The 2 million volunteers fixing immigration

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NAZANIN ASH: This is like what Airbnb and Lyft and Uber did. We require net immigration of nearly one and a half million a year just to sustain our economy. This is a problem that’s way too big for government to solve alone, but we felt like if we tapped into innovations with the private sector, willingness of the American people, we could find much more capacity. And indeed the social cohesion, the bridge building, the community-driven aspect of this work is so important for the moment we’re in.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Nazanin Ash, CEO of Welcome.US, an amazing organization that in just a short time has had a dramatic impact on U.S. immigration. Immigration is such a difficult topic and challenge right now all over the globe, but Nazanin, by pairing new technology with an understanding of human motivations, has created a new model that is both effective and efficient.

Welcome.US has unlocked a nonpartisan business-supported community of 2 million volunteers who are quietly implementing the kind of immigration process that most Americans support. Welcome.US is a story of both business innovation and human inspiration. And yes, things even get a little teary before this episode ends. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Nazanin Ash, co-founder and CEO of Welcome.US. Nazanin, thanks for being here.

ASH: Thanks so much for having me, Bob. I’m really excited to be here.

Copy LinkHow Welcome.US pairs refugees with sponsors

SAFIAN: U.S. immigration policy and the migrant crisis, these are difficult and divisive topics. Welcome.US is a nonprofit, started in 2021 to help Afghan refugees resettle in the U.S., and since then, you’ve helped nearly 800,000 of what you call newcomers. Can you explain how Welcome.US works? You pair refugees with sponsors, or what you call welcomers?

ASH: That’s exactly right. So, we unleash the compassion, and generosity, and willingness of Americans to help welcome and resettle refugee newcomers through a program called Private Community Sponsorship. So, welcomers raise the resources, they submit applications, they submit themselves to security and background checks, and then they’re the ones that take on all the work of helping newcomers resettle in their new communities.

SAFIAN: And you’ve activated more than 2 million Americans as welcomers across 50 states. It seems counterintuitive at a time where anti-immigrant sentiment seems to be everywhere.

ASH: You’re absolutely right. I think we have a misconception that we are not a welcoming nation. 93% of Americans think that we have a problem at the border, because we do. But 73% of Americans, including a super majority of Republicans, think that we should have expanded legal pathways for welcoming. 88% of Republicans think that managed immigration has been extraordinarily good for our country. So, we are very pro-immigration. We know what that has contributed to our country. We know what role it plays in our founding ideals. We take pride in that, but we want it to be orderly. We want it to be managed. We want it to be community-driven, and that’s exactly what we designed.

SAFIAN: Yeah, it surprised me that 70% of the welcomers are self-identified Republicans and independents, often from rural areas in the middle of the country.

ASH: That’s right. And in some sense, I want to say it shouldn’t surprise us at all. We know that Americans are generous, and compassionate, and they love to serve. What was unique about the methodology that we deployed is we didn’t ask them their opinion on immigration. We didn’t ask them to take a stand on any of the divisive political debates of the day. We asked them if they wanted to help, and that is a call to service that Americans have always answered.

SAFIAN: So, through your platform, welcomers and newcomers are paired up. How? I mean, I assume the newcomers are approved to come already by the government.

ASH: We offer a wide variety of ways for people to participate. So, if you already know someone that you know is in need of safety, what we provide are all the tools, and resources, and facilitation for you to be able to do that well. If you need to be matched, if you want to do this work, but you need to be matched to a newcomer in need of safety, then our matching platform allows for you to connect with newcomers who are seeking sponsors in the United States.

And a big part of what I love about it is it allows you to connect and develop a relationship. They connect on the basis of their love of dogs. They connect because they have kids the same age. You find and develop these very human bonds well before newcomers arrive. And the platform also does all kinds of helpful things, like simultaneous translation, so you can chat in real time and get to know each other and ask questions. And it’s part of why we were able to scale resettlement, including in rural areas. But I will tell you that it surprised us too, that so many people wanted to participate. When we set our initial goals, we thought maybe 100,000 people would participate, but we blew through that cap in three months.

