Abstract
Due to the increasing prevalence of political violence in developing countries such as Syria and Myanmar, the acceptance and integration of refugees has become a pressing issue in international discourse today. Unlike most countries, the United States resettlement programs are designed to permanently incorporate refugees to become naturalized citizens. The primary objective is to help refugees achieve self-sufficiency. Although United States refugee resettlement programs have claimed that they have helped 82% of their refugees become self-sufficient, the definition of self-sufficiency and how it is measured misrepresents the integration outcomes of refugees. I argue that a bottom-up definition of self-sufficiency that incorporates economic, psychological, and social aspects is necessary in program implementation. Using scholarly research, national and international datasets, and definitions of self-sufficiency employed in other countries, this paper both analyzes the limitations of the traditional model of self-sufficiency and offers remedies as to how a bottom-up model of self-sufficiency could improve refugee integration. By incorporating a model that acknowledges self-sufficiency as a process of interdependency, this paper supports an improved model for refugee integration as a whole.