More than Economic Contributors: Advocating for Refugees as Civically Engaged in the Midwest

Abstract

In the context of an increasingly hostile national political environment and federal cuts to refugee resettlement programs in the United States, advocates often highlight the economic contributions of immigrants and refugees to garner local support, especially in regions with histories of economic and population decline. While these narratives continue to be a centerpiece of pro-immigrant and -refugee advocacy, in practice advocates and refugees themselves use a diverse set of frames to promote belonging. In this paper, we examine pro-refugee advocacy frames in a small, nontraditional destination in the Midwest. We draw on survey and focus group research with young adult refugees and nonprofit advocates and content analysis of online stories about refugees. We found that pro-refugee values frames (humanitarian and faith-based) and contributions frames (economic, cultural and civic) coexisted across the local landscape and were used by not only nonprofit advocates and local officials, but also by refugees themselves. While advocacy groups emphasized the dominant frame highlighting refugees’ economic contributions, they were also strategic in using overlapping frames to highlight a less public frame, refugees’ contributions to civic engagement through community service and volunteering. Advocates tended to reproduce the economic contributions frame to appeal to key stakeholders, which consequently obscures refugees’ diverse contributions, but we argue that refugee self-advocates’ use of the civic engagement frame pushes back against economic and other frames that limit their contributions and helps them to create spaces of belonging.

1. Introduction

While the United States has admitted over 3 million refugees since World War II, political discourse has often been characterized by hostile framing about immigrants and refugees as threats to the country’s economy, welfare of citizens, culture, national security and safety of communities (Drewski and Gerhards 2025; Haynes et al. 2016). Opposition to refugee resettlement, particularly from Muslim-majority and non-white countries, played a particularly important role in recent U.S. presidential elections, and both Trump administrations targeted refugee-serving programs with major federal funding cuts. This hostility to refugee resettlement culminated in Trump’s January 2025 executive order that halted U.S. refugee admissions and resettlement programs indefinitely, with the exception of the resettlement of a small number of white South Africans. These policies forced more than 50 refugee resettlement local offices to close during the first Trump Administration (Siegler 2019) while many others limited or eliminated social service programs for recent arrivals (Chikanda 2023; Chishti and Pierce 2020). This process has accelerated in the early months of the second Trump Administration.1 But even as federal assistance for refugees has largely evaporated, public support for refugee resettlement has actually increased over the last two decades according to public opinion polls (Sana 2021), including during both Trump administrations.

In response to increasing restrictions on refugee resettlement and the prominence of the refugees-as-threat discourse, a coalition of political officials, advocates, and community organizations have emphasized pro-refugee values and contributions frames in order to garner support from local stakeholders and residents. We use the term “pro-refugee” to describe frameworks of support for refugees. Frames are a useful conceptual tool because they provide a lens in which to view and understand the social world by highlighting what is perceived to be important (Goffman 1974). Values frames emphasize the U.S.’s obligations to protect vulnerable people and support resettlement as a humanitarian policy or moral responsibility (Clevenger et al. 2014; Cook 2010; Drewski and Gerhards 2025), a religious practice or ethic (Frazier 2022), and/or social justice initiative (Housel et al. 2018). Contributions frames can emphasize how refugees benefit local, regional, or national economies, cultural diversity or other areas, often through narratives that categorize specific groups of migrants as particularly deserving because of their status2 and hard-working and grateful nature (Espiritu and Vang 2024; Nayeri 2020).

In this article, we examine pro-refugee advocacy in Centerville, a pseudonym for a small metropolitan area in the Upper Midwest that experienced deindustrialization following the farm crisis of the 1980s and, in recent decades, refugee resettlement. Refugee resettlement in the U.S. is carried out by local nonprofit agencies contracted by the federal government who play key roles in developing local-level policies and services for refugees to support integration while promoting pro-refugee frames (de Graauw and Bloemraad 2017; Frazier 2024; Trudeau 2008). While research has explored the new geography of refugee settlement, scholars have argued for greater attention to the role of advocates and community-based organizations in this new political landscape (Roth et al. 2018; Pottie-Sherman 2018; Howsam Scholl and Darrow 2025). We found multiple actors at the local level contributing to the production of pro-refugee resettlement and belonging frames in relation to the variegated political environments at the state and national level, including local officials, advocates at resettlement agencies and other refugee-serving organizations, and refugees themselves. We draw on primary data we collected from surveys and focus groups with immigrants, refugees, and staff at a local nonprofit affiliate of a national resettlement agency, Heartland Resettlement (a pseudonym), and our analysis of published stories about refugees from local nonprofit immigrant- and refugee-serving organizations and online news reports.