Copy LinkThe story of a family that resettled in a small Wisconsin town

SAFIAN: Do you have any favorite stories about newcomer families or sponsor family welcomers? I saw one mentioned from Unity, Wisconsin. Is that a real place?

ASH: It’s a real place. You can’t make this up. So, Unity, Wisconsin is a town of 400. And in fact, the family who sponsored, the Luchterhands, they are a multi-generational farming family. They live 60 miles outside of this town of 400, and they were watching the news, seeing what was happening in Ukraine. They were enormously moved to help.

They found their way to our website. They connected with the Hnatiuk family on our website. And I mentioned to you that rural resettlement is a story unto itself, and it’s for this reason. No government program would have thought it was a good idea to resettle a refugee family in a rural community of 400 that doesn’t have an extensive public transportation infrastructure, or a lot of public welcoming infrastructure, or diaspora community, et cetera. But because the Luchterhands and the Hnatiuks were able to connect on the platform, what the Hnatiuks saw was a farming community that reminded them of their family farm, which is their retreat when they want to find peace.

To them, it reminded them of their most peaceful place, at a time where they and their young boys had been experiencing the terror and the bombings of the Russian invasion. So, they chose each other, and the librarian stepped up to provide the English language services. A neighbor donated a car. And two years later, Olesia, who had originally trained as an accountant, loves her community so much that she’s retraining as a nurse, because there are deep rural health needs in the community. So, there are these amazing stories unfolding all across the country, all 50 states, because Americans are now able to do this welcoming work.

Copy LinkThe responsibility of the host family

SAFIAN: You ask a lot of the welcomers. Are the welcomers having them come into their homes, or they’re helping them find housing, find healthcare, find whatever they need?

ASH: Right. The responsibility of the welcomer is to facilitate access to housing, but not necessarily in your own home. You facilitate employment, you make sure kids get enrolled in school, people get security cards, work authorization. You’re helping to make sure that they get all their medical checks upon arrival. You’re providing the initial cash resources, so they have a little bit of cash to get back on their feet. And we generally tell sponsors to plan on providing pretty intensive support for the first 90 days, but most working age refugee newcomers are self-sufficient within 180 days.

SAFIAN: You put the welcomers and the newcomers together, and then do you back away, then it’s just up to them?

ASH: No, no. We give them access to flight credits, and housing credits, and rideshare credits, to matching grants, because they have to raise the money for this to be successful. We funded this network of community organizations, so they have what we call a bat phone in case they run into trouble locally. That’s one of the things that is unique about our model, that sort of flips the typical way of doing business on its head. Our customer is the welcomer, because if they don’t have an incredible experience, then our intention to scale legal pathways and opportunities for more people in need of safety, to be able to come to the United States and thrive, we can’t do that if welcomers don’t feel successful, supported, inspired, and engaged.

Copy LinkHow Welcome.US does more with less than government programs

SAFIAN: The U.S. government has its own programs for helping refugees, spending like $1.5 billion annually. Those taxpayer dollars help a fraction of the number that Welcome.US does, around 70,000 a year, versus your peak was around 800,000 a year. Why is that? Is this an area where Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency might zero in?

ASH: I think this is a great area for improvement, and we’ve got a lot to offer on lessons learned. This is another way in which we flipped the model. So, a typical approach for providing services to vulnerable populations is B2B, right? So, government provides public funding to an NGO, or a contractor; that nonprofit or contractor provides services to vulnerable populations.

But your capacity is limited at every point along that chain. Limited by public dollars, and innovation capacity, and politics. And so, to your point, despite billions being expended in humanitarian response, we’re serving a fraction of the need. I’m talking about less than 1% of the need. So, our model skips all those steps, and it goes directly to the welcomer, and it leverages their capacity, their willingness, their generosity, and that’s how we scale it.

From our perspective, if it didn’t scale, it wasn’t a solution. We were able to mobilize, and tap into 7 billion in time and resources from everyday Americans. And to be clear, those resources didn’t come to us. We have an annual operating budget of 10 million. That is what welcomers dedicated in their own time and cash. And from our perspective, the scale limitations are really led by the generosity and compassion of the American people.

