We've seen the images on TV about people fleeing conflict in the Middle East, specifically Syria, trying to make their way to a better life. What happens to refugees after they get here? How do they pay their rent and get a job? The biggest problems facing refugees being resettled in the US is economic, and help is coming from what might be considered an unlikely place, Wall Street. Welcome
to Benchmark, a podcast about the global economy. I'm Daniel Moss, a columnist for Bloomberg View in New York, and I'm Scott Landman and economics editor with Bloomberg in Washington. A couple of financial market insiders have started a foundation interfaith Refugee project that raises money from some of the biggest names in the business pinco, JP, Morgan Goldman, Sachs, Morgan
Stanley in a few others along the way. They're trying to re engineer refugee resettlement with a distinctly economic edge. Welcome to our guests, Greg Sharon Now and Michelle Brohart. Thank you before we dive too deeply into this. Our story here isn't just some technocratic exercise in a profit and loss spreadsheet. It's also deeply personal. Tell us about what you do in the finance industry and a little bit about your background. Sure, I'm a portfolio manager PIMPCO.
I manage our commodity mutual fund and absolute term products, and I contribute to the rest of the back of thought process regarding energy and portrollum in particular. My background is that I am in relationship to the work I'm doing refugees outside of office hours, is that I'm a grandchild of refugees. And tell us a little bit about your grandparents refugee experience. Yes, and my grandparents were fortunate to get out of Germany in the late nineties and
be resettled into Panama. It was good fortune because my grandmother was able to use a relationship her family had had previously with the Panamanian ambassador Germany to get herself out. That shows how lucky and fortunate she was. And then I got to be a product of the experience of her and my grandfather re integrating into a new country
where they did not speak the language. Her education was taken from her because she was still a teenager at that time, so they did not have the normal skills that you would have to be successfully integrated to an economy, and they did not have family and natural connections. And when I go through my family's history, it really is emblematic of what the refugee experiences. Michelle, My experience is
a little different with the refugees. I am born and raised in Kansas with parents and grandparents and great grandparents who have all been American, and we haven't really experienced a refugee crisis in Kansas. We have any of things the matter with Kansas that's there. There are wonderful things about Kansas, and there are wonderful things that need to change about Kansas. That's for sure. Kansas is one of the states that has chosen to not take refugees. That
wasn't really the catalyst that pushed me um. It was the conversations that we had with the It was what you would see in the news, and also just being in the oil industry, you read a lot about Libya and the fleeing of people, and you read about these humanitarian crisis that of course impact the oil market, but also impact humanitarian aid in Europe and what it's doing
even to like the nearby countries. So my interaction with refugees was I. I left the US for a week or two, maybe two weeks, and went to Jordan to visit a refugee camp and to visit some of some internally displaced people inside of Jordan's um, and I met refugees who had been fleeing from Syria as well as Iraq. And the interesting thing I think about the my interaction with some of the refugees from Iraq was that it must have been six months, no, maybe maybe eighteen months
before I had gone there, Ices had attacked Mosl. And when Isis attacked Mosle, those those people fled from there. But the impact that it had on the oil market was significant. Even though Mosa was nowhere near oil's oil supply, it's still impacted the market. I met a lot of those refugees from that, and so my relationship with Mosle and the refugees all got tied together at that point. And what do you do in the oil industry? I
trade oil and oil products. Now, how did you get the broader financial services seen interested in the work that you're doing. Now? Many people in finance give a lot back some of the country's biggest philanthropists from the street, But was this a particular area that you found was underserved. So I think what was evident to me and Michelle and Who's saying, is that we work in very global communities,
we work in very current communities. But how do people get engaged with donating and how do people getting age are called They need someone to help them get over the finish line, something to connect with, and at that time there wasn't that obvious connection happening among our community. I am fortunate that my wife, Julie Gersnie is one of our founders, worked in international human rights and nonprofits
for her career. And when I went home two years ago, and this was after the pictures of the Turkish of the boy washing up on the Turkish shores, you know, we were able to use our connections through her work to engage in this. And then I looked around and said, well, I wonder if we had the same pathway for everyone else who who I work with, the new Michelle works with,
to become engaged in the subject. Couldn't we really start moving the needle, both raising dollars to help address refugees, but more important, raising advocacy efforts and building community to address some of the greater. You know ills that the refugees were facing, and how do you make the maximum economic impact with the dollars that you raise. You know, what do you target and what are the basic economic needs? Are the most basic economic needs that you are seeking
to rectify. So we took a life cycleolistic approach. Um. For one, we started from no infrastructure, so we had a physical sponsor model which allows us to then take whatever money we receive and distributed to our partners. But we don't have the ability to run overhead, so all of that is paid for out of pocket by the founders.
