abstract: This research examined the perceptions of refugees towards social entrepreneurship in Arizona through focus group discussions with 77 members of the refugee communities that have been organized under nine groups. Business experience, problem solving experience, conception of social entrepreneurship, examples, opportunities, support, and needs emerged as the themes of the study. Available opportunities as well as barriers for refugee social entrepreneurship based on the views of refugees in Arizona were explained. The difference between commercial entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship was highlighted and some examples of refugee social entrepreneurship described. Qualitative data analysis revealed that refugees in Arizona have entrepreneurial characteristics such as risk taking, hardworking, problem solving, and determination. They also have a good understanding of commercial entrepreneurship but very little understanding of social entrepreneurship. The findings underlined that social entrepreneurship can be used as a helpful strategy for self-sufficiency of refugees residing in Arizona. Given their life trajectories, refugees in Arizona have high potential to be social entrepreneurs with the right exposure and training. If supported adequately and planned appropriately, the refugee social entrepreneurship project can lead to self-sufficiency and faster integration of participating individuals to the mainstream society. The findings may spark interest among practitioners, policy makers, and scholars. It may redefine refugee social work practices as the passion of enterprising empowers refugees and helps them to discover self-confidence and rebrand their image. Policy makers may consider incorporating refugee social entrepreneurship in to the current self-sufficiency plan for refugee resettlement. Future research needs to investigate how refugee social entrepreneurs can be successful and focus on the measurement of their success. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Work 2015

abstract: The United States resettles more refugees each year than any country, yet little is known about the influence that the Refugee Resettlement Program has on our communities. Program evaluation in the United States is primarily concerned with outcomes and efficiency; while there has been an absence of collecting data to measure the impact that social programs have on communities. This study explores the impact of refugee resettlement on a metropolitan area by surveying professionals with experience working or volunteering with refugee populations. These professionals rate the extent to which they believe refugee resettlement influences social, economic, and environmental variables in the community, and explain the nature of the influence they believe the program has on the community. The data collected from these surveys will introduce the perceived impact of refugee resettlement from the perspective of those with professional experience in the area. By exploring the effects that the Refugee Resettlement Program has on Phoenix, this data can assist in the creation of community assessments for refugee resettlement and comparable social programs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Work 2018

Legal rules regarding unaccompanied refugee children in the European Union (EU) are closely related to the refugee crisis and the community’s asylum policy. This study aims to investigate how the best interests of the unaccompanied refugee child is being ensured under EU law. Dworkin’s theory and various methods are used to answer the research question. Firstly, the focus is, with the use of the chosen theoretical framework and international legal method, on the interpretation of the principle of “the best interests of the child”. Secondly, the thesis studies how this principle is reflected in the EU law in relation to unaccompanied refugee children, by applying EU legal method. This study shows, on the one hand, that there are a few anomalies in the EU legislation in the area of asylum that arise with regard to the best interests of the unaccompanied refugee child. It is argued that the European Union’s restrictive asylum legislation leads to conflicts between the international law and the EU law. On the other hand, the thesis demonstrates that the EU law has continuously improved, and the international child rights principle was adopted in it. It will be shown in this study that despite the common asylum policy and the community acquis, the EU Member States’ domestic law enables different assessments of the best interests of the unaccompanied child. The solution of normative conflicts is also in the hands of the EU countries, since the status determination of refugees and the assessment of the child’s best interests are carried out by the EU Member States. This will be confirmed by analysing the most important applicable EU laws, particularly the Proposal for a Regulation establishing a Union Resettlement Framework. The Proposal is chosen for discussion, because this is an essential part of the Common European Asylum System and is consistent with two packages of legislative proposals to reform it. The conclusion of this thesis is that the best interests principle is guaranteed in the EU law, but it is not guaranteed in the spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and further improvements are needed in the EU legal framework.

No description available.