Much like pro-immigrant advocacy campaigns across the Midwest, local advocates in Centerville have emphasized immigrants and refugees’ contributions to economic development to garner support and develop coalitions amidst heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and neoliberal austerity policies (Filomeno 2015; McDaniel 2014; Pottie-Sherman 2018).Despite these economic contributions, refugees encounter discrimination in their everyday lives and struggle to navigate a new environment impacted by a weak social service network and limited opportunities for social mobility. In response, local advocates, including immigrants and refugees themselves in Centerville, also use overlapping frames as a strategy to emphasize not only refugees’ economic contributions but also their civic contributions through community service, such as volunteering for families, community members and organizations, working at refugee resettlement agencies, and/or starting their own immigrant organizations or co-ethnic support groups.

As anti-immigrant and anti-refugee public discourse continues to hit the headlines, analyzing distinct refugee advocacy contributions frames helps to avoid the neoliberal reductionist tendency to exploit refugees’ economic contributions. Highlighting the less public civic engagement advocacy contribution frame provides a distinct counternarrative to the negative construction of refugees as not assimilating or sharing “American” values and/or as “dependent” and a threat to American welfare (Ludwig 2016; Espiritu 2006). Our findings add to prior literature by showing how immigrants and refugees describe their motivations to be civically engaged in terms of their family and cultural values–in contrast to volunteering driven by American individualistic motivations for career growth or documenting educational requirements. Consequently, refugees’ civic engagement plays a key role in integration, as it helps them advocate for themselves, build their social networks and social capital and create spaces of belonging, while pushing back against anti-migrant sentiment in a nontraditional destination for refugees.

2. Immigration Federalism

While immigration policy is set at the federal level, states and localities across the United States have become increasingly active in immigration debates (Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015). State and local governments have passed hundreds of immigration-related bills in recent decades that range from pro-immigrant and refugee-integration initiatives to exclusionary policies that seek to limit the ability of newcomers to live and work in their jurisdictions. Policies targeting immigrants and refugees have become more common in states like Iowa, where state officials have increasingly described immigrants and refugees as threats to the state and local communities. In 2015, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad joined a group of 30 states in refusing to resettle Syrians, citing concerns about potential public safety threats from refugees. The state subsequently banned sanctuary cities, required local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and made certain immigration violations into state crimes, which would allow local and state officials to detain and deport immigrants. Scholars have argued that anti-immigration sentiments and exclusionary policy initiatives often rely on representations of Midwestern communities as rural, white places threatened by immigrant and refugee newcomers (Nicholls et al. 2021; Leitner 2012), who are seen as less deserving than long-term residents of European heritage (Lay 2012).

While inclusionary immigration policies tend to be concentrated in cities and suburbs in large metropolitan areas (Walker and Leitner 2011), it is also the case that smaller cities have also implemented welcoming policies and practices. Even as state officials have become increasingly hostile to immigrant and refugee resettlement, local officials and advocates across Iowa have drawn on the state’s history of refugee resettlement to develop alternative frames of rural Midwestern communities as historically welcoming (Strunk, forthcoming). Williamson (2018) argues that these initiatives are part of a larger trend across many U.S. cities and towns that has seen local officials work to integrate immigrants and refugees.

The decentralization of refugee resettlement and immigration policies has allowed local bureaucrats to often take on a larger role in providing services and shaping belonging and membership for newcomers. Research on bureaucratic incorporation suggests that local agencies, particularly public schools, libraries, and other government offices that provide translation and other social services, play an important role in helping newcomers to navigate cultural norms and rules in a new setting (Marrow 2009). At the same time, immigrants and refugees are governed by a variety of local administrative practices that create localized definitions of belonging and influence how both advocates and communities navigate policies and articulate their place in cities and other scales (Coutin and Nicholls 2024). Furthermore, while immigrant and refugee integration occurs primarily at the local scale, political environments at other scales shape the frames that are available to local officials and advocates. Nicholls (2014) argues that activists in inhospitable places often use frames that align with national conversations about immigration and emphasize the deservingness of specific groups of migrants. Thus, the tactics and frames used by local advocates are fundamentally multi-scalar in nature and are shaped by extra-local and national networks and discourses.

3. Situating Centerville in Midwest Refugee Resettlement

Popular culture and media representations often present the U.S. Midwest as “flyover country”, an agricultural region disconnected from coastal centers of economic activity. In what Tauxe (1998) has described as the “heartland myth,” Midwestern rural communities in particular are represented as largely white, ethnically homogeneous places defined by traditional family and community values. While the influence of European immigration is occasionally visible in local histories and celebrations, the representation of the Midwest as a predominantly white, non-ethnic space has the effect of marginalizing the presence of non-white residents, especially outside of major cities, and erasing immigration histories from the Global South that have also been an important part of small cities and rural communities, particularly those with manufacturing histories like Centerville.