And what we did is we decided we were also not experienced enough to drive programming that we wanted to support organizations that we're doing critical work from whether or not they're helping like World Vision and Islamic Relief does in the camps helping people literally to sustain their lives
at a point where the greatest vulnerability to using. The International Refugee Assistance Project, which helps the legal services of refugees who need help to gain resettlement and then highest on the United States Fund, is one of the nine organizations, most seven of which are faith based, that actually do the actual act resettling in the United States. So our project decided to take the life cycle approach support organizations. We thought we're doing valuable work at all different portions
of the refugee life cycle. You know, at PIMCO, we've actually done an additional step that I was involved with where we signed up for the previous White Houses call for public private partnership. And what PIMCO decided to do, and we certainly think this is a great idea, is they raised money to pay for housing for refugees in
our Orange County community. And why we determined to do this is that if you look at a refugee comes to United States, the US government only gives a few thousand dollars to one of these resettlement agencies that are supposed to give them a couple of months of running start and in their integrating up and then they are able to get some social services from other parts of the federal support system. But effectively it is not enough.
And if you look at the needs of the refugees, they spend in an ordinate amount of time simply trying to raise money to pay their rent when what they really need to be doing. A lot of them needs needs to be learning how to speak language, gain training
creates stability in their home. If you have your home and you're moving seven times in a year because you're struggling to meet your rent, your kids are not in the school in a stable environment, and you end up creating a cycle of poverty that it becomes harder to escape. And then you're falling into this cliche eye view of what a refugee really is that they're draining on society at ctera, etcetera. Yes, when in fact, if you look at refugees as a whole, they tend relative to other
immigrants by a higher incidents of home ownership. Eventually higher instances are becoming that citizen. They tend to be very interested because in the country that they've allowed to come to is the one who saved their lives and has given them a future. And you know, in some respects we feel like it's important to support refugees here to
gain that success. And you know, we also think it's very important and we've supported to organizations that are very active in advocacy because we do think it's important that we need to rally Congress, we need to rally our support for continue doing not only to allow refugees to resettle, but to ensure that when they get here that they have a chance for success. Talk a little bit about this cycle of poverty that you say some people fall into.
Is there too much attention on that in resettlement programs and not enough on getting people into a role where they can participate in the economy. And what we're talking about here is sort of how we think about refugees in a popular sense. You know, where it's impacting our election cycles. Where it's impopping our dialogue on a national level, is that we are focusing on the challenges to both
the physical budget and the drain on society. And you know whether or not there is someone who is losing out because we're helping refugees come in, meaning like there's an American that could have gotten that social services that were subsequent to prize. But when you look at over the life cycle of the refugee, these refugees are within
eight to nine years. There's a study done and and we are working paper published by two professors and a Notre dame that highlight by year eight or nine, they're positively contributing to the fiscal balance, positively contributing to the economy and by your twenty they've returned twent of investment. And if you leok just so folksiclear when you say the n B you're talking about the National Bureau of Economic Research, the group which did a calls recessions and
recoveries one of our favorite topics. And if you look at it, there was a Department of Human and Health Services published or they didn't publish, they weren't allowed to, but it was leaked that refugees contribute sixties three billion dollars to the economy over ten years. So I think when you think about how much they are contributing already, imagine how much more they could contribute if we really gave them the tools to success and we really built
their foundation for them to be successful. Let's talk a little bit more about the economic angle and the political issues here. I mean, you have too trends happening in the world right now. You have a big increase in refugees thanks to especially to war in Syria, mainly going
towards Europe. And you have a change in the administration here in the United States that offers a view that's very much opposed to um having an open door towards refugees, even though they just I think in recent days relaxed the policy somewhat. How has that affected what you do? Do you feel that you have to work twice as hard to reach your goals? Or more people open up their wallets as a result of these kinds of events. How would you sum up what's going on? So that's
a that's a really great question. We've actually seen because of the political rhetoric, we've actually seen a lot more people interested in contributing to to to assisting in the refugee crisis, whether it's resettlement, whether it's advocacy, whether it's donating money, whether it's just holding holding small functions to help spread the word on on just educating the public on what a refugee is and how refugees contribute to
our our society. So we've actually seen because of the because of the reddick, we've actually seen a lot of a lot more people step up and say what can I do? How can I be a part? How can I help? I would say, on a personal level, one of the hardest things for me to do is to ask people to get involved, and it's amazing how often they come back and say no, thank you for asking us, and you realize how much people are yearning for community.
