Book Highlight: Navigating Connected Systems
The reality [is] that refugees and immigrants confront many institutions all at the same time as they build a life in a new land—and, for many newcomers, they do so in a new language. Furthermore, these agencies are often interwoven but not coordinated.
— Blair Sackett & Annette Lareau, We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America
For our next book highlight, we want to share the text We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America by scholars Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau. Sackett & Lareau are both researchers at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania. Their research focuses on the experiences of refugees and immigrants on arriving to the United States, and in this text they take a sociological approach to their research, meaning, they are concerned with how people experience systems. Here, they present interviews with several Congolese families who were initially resettled in the Philadelphia metro area five years after that initial resettlement. By interviewing individuals several years after their arrival to the United States, Sackett & Lareau are able to understand some of the long-term physical, emotional, and systemic consequences and opportunities families and individuals experienced.
In this text, we want to focus on their argument that the systems agencies immigrants and refugees face in the United States are often connected but rarely coordinated. When the authors write that agencies and systems are connected but not coordinated, what they mean is that there is no smooth navigation to multiple agencies as they are layered in how we must engage them. And, when these agencies and systems are connected and not coordinated, errors, hurdles, and barriers can occur often making life more difficult. In the book, Sackett & Lareau list the following examples:
…the staff at the driver’s license office expect refugees to have a green card to apply for a driver’s license; Head Start officials demand parents to present medical records, paper copies of pay stubs, and bank records. The complex web of agencies, and the ways in which the interdependency among them creates obstacles, hasn’t been sufficiently understood. Nor have we grappled enough with the reality that errors are routine in these agencies and, as we show, can block upward mobility.
So then, before you get a driver’s license, you need proper paperwork to demonstrate residency, but that does not mean those two systems are coordinating well with each other. Or, to enroll children in school you often need to present medical paperwork, but that means finding the right doctor’s office to contact during the correct hours and being able to have reliable transportation to pick up said paper or having access to Wifi and a computer to receive digital records. It can all be a headache to navigate when you speak English and have lived in the US for a number of years - it be incredibly overwhelming when that is not the case!
Sackett & Lareau find that this can create a lot of hurdles for families: missed deadlines can create compounding bills, unreliable transportation can make holding employment precarious, unfamiliarity with child welfare laws can cause uncertain and scary interactions with the police or court systems.
However, what Sackett & Lareau also find in their interviews is that two types of welcomers make all the difference for our new neighbors: cultural brokers and institutional insiders. In our post on Pipher’s The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community, we learned being a cultural broker means helping individuals and families navigate life in the United States and bridge cultural divides. Institutional insiders, similarly, are those individuals who are working within agencies or systems like education, medical offices, the DMV or DHS, in court systems, and who can offer their insider knowledge to new neighbors and/or cultural brokers in an effort to make opportunities more accessible or barriers more manageable. Institutional insiders and cultural brokers both leverage their knowledge, power, and position to welcome new neighbors to the US and empower them in their new life.
With Welcome Experiences, we hope to facilitate spaces where we can learn more from neighbors about the barriers they face in the United States and how Oklahomans can become cultural brokers and institutional insiders to facilitate welcome in whole and caring ways.