Over the past 50 years, refugee resettlement has helped to further challenge the exclusionary identity of the Midwest by making the existing global connections of the region more visible. Although refugee resettlement was formalized by the Refugee Act of 1980, Midwestern states and local governments helped to resettle refugees in earlier decades, especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In 1975, Minnesota began resettling Lao and Hmong refugees while Iowa Governor Bob Ray worked with federal officials to collectively resettle 1200 Tai Dam refugees (Walsh 2017). Both states created state agencies to coordinate local support for newcomers, and scholars have argued that the relatively large number of refugees in each state is the result of their historical reputation as welcoming (Nolasco and Braaten 2021).

The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement has promoted a dispersed model of refugee resettlement, by settling refugees in small and mid-sized cities that have historically received fewer immigrants and refugees. While federal officials have argued that this model will result in faster assimilation by refugees, research has not shown that this is the case (Morken and Skop 2017). Still, over the last 50 years refugees have been resettled in larger, traditional immigrant destinations like Minneapolis and St. Louis and in smaller cities like Des Moines and Fargo (Erickson 2020; Frazier 2024).

Like many small cities across the Rust Belt, Centerville has a long history of migration from Mexico. Railroad and manufacturing companies began recruiting Mexican laborers in the early 20th century, and the area continues to attract Latin American and South Asian immigrants working in low-wage meat processing plants and high-skill information and technology jobs. Refugees have also found employment in the area, largely in low-wage sectors. The primary resettlement agency in Centerville since the early 2000s has been the local office of a national refugee resettlement agency. Heartland Resettlement partners with churches and faith-based organizations to find housing for newcomers, provide legal services, and assist refugees with navigating the social service bureaucracies, public transportation, and local school systems. The agency also works closely with major employers in the metropolitan area to match refugees with work opportunities. Centerville has also been a destination for secondary migrants, or refugees who move to another city after their initial resettlement. Our previous research with the Congolese community suggested that refugees move to Centerville primarily because of social networks, job opportunities, and lower costs of living compared to larger cities like Chicago and Atlanta.

While Centerville has experienced a significant increase in its foreign-born population since 1990, refugee resettlement during the mid-2000s led city officials to organize a series of “study circles” to discuss the impact of refugees on local institutions and communities. City planners developed an agenda and invited social service agencies, bureaucrats, refugee community leaders, and other residents to participate in a nearly year-long conversation about the contributions of refugees and the challenges that resettlement brings to small cities. During the study circles, social service agency staff expressed frustration about their inability to respond to increasing needs during a time of declining budgets, which was particularly acute in the midst of the recession that followed the 2009 financial crisis. While officials and residents emphasized that refugee resettlement brought new cultures to the city and was helping to offset population decline, the process also highlighted the concerns of residents around competition for employment with low-income African American communities in the city.

In response, advocates developed talking points about the differences between immigrants and refugees, with materials highlighting the legal status of most refugees and stories about their efforts to flee persecution or violence in their home countries. The representation of immigrants as public burdens, particularly during an economic crisis, shaped how social service agencies in Centerville framed refugee settlement and reinforced traditional narratives about the deservedness of refugees. While the effort to develop a community-driven response to refugee resettlement had many benefits, separating refugees from other migrants diminished the possibility of forming a broader coalition among marginalized populations in the city. Indeed, the primary outcome of the study circles was the formation of a nonprofit umbrella organization that continues to function but focuses primarily on refugee issues. While advocates and bureaucrats in Centerville developed a creative response to refugee resettlement, the dominance of the humanitarian and economic frames essentially limited the representation of refugees as only potential economic and cultural contributors (Clevenger et al. 2014) and, more significantly, problems for the city. As a result, the full view of what refugee resettlement meant and could mean for the city, particularly in terms of how refugees themselves described their participation and integration into the community, was overlooked.

4. Methods

This article is based on primary and secondary research conducted over a multi-year period with immigrant- and refugee-serving organizations in Centerville. We had built prior relationships with the primary refugee-serving organization, Heartland Resettlement, through volunteering and service-learning programs at the local educational institution where we worked, therefore we focused our participant-recruiting efforts through them. Since we were interested in learning about refugee advocacy efforts and how they were framed, particularly young adult refugees’ civic engagement through volunteering, we were keen to hear from refugees themselves and those who worked closely with them. Our primary research draws on surveys and focus groups with resettled refugees and nonprofit resettlement workers at Heartland Resettlement between 2021–2022. Our surveys were conducted with 17 young adults, age 18–23, who resettled to the U.S. as 1.5 generation refugees and identified as Asian, Black, African, or Latinx. Our sample of survey participants were selected from young adults who were involved in youth programs at Heartland Resettlement and/or English as a Second Language programs in local high schools. Thus, we were able to have their staff email our survey to participants to complete online. The survey questions generally asked about refugees’ extent and forms of and motivations for volunteering in the community.