And part of what we're doing is not just raising money, are advocating of the average, but we are trying to build bridges across different faiths and different and people of all sorts of backgrounds, because we think one of the reasons we have struggled to meet the needs of refugees is that we don't see them as equals. Now, you've mentioned greg that most refugees being resettled a children. Now
that must present a very unique economic challenge. It's not just a question of getting them into the workforce, it's a question of getting them the life skills so they have the potential to contribute the workforce. How do you do that and is there enough attention focused on that.
There's been academic studies that have shown that if you bring children in under fourteen, they show same level graduation rates of the US citizens have and they go on to achieve higher UM education and dissimilar rate and they
end up having fairly high success rates professionally. UM. There is an area, though, as you start getting closer to high school age and older, where there are structural challenges such as English as a second language that have made it harder for those young people those dependents to be successful. In addition, there are challenges around the fact that if a child is coming without a parent or without two parents, there's a lot of social challenges that come up with
that that needs support. UM So we through our support of our partners, we some of the money does go to helping these individuals overcome those challenges, and I think we need to help them do so so that they could become productive and have the ability to be success
Sulder integration. One of the interesting things that I have learned is that less than one percent of refugees actually get resettled, and so even though the children that do get resettled do make it through the resettlement process, there is an entire generation of children that are not being resettled, that are not receiving formal education, that are not in child friendly zones, and that that is an entire generation
that is going to be lost. And there are a lot of NGOs that are calling that generation of children the lost generation. One last question, You guys both have pretty consuming day jobs, and you're you're doing all this work with refugees in your spare time. Has the work you've done with refugees given you any specific insights that
help you do your day jobs? You know, I don't think that there's anything that I'm doing in the work that really overlaps, except for obviously the refugee crisis are in the countries where oil production is, and so maybe there's a tiny bit of overlap. I think what it's done is just me overall a more alert and aware person,
and it's given me an extra dose of compassion. So I think it's helped us understand a little bit of the political dynamics developing, which at times can leave one feeling very distressed and sad, but also quite aware of them. And at the same token, though, when we're following what is going on in the political dynamics, because of where we sit, we also seeing the dynamics and the pendulum
swinging the other way. You know, we're getting activists who were getting people who are passionate about these issues, who are going to show up and potentially lead to different political outcomes in the future. So I guess I kind of think that I'm a little maybe we're going to be a little bit too into what they the opposing sees, and to either of you, there is a Mike Pants connection in this story. What you're referencing here is the story of the family that was not allowed to resettle
in Indiana and was subsequently successfully resettled in Connecticut. I think what that points to me is it's the fear that is going in about refugees and not an understanding of how well vetted these people are, and how they are the most vetted of anyone who's coming to unite to days. I think most people don't realize that that's lost in the public narrative. For sure. You know, that's several years of vetting before they're allowed end one. We think of that as a last opportunity for the state
of Indiana and one game for Connecticut. But the bigger issue is that as the states pull back and are less willing to work to support refugees, it increases the onus of the work we're doing, which is to support from a civil society standpoint to step in. Thank you both, and good luck to you. Thank you, thank you very much. We'll be back next week and until then you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal Bloomberg dot com. Our Bloomberg app, as well as Apple Podcasts, pocket Casts, and Stitcher.
While you're there, take a minute, rate and review the show so more listeners can find us and let us know what you thought. You can follow me at Twitter, at Moss Underscore Eco Scott I'm at scott Landman. Benchmark is produced by Sarah Pattison. Head of Bloomberg Podcast is Francesco Levie. Thanks for listening, See you next time.