Between 2000 and 2014, refugee resettlement in Buffalo, New York drove $950 million in housing value increases and helped revive a manufacturing sector that had been declining for decades. That figure comes from a New American Economy analysis that tracked the economic footprint of a single city's refugee population over 14 years.

Buffalo worked because Buffalo had the pieces: an affordable housing market where refugee families could establish stable households, a manufacturing base that absorbed labor across skill levels, a community of existing refugee-owned businesses that created a supply chain of informal mentorship, and local organizations that eventually built formal entrepreneurship support.

Most resettlement cities don't have all of those pieces. And the city a refugee is placed in is not typically chosen with their entrepreneurial potential in mind.

Placement is not matched to opportunity

The US Refugee Admissions Program places refugees based on family reunification, community capacity, and availability of resettlement agency services. These are legitimate criteria. But they do not include: proximity to CDFI lenders, presence of multilingual SBA resources, existence of peer entrepreneur networks, or local government welcoming economy policies.

The result is that two refugees with identical skills, experience, and entrepreneurial drive can land in cities with dramatically different business survival environments — and their outcomes diverge accordingly.

A 2025 International Catholic Migration Commission analysis documented that refugee economic outcomes vary significantly by resettlement location, and that this variance is explained more by local infrastructure than by individual refugee characteristics. The gap is not the people. The gap is the city.

What makes a city entrepreneur-ready

Welcoming America's Welcoming Economies Program has identified the structural components that distinguish high-performing refugee entrepreneurship ecosystems:

  • Multilingual business services. SBA district offices and SCORE chapters that offer services in Somali, Arabic, Amharic, French, Swahili, and other languages common among African refugee populations
  • CDFI density. Cities with multiple active Community Development Financial Institutions that have explicit immigrant and refugee mandates — not just general "underserved communities" language
  • Welcoming business ordinances. City-level policies that explicitly extend business licensing and regulatory support to non-citizen entrepreneurs, reducing bureaucratic friction on documentation-related requirements
  • Peer entrepreneur networks. Established communities of immigrant and refugee business owners who provide informal mentorship, supplier relationships, and customer referrals
  • Anchor institutions. Universities, healthcare systems, and government agencies that have made explicit commitments to procure from minority and immigrant-owned businesses

Cities that score high on all five support meaningfully better refugee business survival rates. Cities that lack most of them show the Buffalo gap in reverse: capable entrepreneurs placed in an environment that hasn't been built to support them.

The $68.6 billion case for investment

In 2019, the collective spending power of refugees in the United States was $68.6 billion. That figure has grown with each subsequent resettlement cohort. It represents purchasing power, tax revenue, employment, and business formation distributed across every resettlement city in the country.

The cities that invest in refugee entrepreneurship infrastructure capture more of that economic activity — and retain it. Refugees who build businesses don't leave. They become anchors.

The cities that don't invest are leaving economic activity on the table — and sending the message, through bureaucratic friction and absent services, that refugee entrepreneurs are not worth the infrastructure.

What Rock Forward is building toward

Rock Forward currently operates in a small number of cities. The goal is expansion — not just to reach more refugees, but to build into cities that have the supporting infrastructure to maximize outcomes.

We are also building the portable pieces: curriculum, mentorship networks, CDFI relationships, and capital access frameworks that travel with participants even when the city ecosystem is incomplete.

The zip code gap is real. It is not permanent. Cities that are not yet entrepreneur-ready can become so — and Rock Forward is designed to help accelerate that transition.

If you are a resettlement agency, city government, or community foundation in a city without strong refugee entrepreneurship infrastructure, contact us via our contact page

Sources: New American Economy — The Fiscal Multiplier of Refugee Resettlement; ICMC — Positive Economic Impact of Refugee Resettlement in the United States, 2025; Welcoming America Welcoming Economies Program; American Immigration Council — Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Welcoming Cities