To learn more about how refugees described volunteering and their motivations, we also conducted three virtual in-depth focus groups with refugees that included between 3–13 participants in each which we audio-recorded with participants’ consent. Focus group questions were similar to survey questions; however, we were able to get more details about various types of volunteering and what that consisted of, as well as the different reasons as to why participants engaged in volunteering. We transcribed our focus group research recordings to an online text document and did line-by-line thematic coding on a shared document. The primary themes highlighted refugees’ active civic “contributions” (the civic engagement frame) in various types of formal and informal volunteering at home and in their communities and that family solidarity, ethnic and cultural values were their primary motivations for being civically engaged. We conducted one additional focus group with five staff members who had volunteered at Heartland Resettlement prior to working there and had experience working with young adult refugees. Due to the limited number of staff members and their limited availability due to the organization being under-resourced, we only conducted one focus group with staff. Themes from the different focus groups aligned as staff highlighted refugees as actively engaged in their communities, assisting family members and volunteering in refugee- and immigrant- serving organizations in Centerville, although they also framed refugees as having significant responsibility for their family members to help manage the economic challenges of resettling in a new country. All participants provided informed consent per our approved Institutional Review Board protocol.

We supplemented our primary research with secondary data, which consisted of a content analysis of online stories about and by refugees in Centerville that were published by local media and nonprofit organizations during approximately the same time period. To protect the identity of participants and their advocacy work, we anonymized all sources from our content analysis. Our secondary research allowed us to examine pro-refugee frames used by advocates across the local landscape in Centerville from local officials, nonprofit advocates, educators, and community volunteers to refugees advocating for themselves. Our thematic coding of content, focusing on pro-refugee advocacy, highlighted more diverse frames including “values” frames promoting refugee advocacy on the basis of humanitarian values and/or refugee “contributions” frames emphasizing how their economic and civic contributions strengthened Centerville. By conducting primary and secondary research, we were able to analyze the prevalence and diversity of pro-refugee frames present in a small metropolitan area across the local hierarchy and the extent to which some frames (“contributions”) are used over others (“values”), or are overlapping, in more publicly visible spaces. In the following section we discuss our results using frame analysis and selected quotes from different advocacy groups that are representative of the key themes from our research.

5. Results & Discussion

5.1. Framing Immigrant and Refugee Contributions in Centerville

In the context of an increasingly challenging national political environment, nonprofit immigrant and refugee-serving organizations and the refugees they serve are at the forefront of advocating for and “framing” refugees—be it through community engagement, social service provision, research, policy advocacy and/or public relations to make refugees and their contributions to the community visible to the public. Frames are organizing structures or principles that are socially constructed and help people make sense of the world, as conceived by sociologist Goffman (1974). There is a vast literature on frame analysis in the social sciences illuminating how frames provide a useful conceptual tool to study public issues and their impact on public opinion (Carter 2013; Haynes et al. 2016). Frames have been studied quantitatively and qualitatively in public discourse to illuminate the prevalence of an issue, how it is constructed, and what information about it is included or excluded, as seen in the media analysis of “issue-specific frames” (Carter 2013; de Vreese 2005; Entman 1993). Our case study on immigrant and refugee advocacy highlights a salient “issue” relevant to framing not only in the media but in narratives and discourse amongst diverse advocates and spaces in Centerville.

We define pro-refugee advocacy “frames” as the construction of a “system of values and beliefs” (Benford and Snow 2000) to garner public support for immigrant and refugee rights and their well-being in response to the perpetual framing of immigrants and refugees as economic, cultural, criminal, and/or national security threats (Chavez 1997; Haynes et al. 2016). We found that advocates, local officials, and refugees used distinct but also overlapping pro-refugee advocacy frames, including (1) values frames–humanitarian and faith-based; and (2) refugee contributions frames–economic, cultural and civic engagement. Thus, our conceptual framing illuminates “some aspects of a perceived reality…to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman 1993, p. 52, emphasis added). Specifically, we illuminate the prevalence of the less-examined civic engagement contributions advocacy frame across the local landscape of Centerville. Diverse advocacy groups constructed refugees as more than economic contributors, “a problem definition”; they were also valued members of Centerville for their civic contributions, thus reflecting a “a moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman 1993). Our research adds to prior scholarship by showing how pro-refugee advocacy can co-exist across scales in a small city. We also found that young adult refugees employ some of the same frames to describe their belonging and contributions to Centerville but also diverge in important ways.

