After fleeing the war in her native Bosnia, Zemira Bajrektarevic arrived in Chicago to face a new set of fears.
A stay-at-home mom of two children, Bajrektarevic didn’t know English. She didn’t know how she’d earn money. When RefugeeOne, a resettlement agency, placed her in a job at Eli’s Cheesecake, removing baked cakes from their pans, she didn’t know she possessed leadership qualities that would eventually make her an invaluable employee at the quintessential Chicago company.
Twenty years later, Bajrektarevic, 49, is a foreman at the Eli’s factory in the Dunning neighborhood on the city’s Northwest Side, overseeing many colleagues who, like her, are refugees.
“I love it,” she said during a break from supervising a line of 18 workers churning out trays of raspberry oat bars. “I like my boss. I like the job. I like (to) help the people.”
Eli’s Cheesecake is among numerous local employers that make it a point to hire refugees, giving the dessert-maker a loyal and consistent supply of employees at a time when Americans aren’t lining up for factory jobs, President Marc Schulman said.
But that practice could be at risk as the U.S. continues to reduce the number of refugees it admits, advocates say.
In early October, President Donald Trump signed an executive order dropping the ceiling on refugee admissions to a record-low of 30,000 for the year that started Oct. 1. His administration had set the prior year’s ceiling at 45,000, at the time a historic low, which was down from a cap of 110,000 that President Barack Obama set just before he left office.
The reduced cap, which comes as an unprecedented 68.5 million people worldwide are displaced from their homes, has been widely criticized on humanitarian grounds, but groups that help businesses hire refugees worry it could also disrupt a recruitment tool that many companies have come to rely upon for good talent.
“We anticipate it being a problem,” said Jims Porter, spokesman for RefugeeOne, which works with more than 100 employers that hire from its clientele. RefugeeOne, based in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, saw the number of new refugees coming through its doors plummet to 175 this year from 700 in 2016, he said.
At Eli’s Cheesecake, 10 percent of the 230 employees are refugees, and Schulman said they have been critical in helping the company grow.
“I think these are individuals who really have overcome a lot and want to work really hard and are really dedicated,” said Schulman, whose company, founded by his father, has been hiring refugees for more than 25 years. “The reason we are a favored supplier is because of that dedication, and it comes down to the people.”
In announcing the new refugee ceiling in September, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. must focus its resources on its backlog of asylum cases, which has ballooned in recent years. People seeking asylum request protection once inside the U.S. or at the border, while refugees are chosen for resettlement while they are abroad. In order to be granted protection as a refugee or asylum-seeker, the individual must have a well-founded fear of persecution at home based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
Critics of refugee resettlement say the nation’s resources would be better spent supporting refugees in the countries where they first flee to, as that’s where the vast majority remain and the cost of hosting them in the U.S. is higher. Just 1 percent of the world’s 25.4 million registered refugees are resettled to another country, such as the U.S. or Canada.
“We have to think long and hard on whether we want to use our resources to help a tiny fraction in a big way or to help more people,” said Steve Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit think tank that favors lower immigration.
But while the number of refugees coming to the U.S. is small, “it is a very important drop in the bucket because it is sometimes the people who are most vulnerable who are taken in, such as LGBT individuals, victims of torture or political dissidents,” said Gideon Maltz, executive director of the Tent Partnership for Refugees, a New York nonprofit founded by Chobani yogurt CEO Hamdi Ulukaya that encourages the private sector to hire and invest in refugees.
A growing number of companies have made commitments to hire refugees in recent years, both for the contribution to their workforce and for the social impact, Maltz said. As fewer refugees arrive in the U.S., some businesses are expressing concern about the ability to recruit them, he said.
“Businesses like to plan, and there is so much uncertainty about what the numbers will be in the years ahead,” Maltz said.
Actual refugee admissions to the U.S. last year fell far short of even the low cap because of the administration’s tightening policy. Fewer than 22,500 refugees were admitted to the U.S. last year, the lowest number in 40 years; nearly 85,000 came during Obama’s last year in office, meeting the cap at the time.
Admissions from war-torn Syria, where 13 million people have been displaced, dropped from more than 12,500 in 2016 to just 62 last year. The Trump administration temporarily banned refugees from Syria and several other predominantly Muslim countries deemed security risks, and though that ban has been lifted, time-consuming security checks are slowing the process, said Mary Giovagnoli, executive director of Refugee Council USA.
Illinois received 708 refugees during the year that ended Sept. 30, down from more than 3,000 two years earlier. Most are from Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya minority have been fleeing in droves, or Congo. The state, which welcomed 392 Syrian refugees two years ago, received three this past year.
The declining numbers have affected resettlement agencies that help refugees find jobs and housing and transition to U.S. life. Paid on a per-capita basis, some of those agencies have had to close offices, threatening the services that help employers integrate refugees into their workplaces, Maltz said.
“Part of the reason businesses in the U.S. have had such a positive experience (with refugees) is that you do have these agencies playing such a significant role in bridging that gap,” he said. “The infrastructure is really crumbling as these resettlement agencies are not getting the support they need.”
Employing refugees presents challenges, the foremost being language barriers, said Jeff Anderson, vice president of purchasing and operations at Eli’s. That has improved now that there is a network of Arabic and Swahili speakers on staff, but when there are less common dialects, the company leans on RefugeeOne for translators.
