November 20, 2018. This article is about Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB), an international non-government organization, with locations in Canada and Australia that works to match refugees in Lebanon and Jordan with employment opportunities abroad. The author goes on to discuss how highly-skilled refugees can fill labor shortage gaps and the organization hopes to change Western attitudes towards refugee resettlement. The author highlights that the project is currently small and the organization has a searchable database with 11,000 refugee resumes from Lebanon and Jordan.
The experiment so far is tiny, but it’s aiming high: to forge a new pathway for refugees to be recognized for what they can bring to a country, not for the state of the countries they were forced to leave. In so doing, TBB hopes to shift attitudes about refugees among Western nations and their immigration systems, some of which are under assault by the rise of populism and nativism.
The group is not alone in grappling with how to put refugees to work. In the United States, the Tent Partnership for Refugees works with businesses to facilitate refugee hires, both in countries to which they first flee and where they are ultimately resettled.
Tent Partnership’s leaders argue that it is not just the right thing to do, it makes both strategic and business sense. A report released by Tent and the Fiscal Policy Institute in May, for example, showed higher retention rates and resilience among the refugee workforce in the US market. “Our key principle is that businesses can and should be doing more to support refugees,” says Gideon Maltz, the executive director of Tent Partnership for Refugees, who supports the TBB model as an additional option.
Here is the link to The Christian Science Monitor.