A friend says refugees accepted by the U.S. get $10,000 each from the government after they arrive. Sounds bogus to me- what’s the truth?
He says there have been cases in which people claimed refugee status, collected $10,000 and then left the country only to enter again using another name- time after time after time.
You might want to got to the source to check the benefits:
The US State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
This issue has been quite a genuine concern in certain countries (e.g I lived in Switzerland briefly in the 70’s and 80’s, and the benefits awarded to refugees -many of whom made no effort to become productive by e.g. learning any of the four official languages- was a serious issue) It has not been a serious issue in the US. The $10K you describe, for example, might sound like quite a windfall, if it existed but it really isn’t much compared to Switzerland’s essentially lifelong ongoing welfare for some of its approved, authorized refugees. Similarly, refugees who are approved (eventiually) for permanent resident status in he US, due to egregious certified political persecution at home could, in principle "milk"the US taxpayer (though very few do) for years of welfare payments (If the standards were uniform, far more refugeees would qualify for resident refugee status, for the sole benefit of staying alive, not milking anyone - but the process and criteria are highly politicized and predictably uneven between various nations of origin)
The US actually doesn’t do all that much for refugees. I’d say it’s somewhere crudely in the middle of the range for various times and places in history. There are quite a few private organizations (churches, lecture circuits, ethnic communities, etc.) that offer somewhat more support. Whether the US should offer more support, or whether the existing private support is adequate, etc. are issues for some other thread.
As someone who has spent a chunk of her career working with refugees, I can assure you it’s bogus. There are no lump-sum government grants given to refugees in the U.S. Back in 1990, a family of 4 got something like $800/month in Illinois plus food stamps, ONLY until at least one family member was employed full-time.
I was a job placement caseworker, and believe me, we made damn sure all working-age people were either working, busting their asses seeking work, or in short-term training that would enable them to find appropriate work (ESL classes and/or short-term job skills classes appropriate to their educational and professional background, lasting generally no more than 8-10 weeks, such as spreadsheet classes for an accountant who had never used a computer, which was frequently the case with the population I worked with: former Soviets). And only one family member could be in training at a time; the other one had to be working, unless both were unemployable without further training.
$10,000 per FAMILY, TOTAL over a period of several months or more might be spent in extraordinary cases, between the cash value of all benefits: counseling, cash assistance, rental subsidies, medical care, food stamps, and training/resettlement funds, but no way in hell did anyone get a $10,000 check on arrival.
To amplify what KP has already said, there is no special “refugee benefit” or “bonus”.
As an attorney, I have worked pro bono in helping draft petitions for political asylum for people who had a well-founded fear of persecution if they returned to their homeland. Such people are permitted to apply for assistance such as food stamps, etc., but only on the same basis as other legal residents of the United States.
What we are dealing with here is an Urban Legend scare story, and a fairly bigotted one at that.
On the other hand, you know those Mom and Pop convenience stores some immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, etc., run? The ones where they end up working fourteen hours a day to scrape by and are often in continual fear of being robbed? The government gives them those stores for free. I worked in an office once with a bunch of people who “just knew” this. They also knew that the alien autopsy movie was real. One of them had an uncle who had gotten the problem of perpetual motion licked.