Hiring refugees also requires sensitivity to the fact that people are far from home and may take extended time off to visit family. Bajrektarevic went to Bosnia last year for three weeks. Employees use paid time off and can draw from the next year’s PTO to extend their trip, Schulman said.
Co-working space provider WeWork, which has made a commitment to hire 1,500 refugees within the next five years, relies on resettlement partners to identify and train its new refugee hires, and it hopes to continue those partnerships, said Mo Al-Shawaf, director of public policy and social impact at WeWork.
WeWork’s refugee initiative began in New York last year when managers with positions to fill were looking for diverse talent sources, Al-Shawaf said. Within six months, 50 refugees had been hired in Chicago, New York and Boston, and the program has now spread to its offices in 13 U.S. cities as well as the U.K. and Latin America. WeWork also has called on its 50,000 member companies to join the effort by offering jobs, skills training or other support.
Retention is proving to be higher among refugee employees than others in the same jobs, Al-Shawaf said. In addition, the effort has been good for employee morale because people feel they are part of something bigger than themselves, he said.
“Employees want to get involved; they want to be exposed to refugee team members,” Al-Shawaf said.
Most refugee employees start in entry-level positions that entail making coffee, refilling water containers and welcoming members to the office. Some have moved into roles in technology, operations and security, and the company has job shadowing and other programs underway to help them advance.
WeWork launched a coding course for its refugee employees in New York, pairing them with mentors to help with both technical skills and social integration, a program it hopes to bring to Chicago.
Olivier Marambo said his entry-level job at WeWork’s location in Chicago’s Fulton Market district is allowing him to prepare for a future that once didn’t seem possible. Marambo, 31, fled a violent conflict in Congo in 2008 and lived for a while in Kenya, where he worked on anti-HIV efforts at a refugee camp and taught at a school for the deaf.
Marambo, who arrived in Chicago two years ago, did a stint as a hotel bellman before joining WeWork, where the reliable hours and support from his employer allow him to also take community college courses in nursing. His goal is to be a doctor.
He is in the process of moving to Minneapolis to be close to family, and WeWork has a position waiting for him there.
“They are very helpful,” Marambo said.
Numerous high-profile companies have publicly announced refugee hiring initiatives. Starbucks last year pledged to hire 10,000 refugees across the globe over the next five years. Microsoft is investing in a digital literacy training program at a refugee camp in Kenya, and food service company Sodexo committed to hiring 300 refugees across the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Sweden, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.
Celergo, based in north suburban Deerfield, manages payroll for the international offices of multinational companies, and the company seeks candidates with language expertise as well as cultural sensitivity to work with global clients, said Michele Honomichl, founder and executive chairman. About 60 percent of its U.S. staff are immigrants, including refugees, or the children of immigrants, she said.
Having a global background is helpful when cultivating relationships with clients operating under different business conditions, such as the shorter French workweek or the slower pace of Africa, because it tends to make you more patient, Honomichl said.
As immigration overall contracts under Trump in an already tight labor market, Honomichl expects it will become harder to find people with the right skills when she needs them.
“Those skills are just things we don’t necessarily have here (in the U.S.),” she said. “We are all now chasing fewer people who fit into that profile.”
Celergo hires through Upwardly Global, an organization that helps mostly college-educated refugees and other immigrants find and prepare for jobs. Many refugees were professionals in their home countries but find themselves in low-wage jobs in the U.S. because they lack industry-specific English skills or employers don’t recognize their schools or credentials, said Jina Krause-Vilmar, the organization’s CEO.
Seventy percent of Upwardly Global’s clients have backgrounds in science, technology, engineering or math, and most get jobs in their fields, with an average starting salary of $48,000, she said.
The group’s work in Chicago has historically focused on refugees because the city is a prime destination for resettlement, Krause-Vilmar said. Nearly 19,000 refugees settled in the Chicago metro area between 2007 and 2016, ranking it seventh in the nation, according to a report from the Tent Partnership and the Fiscal Policy Institute.
Advocates say refugees are good for the economy.
But Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said more recent arrivals are less likely to be highly educated than in the past, increasing their reliance on public assistance. He rejects the idea that employers can’t find Americans to fill positions.
“The argument for bringing refugees should never be that it is an economic or fiscal benefit,” he said. “The argument should be humanitarian, that they need a permanent place to live.”
Eli’s Cheesecake has found that hiring from diverse talent pools helps build a stable workforce that produces a consistent product, which is important as the jobs become more technical and oriented around food safety standards, Schulman said. The company trains and offers opportunities for advancement, and several of its refugee hires have become leaders.
Elias Kasongo started at Eli’s 24 years ago, washing dishes. He was a college student in Congo (at the time Zaire) when he fled as the regime was rounding up, imprisoning and killing people it thought might be dissidents. He spent four years in a refugee camp in Zambia before arriving in Chicago, alone and knowing little English.
While working at Eli’s, Kasongo went to community college at night to learn English, got his associate degree and then his bachelor’s in business management at Northeastern Illinois University. He is now the company’s purchasing manager and a board member of RefugeeOne.
“The first opportunity we are given, we appreciate it,” said Kasongo, 51. “You have to start somewhere, and cleaning dishes gave me an opportunity.”
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
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