5.2. Humanitarian Advocacy Values Frames Analysis

Our analysis found that refugee-serving agencies and other advocates frequently use humanitarian frames to describe their work with refugees. Many resettlement agencies in the United States are faith-based and use humanitarian frames, for example by describing themselves as “humanitarian organizations” that do “life-saving work,” to garner support for newcomers by working with local churches and organizations (Clevenger et al. 2014; Frazier 2022). We also found that local officials used humanitarian frames in response to an increasingly hostile national political environment for immigrants and refugees. In 2014, one city in the Centerville metro area offered to host unaccompanied minors from Central America while their asylum case proceeded. Local officials cited Iowa’s history of refugee resettlement under previous governor Bob Ray and called for the state and city to provide support for young people fleeing violence. While a number of local religious leaders supported the proposal, Iowa’s governor opposed the effort and expressed concerns about the potential gang ties of migrant youth.3 In this and other disputes over the resettlement of refugees and asylees, pro-migrant local officials have drawn on humanitarian frames to distinguish Centerville from more restrictive jurisdictions in the Midwest, which often relied on threat narratives to justify exclusionary measures. More recently in 2025, local officials across the Centerville area adopted pro-immigrant and refugee proclamations that affirmed the humanitarian, cultural and economic value of immigrants and refugees, “who are our neighbors,”4 thus highlighting the strategic use of overlapping advocacy frames.

Against the backdrop of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, local officials across the Midwest have often presented recent immigrant and refugee settlement as a way of restoring previous connections to the global economy and competitiveness more generally (Glick Schiller and Cağlar 2011). In cities like Dayton, Des Moines, Detroit, and St. Louis, coalitions of elected officials, non-profit organizations, and business leaders have developed a comprehensive set of immigrant integration policies5 that promote a receptive context among long-term residents in cities and metropolitan areas as well as supporting greater civic engagement among recent immigrants and refugees (McDaniel 2014; Pottie-Sherman 2018). These efforts are influenced and supported by national advocacy networks, most notably Welcoming America, which provides resources to local jurisdictions and non-profit organizations working to attract and incorporate newcomers. Most of the 134 cities and counties in the Welcoming America network are in large metropolitan areas, but these regional and national immigrant rights networks influence how local advocates and officials frame their support for refugees.

5.3. Economic Advocacy Contributions Frames Analysis

In Centerville, business leaders, local officials, and advocates have made the case that immigrants and refugees are an economic benefit to the region. The pro-immigrant and -refugee proclamations adopted in 2025 responded to Trump’s promises to engage in a mass deportation campaign in his second term by noting that immigrants and refugees made important contributions to the local economy through their skills as employees and entrepreneurs. Similarly, Centerville’s Chamber of Commerce highlighted the importance of immigration for regional economic development in recent strategic planning initiatives. Like other welcoming initiatives in Midwestern and Rust Belt cities, Chamber leaders argue that immigrants and refugees represent a key source of population growth for a depressed region. Business leaders frequently host job fairs for newcomers and partner with different refugee-serving agencies to find employees for meat processing facilities and other large employers in the region.

While pro-refugee advocacy in Centerville often emphasizes the economic contributions of all newcomers, some local officials and community-based organizations have drawn distinctions between migrants who they see as more deserving than others. After the first Trump administration began allowing local and state jurisdictions to refuse to resettle refugees, one local county board proclaimed that the county would “continue to welcome legal refugees,”6 citing the economic contributions of refugees and their desire to assimilate while implicitly opposing migrants with other legal statuses. Statements like these, which implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) contrast refugees with migrants who are assumed to lack legal status or a desire to fully integrate into local communities, reflect what Hamlin (2021) calls the “migrant/refugee binary,” which privilege some border-crossers over others while disregarding the similar conditions that result in migration for people with different legal statuses.

Efforts to represent the positive economic impact of refugee resettlement are an example of how economic frames can frequently overlap with humanitarian and other values frames. Several years ago, a refugee-serving organization in Centerville asked local academics to develop an estimate of the economic impact of immigrants and refugees. The report, which was modeled on Welcoming America’s research, included personal narratives from refugee entrepreneurs and was used in campaigns to increase local support for refugee resettlement. Advocates frequently use refugee stories to build understanding and support among local residents for resettlement and funding for social services (Howsam Scholl and Darrow 2025). Refugee stories are crafted for specific audiences, and as a result often reproduce dominant narratives about the vulnerability of refugees or their economic contributions to local communities. In one example, business leaders used personal narratives from refugees to celebrate the work ethic of individuals who had demonstrated such resilience in fleeing their countries of origin.7 In these and other cases, refugees choose to share stories that can simultaneously reinforce and challenge dominant narratives about refugees (Espiritu et al. 2022). Humanitarian and economic frames influence the political landscape of advocacy, and refugees engage with these frames to push back against restrictionist frames that present refugees as a threat. At the same time, refugee stories and advocacy are examples of how refugees self-advocate and describe their belonging and the value of their contributions in alternative ways.

5.4. Civic Engagement Advocacy Contributions Frames Analysis

Resettlement agencies have used a variety of strategies to manage the significant federal funding cuts to refugee resettlement during both Trump administrations. For example, they have expanded services to other immigrant and refugee populations, increased funding from community organizations and private foundations, recruited more voluntary labor, formed new community collaborations and engaged in increased political advocacy (Chikanda 2023; Howsam Scholl and Darrow 2025). In our research, we found another advocacy strategy, community-based nonprofit organizations conducting collaborative research on refugees’ civic contributions to American society to highlight a less visible frame about refugees in public spaces, their civic engagement.

