity, including labor and workforce conditions, housing availability and affordability, and health care and education infrastructure.
Data collection combined structured, secure surveys with desk research, and short interviews and focus groups involving state leaders as well as national and local resettlement agencies, state refugee coordinators, state refugee health coordinators, refugees, and stakeholders across national and local ecosystems. Findings were aggregated without attribution so participants could engage openly.
By the end of the grant term, the project provided states and ORR with:
● A nationwide readiness map showing states' readiness to adopt a state-centric framework
● A catalog of state-suggested implementation resources, including training and technical assistance needs
● A state-based implementation roadmap with tangible guidance for piloting the new framework
● Distilled themes across the ecosystem, with wide ranging state and actor participation, providing lessons learned, best practices, and a positive outlook about the state-centric model
