Hey everybody, I'm Amy Scott. Welcome back to Make Me Smart. We're none of us as smart

as all of us.

I'm Kyle Rizdolid, it's Tuesday as we tape this, it is time for our weekly deep dive

into a single topic. Today, refugee resettlement, the economics thereof in the United States,

there is of course a long history of resettling people here who have been fleeing war persecution

started for real sort of after the Second World War and then after Vietnam, officially

the government decided it was going to do something about it in the refugee resettlement

act of 1980, I guess. And we're going to talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, since then, the US has resettled hundreds of thousands of refugees across the country.

The Biden administration has said it's going to welcome 100,000 refugees of the war in

Ukraine and is talking about a new program to expedite that process.

So the question for us today is what happens to an economy when refugees become part of

it? And here to make a smart is Romeo Vigia, she's a professor of economics at Stockton University,

professor of things coming on the pod. Thank you for having me.

So I'm going to lead with the big picture question and then we can sort of tear it apart.

But generally speaking does happen when refugees come into an economy.

So just to the outset, I just want to emphasize that of course refugee resettlement is a humanitarian

imperative, but of course refugees also bring with them tremendous economic potential as well

as economic aspirations just like everyone else. And that needs to be recognized. So when

refugees arrive in the US economy, the US model of refugee resettlement assigns them to contract

agencies that are called resettlement agencies. So they're typically given an initial allowance

of about $2,000 it differs by state. And that is meant for the initial phase when they enter

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