Civic engagement advocacy scholarship largely focuses on organizational-level policy advocacy work done by community leaders, nonprofit workers and social service providers (Dixon et al. 2018; Roth et al. 2018; Howsam Scholl and Darrow 2025). While scholars have found that first and second-generation immigrants successfully integrate and are civically engaged (Jensen 2008; Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad 2008) in their communities in numerous, diverse ways including volunteering with immigrant/refugee organizations, churches and ethnic congregations, voting, obtaining citizenship, coaching, tutoring, helping those in need with basic welfare, political activism and organizing ethnic celebrations (Handy and Greenspan 2009; Jensen 2008; Stepick and Stepick 2002; Weng and Lee 2016), less is known about how, and the extent to which, advocates at the local level frame refugees’ civic engagement in communities.

In our research we found that pro-refugee advocates used the civic engagement frame as a response to anti-immigrant/refugee sentiment to highlight the diverse ways that resettled refugees contribute, integrate and form a sense of belonging through community involvement. We focus on civic engagement as community engagement and service—working or volunteering to promote the quality of life of a community and supporting the well-being and welfare of community members (Wray-Lake et al. 2015), particularly newcomers. This includes volunteering in organizations or neighborhoods, social service provision, policy advocacy and public awareness of immigrants’ and refugees’ rights and the issues they face. Our research also adds to literature on immigrants’ civic engagement that has largely focused on their voting and political engagement (Dixon et al. 2018). While volunteering or community service as a form of civic engagement has been framed as “low risk” advocacy through social solidarity (Libal et al. 2022), illuminating this type of civic engagement advocacy frame highlights refugees’ civic incorporation and their agency in developing and articulating their belonging in their communities.

5.5. Research Collaboration as Advocacy to Highlight Refugees’ Civic Engagement

In response to concerns about maintaining local support for resettlement programs, Heartland Resettlement asked the authors, professors at a local educational institution, to collect data on volunteering amongst young adult immigrants and refugees in the community for potential funding opportunities and to use in public relations/communication efforts. This collaborative research effort—to highlight refugees’ volunteering in the community—focuses on their civic engagement contributions, along with nonprofit workers’ and educators’ civic engagement advocacy efforts.

However, nonprofit staff were particularly concerned with obtaining quantitative results from this research in order to highlight the number of hours refugees volunteered in public facing research. Refugee resettlement agencies are under-resourced and under threat by state and federal officials, which puts pressure on the types of advocacy work they engage in and frames they can highlight. They are aware of the power of neoliberal economic framing (Pottie-Sherman 2018) to help secure funding and combat anti-immigrant sentiment. However, this focus has the potential to obscure the substance of the volunteering refugees engage in that positively impacts the welfare of the community. When trying to quantify data on volunteering, we were not able to yield much quantitative data due to how refugees described their diverse forms of civic engagement, including informal and formal volunteering, as discussed in the next section. This experience demonstrates that when nonprofit community advocates try to make their work more public through funding efforts or to combat anti-immigrant sentiment, they tend to rely on frames that resonate with the dominant economic advocacy frame (in a climate where refugee resettlement is under threat) which can obscure refugees’ diverse contributions to civic life through volunteering.

However, we argue that refugee participants were advocating for themselves by participating in this research collaboration and helping direct the focus of the results. They were willing to share their community service efforts, which illuminates how they self-advocate using a civic engagement frame that incorporates but also pushes back against economic and humanitarian frames that limit the contributions and belonging of refugees to certain arenas while marginalizing other elements of refugee lives. Our research contributes to a growing literature that highlights refugees’ agency (Espiritu 2006; Espiritu and Vang 2024; Espiritu et al. 2022; Ehrkamp 2017) by focusing on their self-advocacy.

5.6. How Refugees Self-Advocate Using Civic Engagement Frames and Form a Sense of Belonging

Our research with resettled refugees draws on 17 survey participants and three focus groups with 18 participants—who all immigrated to the U.S. as 1.5 generation refugees who lived in Centerville. Most refugee participants identified as having Asian, Latinx, or African origins, thus marking them as minorities in America. Questions broadly focused on activities/extracurriculars that young refugees participated in and the forms and frequency of volunteering in the community and their motivations to do so.

Almost all survey and focus group participants described volunteering in some form, whether in public or private spaces. While some young adults are involved in more formal volunteering activities in at churches, mosques, food pantries, organizations, and sports or environmental clubs, most are engaged in less formal activities with families and community members such as interpreting at hospitals, clinics, home, and schools, taking them to appointments, grocery shopping, cooking and babysitting. Participants described assisting family and community members as an important cultural practice and something they do regularly. One participant’s comment reflects most views expressed in the focus groups: “For me, it is just how I grew up. That’s how my culture is, people are always willing to help each other, and it just makes you feel good to be helpful.”

