Statement Regarding Tent’s Work and Member Company Commitments in the United States

MAY 2024

Recently, we’ve seen some misinformation around Tent’s work in the United States as well as the efforts and commitments made by our member companies to support and hire refugees. Here are the facts:

Tent works with member companies in twelve markets across North America, South America, and Europe to help them hire refugees who are legally authorized to work.

In the United States, we do this by assisting well over 200 major companies in adapting their human resource processes to address the barriers that commonly stand in the way of refugees finding lawful work. In doing this, we enable these companies to tap into a larger talent pool for their workforce needs.

We do this work for free, at no cost to companies, because we believe helping work-authorized refugees find jobs in the United States allows them to integrate more quickly into their new communities; reduce the burden on national, state, and local government services, while increasing fiscal revenue through taxes paid; and boost the economy at a time of significant labor shortages – there are currently over 9 million unfilled jobs in the United States, with 1.4 job openings for every unemployed person.

To accelerate their work with us, we often encourage member companies to announce forward-looking commitments to hire a certain number of refugees – and dozens of companies in the United States have done so to date. Commitments along these lines do not mean companies are preferencing refugee candidates over any others – we never advise member companies to do this, as this would be unethical as well as unlawful.

Companies that have made commitments have announced their ambition to integrate more refugees into their workforce by adapting their sourcing, screening, and hiring processes to reduce the barriers refugees commonly face. These efforts simply ensure qualified refugee candidates are given fair consideration. Numerical targets are not quotas, but, rather, estimates of the outcomes their efforts will likely yield.

Beyond the United States, we work in eleven other countries, always with a view to helping work-authorized refugees integrate into the labor market. In Mexico, for example, Tent works with over 60 multinational companies – approximately half of which also work with us in the United States – to hire refugees and migrants into their workforces, filling local labor shortages and boosting the country’s economy. In connecting refugees and migrants to lawful jobs in Mexico – and providing them with a compelling reason to put down roots in the country – we’re thereby reducing the need for them to undertake such dangerous journeys to cross the border into the United States.