Copy LinkNavigating policies issued by the Trump administration

SAFIAN: Your scale quadrupled over three years, but right now, as I understand, it’s all been put on pause.

ASH: Yes, exactly. So, the Trump administration has paused all of these pathways for newcomers in need of safety to come to United States, and what’s been remarkable to us is seeing how our welcomers have responded. So, in addition to pausing the programs, the Trump administration has also issued policy that has put the populations that have been sponsored, most of them, at risk of deportation, and or losing their work authorization.

And what’s been incredible is seeing welcomers, again, from every corner of the country, and every part of our political tapestry, really mobilizing to help protect the people that they have welcomed. They’ve engaged their members of Congress over 100,000 times already. They’ve reached representatives in every single Congressional District, all 100 senators. They’re talking to their governors and their mayors, and they’re saying, “This is the way it should be done. This is common sense immigration policy, and we’ve seen with our own eyes what they’ve contributed to our community.”

SAFIAN: When Nazanin talks about the generosity and compassion of the American people, that’s not ascribed to U.S. immigration policy very much lately. And yet that’s what Welcome.US has tapped into, the common ground that cuts across the U.S. political divide. So what’s been the role of private business in Welcome.US’s success? And what made Nazanin focus on immigration in the first place? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, we heard Welcome.US’s Nazanin Ash talk about activating 2 million Americans to sponsor immigrants in their community. Now we explore immigration’s economic impact, how she tapped dozens of CEOs and big name brands from Meta to Google to Goldman Sachs, and why this pivotal moment is so emotional. Let’s dive back in.

Copy LinkThe economic benefits of immigration

You’ve said that newcomers resettling can bring big economic benefits to the U.S. economy. That’s kind of the opposite of a lot of political rhetoric, people worried about their jobs, and the cost of supporting newcomers. What are you looking at differently?

ASH: Wow, so many indicators. I mean, let’s start at the top. Over 50% of our billion dollar companies were founded or co-founded by newcomers, many of them refugees. Scaled immigration pathways of the last three years are estimated to contribute $9 trillion to our economy over the next decade. You have thousands of communities, rural and semi-rural communities, across the country that have been losing population year over year, and are eager to reverse that decline. There are enormous needs. I mean the Census Bureau estimates that we require net immigration of nearly one and a half million a year just to sustain our economy. So, we not only have the capacity to welcome, we have a need to welcome.

Copy LinkBuilding public-private partnerships with Meta, Google & Uber

SAFIAN: You’ve gotten support from corporate partners, Meta, Google, Uber, others.

ASH: Yes.

SAFIAN: What’s been the role of business in Welcome’s efforts?

ASH: Yes. So this has been an extraordinary public-private partnership. We partnered with the private sector to build the civic infrastructure that would scale these new pathways. That included designing a campaign. We did that with assets from Accenture’s Droga5 partnership. We did that with resources from Goldman Sachs. It was carried with airtime from Comcast, and then distributed to our target audience with Google Ads.

They provided massive technological support for our sort of many to many, our B2C strategy, that allowed us to quickly scale. And then the framework of technology that they helped us create was not only our matching platform and our online sponsorship hubs, but it was also the framework that allowed us to scale flight credits, and housing credits, and matching grants, and rideshare credits from Lyft and Uber. It wasn’t a, “Write us a check and go away,” partnership. It was a deep collaboration that was about bringing our collective efforts to build a seamless infrastructure and journey that wrapped around sponsors and newcomers, and provided them the support they need, and empowered them to do this work.

SAFIAN: How did you build these relationships with all of these organizations? I mean, I know you have something called the Welcome.US CEO Council. It’s got like 40 of the biggest name CEOs. Is that where you started? Do you start at the top of these organizations? How did all that come together?

ASH: We launched in the crucible of the Afghan evacuation. When the U.S. faced this extraordinary challenge of resettling 80,000 Afghan newcomers on a government resettlement infrastructure that had resettled just 11,400 refugees the year before. So, that’s when we developed this public-private partnership with government. We were like, “This is a problem that’s way too big for government to solve alone.” But we felt like if we tapped into innovations of the private sector, willingness of the American people, we could find much more capacity.