Young adult refugee participants emphasized that they made their own decision to engage in volunteer or community service work but also described assisting others as a constant in their lives that was modeled by their parents and community members. A participant from Myanmar described how the expectation that young people contribute to community events was reinforced at church services: “I don’t [know] if it is only our culture or not, if we are in a big group and there’s something to do the young people do all the cleaning, washing dishes and cleaning and set up for the older people. Also it doesn’t matter who you are with, we help each other if there is a gathering or even in a church, we do things together.” For young adult refugees, the expectation that they are actively involved in supporting fellow community members was reinforced at regular religious events and when others arrive in the community, as a participant from Sudan described: “When a new Sudanese person comes from Egypt or Sudan, it doesn’t matter, I’ve noticed that other Sudanese people are always around and trying to help them with basic stuff like getting groceries, especially when they first get here.” Similarly, other 1.5 generation refugee participants described assisting newcomers as a form of solidarity that developed within refugee communities, partially in response to the lack of assistance from outsiders: “I feel like some people [volunteer] because they know how it feels not to get help, they don’t want anyone else to experience that.” In these accounts, the act of observing and participating in community activities is a key part of young people learning the importance of volunteering and practicing civic engagement in everyday forms of volunteer and service work. The mobilization of support for recent arrivals also demonstrates how community expectations are shaped both by cultural norms of reciprocity (Weng and Lee 2016) and the specific experiences of refugees.

The expectation of assisting newcomers is also the result of declining federal support for resettlement and other social services (Trudeau 2008; Pottie-Sherman 2018; Mott 2010), which require refugees to rely on makeshift support from charities and their own social support networks. Despite the political and economic pressures facing refugee communities, these forms of community solidarity, as 1.5 generation young people suggest, have also become a critical part of refugee identities and civic engagement advocacy (Libal et al. 2022).

While 1.5 generation refugee participants clearly defined volunteering as a community expectation and activity, they also saw volunteering as a benefit to themselves. Research suggests volunteering can facilitate immigrant integration because they provide newcomers with skills and networks, and participants often echoed ideas about bridging and bonding social capital as they described how volunteering and community service would help them (Handy and Greenspan 2009; Putnam 2000). Some young people recalled being advised that volunteering would improve their college applications, but they said that was not the “main reason” for volunteering. Most also connected volunteering with the discrimination and isolation that they faced after arriving in the United States. For many, volunteering was valuable because it allowed them to interact with different people and use their skills to develop confidence, as one young adult refugee reflected:

before I got here, I was so nervous to talk to people, I am a shy person and I don’t have confidence to talk in front of people but when I got here I had to be an interpreter for my parents and my friends and [local refugee settlement organization], and it just give me some confidence to talk with people and now I have confidence to talk with people and I’m not shy anymore, it’s really given me a good experience.

We argue that young adult refugees’ serving their families and co-ethnic communities, which connects them to the key social institutions and helps them integrate, is a form of community and civic engagement as they become their families’ biggest advocates and build their social capital and networks while doing this.

5.7. Refugees’ Civic Engagement Advocacy & Nonprofit Advocacy in Public Spaces

Refugees also self-advocate by making their civic engagement efforts more public through working with nonprofit agencies and publishing their stories online. Heartland Resettlement, the area’s only resettlement agency, dedicates a section on its website to highlight refugees’ impact in the community as part of detailing their contributions to local communities and civic engagement. We chose a select few that reflect the key themes to highlight the salience of the civic engagement advocacy frame.

One story features Sara, who discussed her path to becoming an advocate for immigrants and refugees using overlapping humanitarian, faith-based and civic advocacy frames. Her experiences as a second-generation immigrant, along with her Christian values, resonated with the mission and work of Heartland Resettlement. She also emphasized how volunteering in the community helped her engage in more effective policy advocacy: “I am better equipped to have conversations when speaking to my elected officials and community about refugees and immigrant policies. I can also have conversations with my church and fellow Christians about welcoming the stranger.” Thus, her civic engagement advocacy work tacitly fights against anti-immigrant sentiment while promoting immigrant and refugee belonging.

Online stories also resonate with our focus group participants’ emphasis of civic engagement as reciprocity (Weng and Lee 2016). Mali, a health and wellness caseworker at Heartland Resettlement, and former refugee from Thailand, resettled to Centerville in 2018. She has served the community by helping her brother manage a grocery store, interpreting, transporting community members and more. She was motivated to be civically engaged through community service because, “When we arrived, we had people who helped us with transportation and educating us on the new culture. So, I try to do the same for new arrivals knowing how hard it is to start a new life in a new country.” Mali was also thankful for the service of others, reflecting her awareness of the civic benefits of a free democracy, “We have lots of opportunities here and we thank the country for that and all who served the country. Because of their service, we can receive freedom.” Consequently, her recognition of community-wide social solidarity highlights her agency in developing and articulating a sense of civic incorporation and belonging in her new home.