The longstanding framing of accountability in principal-agent terms has encouraged adversarial and oppositional interactions and ways of thinking amongst nonprofit and funding agency practitioners within government-nonprofit relationships. These interactions are deeply rooted in the accountability claims made by government funders and responded to by nonprofit practitioners. This dissertation outlines the implications of nonprofit-government contracting for participating nonprofit organizations and explores various strategies practitioners in those institutions utilize to respond to the challenges raised by their relationship to public funders. To understand the tensions surrounding government accountability claims, I provide an overview of the emergence of the contracting regime and an exploration of the understanding of accountability that has attended its evolution. Through an in-depth qualitative case study, constructed on the basis of interviews, observation, and document analysis and following a grounded theory approach to analysis, I explore various nonprofit manager responses to the norms and pressures of the contracting regime. I chronicle nonprofit practitioners\' responses to contracting regime pressures, including accepting those norms, even when arguably inimical to their organization\'s mission, ignoring them in favor of serving clients, or leaving the employ of organizations altogether. I also explore examples of practitioner efforts to navigate outside of the contracting regime\'s antagonistic framing and engage both with powerful stakeholders and others in their organizations to negotiate changes. Drawing on the theoretical lens of agonism, I examine the context and characteristics of those responses to provide insights into how nonprofit managers might move beyond antagonistic accountability frames. / Ph. D.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The United States is the world’s top resettlement country for refugees and the third largest community of Burmese refugees lives in the state of Indiana. Many refugee families look to their college-age youth to enhance their well-being. This study explored the lived experiences of Burmese refugee college students’ resettlement and the role that social support plays in that approach. In order to explore the refugee students’ resettlement experiences and the role of social support, social support theory and conservation of resources theory were used to explain the importance of social support for refugee students’ successful resettlement. A qualitative study using thematic analysis was conducted using 32 in-depth individual interviews with Burmese refugee students in higher education. Through an indepth examination of the lived experiences of Burmese refugee college students’ resettlement, four main themes were identified: challenges of resettlement, resettlement needs, the resources of social support, and resettlement experiences. Refugee students actively cultivated their life and showed aspirations of being successful members of this new environment. Even though they faced many challenges and needs identified through interviews, the participants overcame these barriers including a different culture and language and prosper in their lives in the host country. The social support from the coethnic community and people in the host country both affected the participants’ successful resettlement. Co-ethnic community also plays an important role to pursue higher education. The study findings will be used by social work practice, programs, and policies to improve the success of Burmese refugee students' resettlement. This study would serve as a foundation for enhancing refugee students’ resettlement and understanding the critical role of social support resources during the resettlement period. Burmese refugee students would be an important avenue to develop international relations and achieve social justice. In spite of a variety of barriers and prejudices, Burmese refugee students bloom and flourish in their new environment in the United States. They are beneficiaries but also currently benefactors. The perspectives on refugees need to change and move from victims to the citizens of the world.

Refugee Resettlement Agencies in the United States make headlines because of the people they help, but what about the immigrant support providers doing the work? In Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts there are organizations that open their doors to newly arrived people needing assistance. The purpose of this case study was to explore the experience of working as a resettlement provider for immigrants in Massachusetts between 2016 and 2021. I argue that Donald Trump’s policy decisions were a form of structural violence against and experienced by the resettlement organizations contracted to the federal government to assist refugees. Preliminary literature reviews showed research on refugees was saturated. A few articles discussed psychological impacts on providers in a clinical setting or presented quantitative analyses of immigration statistics. My research is a novel ethnographic case study of the resettlement organizations. This study was conducted over three years during the COVID-19 pandemic. I examined the effect of changes to the body-politic, the social-body, and the body-self levels of experience. By using a holistic model of health, I connect these experiences to the physical, social, and psychological dimensions of wellbeing. Throughout the fourth chapter, I argue that Trump’s pernicious executive policy decisions were intentional acts of violent against resettlement organizations across the United States. The anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media and policies, combined with increased xenophobia withdrew vital physical and social resources for providers. This created a shift in the hegemonic forces in the United States that impacted organization and refugees alike. Chapter Five argues that Massachusetts resettlement organizations were impacted through implicit effects at the state and community levels. As the pressure of their work increased and their community relationship became more complicated, their precarity was compounded by COVID-19. This is illustrated through the starvation of the social-body and subsequent re-feeding they experienced. Finally, Chapter Six argues that individual resettlement providers experienced a state of precarious wellbeing. They had to develop creative coping mechanisms to work through the precarity after being flooded with new arrivals. The providers embodied this precarity on a personal level, though not passively. They pushed back against the Trump Administration’s violence through interagency legal action, solid community partnerships, and individual coping mechanisms.

