“It certainly gives the lie to the trope that they’re just going to the places with the highest welfare benefits,” she said. “If they do carry out a secondary movement, they lose their welfare benefits.”

The federal government has reduced the amount of time refugees can receive cash assistance after arriving in the country. In 1981, refugees received 36 months of assistance, which was reduced to 18 months in 1982, 12 months in 1988, and 8 months in 1991. This might motivate migrants to move sooner than they otherwise would, because they have less to lose when they leave.

There have been cases of a planned, large-scale secondary migration among ethnic groups. Newland tells the story of a group of Somali refugees living in inner-city Philadelphia who worried that their children would be exposed to bad schools and violence in the neighborhood where they were resettled. So they sent a group of elders around the country to look for a place to raise their kids. They settled on Lewiston, Maine, even though there were few economic incentives to move there. They moved because the schools were good and the housing was cheap, according to Kimberly Huisman, who wrote a paper on secondary migration in Lewiston.

“It is very hard to find a job in Lewiston but I think it is good place to get an education, for our children to go to school,” one refugee told her.

I was recently in Syracuse, which has accepted thousands of refugees over the years. Many leave, though, not because they don’t like Syracuse, but because they can’t find work. Indeed, some of the states with the highest influx of refugees had relatively low unemployment rates in 2012: Minnesota at 5.4 percent, Iowa at 4.9 percent. The states with the highest outmigration in 2012—Arizona, California, and New York—had some of the higher unemployment rates.

“Some of them will move after a week, after three months, to Minnesota,” Abdullah Ismael, a Somali immigrant who lives in Syracuse, told me. “There are a lot of people there, and they say it’s better.”

In Texas, one of the states with the most secondary resettlement, 82 percent of refugees had entered employment, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In California, one of the states that refugees have tended to leave, only 25 percent had.

It may be a lesson to those governors who don’t want Syrian refugees. Want no refugees to settle in your state? Simply make it a harder place for any citizen to find a job, and you’ll be all set.

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