5.8. How Nonprofit Advocates’ Economic Contributions Frame Obscures Refugees’ Civic Engagement

Advocates use a variety of pro-refugee advocacy frames to garner support from different audiences. While we have shown how advocates attempt to use the civic engagement advocacy frame, this is not always easy given the dominance and power of economic frames. Consequently, when pro-refugee advocates emphasize the dominant economic frames in more publicly visible spaces such as the media and internet, this can obscure refugees’ civic engagement and other lived experiences (Haynes et al. 2016; Steimel 2010).

In a local opinion piece in an online business news publication, Dawn, the executive director of a nonprofit urban farm system collaboration with refugees, stated that refugees are “a vital part of the workforce” and emphasized their economic contributions by highlighting the revenues of companies where refugees work in Centerville. Dawn uses the pro-refugee economic advocacy frame in order to encourage the business community to advocate with federal leaders to support the country’s stalled refugee resettlement program in 2025.

In contrast, the nonprofit’s publicly accessible website, a less visible space compared to online media, illuminates refugees’ civic contributions through numerous stories about the work of refugees in improving food access and production, improving the health and quality of life for not only refugees—but the greater community—contributing to the civic and socio-cultural revitalization of the area. While Dawn uses overlapping economic and civic contribution frames in online media, the decision to focus primarily on economic contributions demonstrates how more publicly visible spaces of advocacy can be constraining.

Refugees’ self-advocacy can also obscure their civic contributions when focusing on their economic contributions. For example, a story on a refugee-serving nonprofit’s website features John, a former refugee from Tanzania, who worked there for two years. His advocacy engages with overlapping pro-refugee frames including faith-based, civic engagement, economic, and moral frames as he states that “human beings are created to help one another” and “it’s more than getting paid, it’s about helping, it’s about community and having one another” and giving back, because “I know what it’s like…” The story also focuses on how John helped increase the agency’s employer partnerships to more than 50 companies who worked with refugees to find employment. John stated that what was “most rewarding” was “seeing clients starting jobs, becoming self-sufficient, buying their own cars and paying their own bills.” Including this information makes it visible to the public how Heartland Resettlement works to make refugees self-sufficient, a key contractual “economic” goal in the state-NGO partnership, but also shows how John reproduces the economic advocacy frame that reflects the priority of fulfilling federal policy goals as most important or “rewarding.” This example reflects how overlapping values and contributions frames used by local advocates and refugees themselves can be multi-scalar in nature and shaped by extra-local and national discourses.

6. Conclusions

In response to frames that question the deservingness and belonging of immigrants and refugees in an era of restrictive immigration and austerity measures, local officials, advocates, and refugee communities have emphasized their economic and civic contributions to local communities. Our research explores how advocates frame immigrant and refugees’ civic engagement in communities in nontraditional destinations that have seen increased resettlement in recent decades. We argue that advocates use overlapping contributions frames to highlight refugee belonging and participation in multiple communities, even as they still use the economic contributions frame to appeal to key stakeholders. This is not surprising given the history of economic and population decline in Centerville, alongside refugee resettlement from non-European countries, and the dramatic reductions in federal funding for refugee resettlement and other services under both Trump administrations that have placed additional constraints on refugee-serving organizations.

Even while recent cuts and devolution of refugee policy have placed greater responsibility on local bureaucrats without corresponding resources, local community collaborations and nonprofit services have emerged in Centerville to support newcomers, often drawing on ideas and resources from regional and national networks. Advocates and local officials drew on the history of Midwestern states’ refugee resettlement practices and hospitality that welcomed Lao, Hmong and Tai Dam refugees to challenge restrictive measures and promote inclusionary policies at the local level.

We argue that analyses of pro-refugee advocacy must also include refugee self-advocacy, both through more formal efforts to influence policy but also through story-telling that describes community service and their motivations, cultural and altruistic, interpreting for family and community members at appointments, helping organize events at their places of worship, educating local officials and community members about refugees and immigrants to help combat anti-immigrant sentiment and racism, and more. Through these public and less visible frames, refugees implicitly contest dominant humanitarian and economic framing by highlighting their civic engagement and construction of diverse spaces of belonging, showing that they are more than economic contributors in the Midwestern United States.

Our research focuses on one case study in a small metropolitan area in the Midwest. While such multi-scalar pro-refugee advocacy is not necessarily representative of all nontraditional destinations, small cities or the Midwest, our findings suggest that pro-refugee advocacy groups across local landscapes are in the unique position to frame refugees in diverse, welcoming ways in public spaces by highlighting their less visible civic and service contributions that support the welfare of not only newcomers but the wider community. Future research should delve deeper into local level advocacy strategies and the diverse forms of refugees’ civic engagement advocacy in traditional and nontraditional destinations in an increasingly hostile political environment for immigrants and refugees.