This thesis asks the question: what roles do local governments and nongovernmental organizations play in resettling refugees in U.S. cities? To answer this question, I conducted a case study of the refugee resettlement structure and process as it occurs in the city of Roanoke, Virginia. I find that two governance structures dictate how refugees are resettled into the city. The first stems from federal refugee policy, which establishes the use of a public-private partnership between federal and state governments and federated civic organizations. The second is an evolving local-level grassroots organizational structure that assesses the needs of refugees in Roanoke following their initial resettlement. In the case study on Roanoke I examine the support roles and practices of government institutions and nongovernmental organizations during the initial refugee resettlement period. Additionally, I examine aspects of long-term service provision and additional supports that move refugees towards social and economic inclusion. I conducted interviews with government and non-governmental leaders to grasp their understandings of existing practices and norms of local-level refugee resettlement. I also examined local survey data, economic and demographic data, media reports, and other public documents prepared by government agencies and nonprofit organizations. I identify who offers, or influences decisions about, specific supports for refugees at different times throughout the resettlement/integration process. I will suggest further implications of the supports provided for how they structure the pattern of refugees' economic and social inclusion. This thesis is designed to contribute to the limited literature on the process of local-level refugee resettlement in U.S. cities. / Master of Arts / This thesis asks the question: How are refugees resettled by government agencies and private organizations at the local level? To answer this question, I examine how the U.S. preference of public-private partnerships to initially resettle refugees in U.S. cities produces a hierarchical structure that flows from federal policies and agency oversight to state and local level policies and practices. This structure exhibits a quasi-governance phenomenon in which both public and private actors make discretionary decisions on policy implementation throughout the resettlement process. I find also that besides the initial federal structure, a second local network structure forms among grassroots organizations that work to extend federal objectives and address service gaps in the formal resettlement structure. These unaddressed gaps primarily concern longer-term supports to promote refugees being socially and economically included in their communities. I performed a qualitative case study analysis of local refugee resettlement as it occurs in the City of Roanoke, Virginia. I conducted interviews with resettlement stakeholders among government agencies and private organizations in order to grasp their understandings of local-level refugee resettlement service provision. I also examined local survey data, economic and demographic data, media reports, and other public documents prepared by government agencies and nonprofit organizations. This thesis is designed to contribute to the limited literature on local-level refugee resettlement and the use of public-private partnerships for the provision of social services in the U.S.

This Master’s thesis uses the Indochinese Refugee Foundation of Lowell, Massachusetts, a federally funded social service provider, as a case study in the local politics of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement. I argue that the Foundation’s archives offered an opportunity to study the local implementation of the “economic self-sufficiency” mandate of the 1980 Refugee Act, which led the Foundation to increasingly scramble to get refugees off of the welfare rolls and in the labor market as quickly as possible. I conclude that this served to push refugees into low-wage, unskilled, insecure positions such as electronics assembly, and also led to an institutionalized neglect of the broad range of services refugees required. This neglect had a hand in creating the very poverty the Act originally sought to prevent. The archive also offered the opportunity to highlight two unexpected ways that Cold War militarism reshaped urban landscapes. First, the demography and culture of Lowell were profoundly reshaped by refugees resettled partly as a result of American Cold War foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Second, the expansion of Defense Department funded high-technology temporarily revitalized the city’s economic base and drew refugees to the city with the promise of employment.

International migration flows and patterns shaped by the determinants, processes and outcomes of social, political, and economic conditions have led to important transformation of society and human geographies. As Canada continues to effectively manage its immigration system and uphold its commitment to international refugee protection and resettlement, it is critical for Canada to do so with an understanding of the changing context of immigration, which are reinforced by shifting policies and their impact, in our contemporary society. In this thesis, the migration trajectory of three groups of newcomers to Canada; international students, Syrian refugees, and refugee youth, are explored by examining policies and conditions that can create group risks and vulnerabilities in immigration, settlement, and integration as groups transition to life in Canada after arrival. As suggested by Castle (2010) migration researchers can advance the field by embedding their work in broader theories of social change to facilitate understanding of the complexity, interconnectedness, variability, contextuality, and multi-mediation of migratory process in the context of rapid change. This thesis employs a geographical lens of place to deepen understanding of processes and outcomes in our contemporary society, while responding to these evolving contexts in one mid-size, post-industrial Canadian city. In three separate research, this thesis examines: 1) economic immigration flow under Express Entry in 2015 and 2016; 2) the role of the voluntary sector during the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative in Hamilton, Ontario in 2016; and 3) the place of school-based settlement in bridging and brokering school-based mental health for newcomer youth. / Thesis / Doctor of Science (PhD) / As Canada continues to effectively manage its immigration system and uphold its commitment to international refugee protection and resettlement, it is critical for Canada to do so with an understanding of the changing context of immigration in our contemporary society. In this thesis, I examine the migration trajectory of three groups of newcomers to Canada; international students, Syrian refugees, and refugee youth, by asking two overarching research questions that explores policies and conditions that can create group risks and vulnerabilities in immigration, settlement, and integration. This thesis seeks to understand how policies could be addressed to improve successful outcome for newcomers. This thesis employs a geographical lens of place to deepen understanding of processes and outcomes in our contemporary society, while responding to these evolving contexts in one mid-size, post-industrial Canadian city.