And indeed, when we went to these CEOs, and asked them to help, not a single one said no. These leaders know exactly what the challenges are. Peter Zaffino, CEO of AIG, wrote about this in 2015. He talked about unmanaged migration as one of the top five things CEOs should be concerned about as risks. He talked about the benefits if it’s managed, and the risks if it’s not, and he’s talking about global instability, and security, rise of authoritarian regimes.

David Risher looked at our methodology, and he was like, “Oh, I see what you’re doing. This is like what Airbnb, and Lyft, and Uber did. You are not trying to reform government systems from the inside. It’s a whole new business model that you’ve built alongside.” And now, those are lessons we can carry into the traditional system. I think they were deeply inspired to see how communities engaged, right? Like the social cohesion, the bridge building, the community-driven aspect of this work is so important for the moment we’re in.

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for Welcome.US right now?

ASH: We feel passionately about continuing to grow this extraordinary movement of welcomers. So, we are pivoting our technology, our campaign, our systems, our infrastructure, to help Americans volunteer, and serve as citizen guides for the 8.5 million green card holders who are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship, but haven’t done it yet. There’s paperwork you have to file, you have to pass an English test, you have to pass a civics test, you have to pay a fee.

Those are barriers that can be overcome if you have a friend, and a guide, and a welcomer who’s walking alongside you, and helping you through it. So, we’re excited to get the word out. We’re excited for all these policymakers to be educated on what their communities have been experiencing, and we feel really confident that these are the solutions that should rise, and will rise.

Copy LinkWhy Nazanin Ash has embarked on this work

SAFIAN: Can I ask you, why do you do this?

ASH: I do this work for a number of reasons. My parents came here from Iran as exchange students, and they intended to pursue their education and return. They had me accidentally, they were still undergraduates when they had me. The Iranian Revolution happened in the last year of my dad’s PhD program, and so they decided to stay.

And if you look at what is happening with women in Iran today, you know what my future would’ve been otherwise. So, that led to a career of trying to remove those barriers of human potential for others. And I have deep faith in the American people. I come to this with a tremendous amount of patriotism, because we were the first nation with a written constitution that conferred human rights and human dignity on the basis of personhood, and not on the basis of citizenship.

SAFIAN: You get emotional about this. I mean, you really feel it.

ASH: Yeah. We’re built on this idea that we’re a place for strivers. We’re a place for people seeking freedom, and opportunity, and self-determination. And our sponsors talk about how their experience as welcomers reintroduced them to that value. One of our sponsors shared a story once, it’s Leslie Sperry.

She’s part of a sponsor group in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and she sponsored a Congolese family who had spent three generations in a refugee camp, and she was walking the father, Meshack, after she had visited the family to see how they were doing. And she tells the story of how he threw out his arms and said, “I’m free.” And for her, it was this shock, and reminder that, yeah, that’s what we have to offer, freedom. And how incredible to be able to offer that to the next generation of new Americans. These welcomers are having a generational impact in someone’s lives. They’re putting them on a completely different trajectory. Just as my life was put on a completely different trajectory. What an amazing thing to do as a country, and as Americans.

SAFIAN: Nazanin, thank you so much for sharing with us.

ASH: I think it’s really incredible, and you are exactly right. It’s a pivotal moment. It’s a pivotal moment.

SAFIAN: Nazanin’s emotion deserves a bit of space. It’s a reflection of her personal commitment, of her appreciation for all the volunteers who’ve become welcomers, and of her frustration. It’s a shame that Welcome.US’s momentum is being blocked. Although to her credit, Nazanin has pivoted smartly to an adjacent area of need.

What I take away from all this is a reminder that seemingly intractable problems like immigration can have solutions if addressed with creativity. Beyond Welcome.US’s tech platform, it’s human generosity that’s fueled its success, and I take that as a hopeful signal about where we are today, and where we can all be in the future. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.