S.56 (2025) for STAte Based Immigration Coordination
VAAP considers S.56 the most instrumental immigrant-related bill this session
As a direct legal services and technical assistance provider working statewide on high stakes immigration matters, VAAP feels the impact of our state's impressive but uncoordinated model of community based service delivery and its lack of a centralized clearinghouse for reliable information sharing, referral making, and issues resolution. We observe direct service providers like us scrambling to redress individual injustices using individual solutions, but also systemic injustices with individual solutions. For these reasons, VAAP supports the bipartisan S.56 (2025) to establish an Office of New Americans (ONA) equivalent for Vermont.
Read the bill here and a one pager here.
Read our initial blog post tracking fall 2024 outreach, research, and feedback here.
Read our initial feedback to Legislative Counsel on the draft bill here.
The idea is to get the bill off the wall during a time with MANY competing urgencies at the State House and at least secure some state resourcing and authority to bring all community partners together for an inclusive discussion on the most equitable and impactful ways forward.
Summary of outreach EFFORTS TO DATE
See our blog post on community organizing for statewide immigrant services solidarity here. \For initial feedback VAAP shared with Legislative Counsel following the 8 week consultation process described above, see here. Check back for updates and contact us to join forces.
Vermont’s Immigrant Workforce is Essential to our Future
VT needs more people, and the 2025 Vermont Economic Action Plan linked here includes the strategy of increasing “pathways for recruiting international migrants to Vermont.”
Immigrants are VT’s fastest growing working age demographic and vital to VT’s economy and future. They are 80% more likely to start businesses and fill workforce gaps, boosting jobs and purchasing power.
Immigrants contribute about $226.3M toward Federal and State Taxes, $89M to Social Security, $22M to Medicare, and account for about $619.9M in spending power.
Without immigrant workers, Vermont’s aging and dwindling workforce will continue increasing VT’s cost of living. However, despite their contributions, immigrants face significant challenges:
Licensing, education, and language barriers limit immigrant workforce integration.
Fragmented immigrant services create inefficiencies and make it harder for immigrants to learn about and access legal, social, and healthcare systems.
Immigrant entrepreneurs lack culturally and linguistically appropriate resources to grow their businesses and often need burdensome collateral and/or borrower investment to secure capital funding.
While we recognize the pressures on our state treasury, investment in VT workforce solutions comes at a crucial moment, given that the federal landscape on refugee and immigration policy is ever changing.
Why VAAP supports an ONA Equivalent for VT
The good news is that over 20 states have already begun addressing these problems, and not just for the legal services sector, by creating a state-supported Office of New Americans (ONA) equivalent. It's like the State Refugee Office, but with the much broader mandate of championing the needs and rights of ALL immigrants in the state regardless of status or circumstances of arrival. As New York, California, Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine, and Washington have found, ONA equivalents eliminate duplicative intake systems across providers, reduce service gaps as organizations cross-refer, allow for more meaningful demographic data collection, and position service sectors to access outside resources more effectively. In sum, expanding state partners' internal coordination with each other, as well as their external collaboration with the national Office of New Americans State Network, allows robust community sectors like ours to better address the complex needs of its growing immigrant communities.
This fall, we gathered with diverse community partners across disciplines and regions to explore opportunities to collaborate on establishing an ONA equivalent for Vermont. You can review a history of these gatherings below. As VAAP has learned over the course of these gatherings, the mandate of an ONA equivalent can include charging a cabinet-level director with ensuring government accountability for the rights and obligations owed to immigrant populations. It can include empowering the director to help communities solve systemic injustices with systemic solutions. It can include improved service coordination, equitable grantmaking, or improved demographic study. It can position states to more easily access available resources to address intersecting public policy issues like disaster preparedness and workforce development.
Focusing on the legal services sector that VAAP champions, coordinated intake would conserve attorney resources so we can do what we do best: assist noncitizens to invoke immigration legal claims and defenses that enable their full and safe participation in the regulated economy; protect noncitizens from harmful and wasteful enforcement and removal proceedings; and ensures an inclusive and prosperous future Vermont for all not withstanding Vermont's critical workforce and working age taxpayer shortages.
Recall that a work authorized social security number is the necessary precursor to proving your identity with public institutions, working, opening a bank account, obtaining a REAL ID needed to travel safely between states, securing financing to own a home, run a business, or access public financial aid, and more. Work authorization is not an independent immigration benefit one can apply for and is only available incident to some other claim or defense you have filed, normally with the assistance of an attorney.
An ONA equivalent for Vermont would not be a panacea, but at least a means for evidence-based progress toward more coordinated, equitable, and impactful service delivery. Feeling impassioned? Get in touch to join our growing coalition. We are stronger together!
Learn more about an ONA equivalent for VT
For context about what an ONA can do for VT communities and why VAAP agrees with Treasurer Mike Pieciak that now’s the time to establish one:
Tabled Senate Bill S.194 (2024) seeking a multiagency study on the utility and structure of an independent Office of New Americans;
VAAP’s testimony in support of related Act 105 (2024) explaining immigration legal status as an economic justice issue;
Key findings from the Welcoming New Americans Symposium in June 2024;
Vermont Poverty Law Fellow 2022-24 Maya Tsukazaki’s final report calling for increased state-supported coordination for maximal benefits;
VAAP’s efforts to build coordination capacity for Vermont’s immigration services bar;
Vermont Judiciary research regarding the positive economic impacts of increasing access to free immigration legal services in Vermont.
Vermont’s Economic Action Plan 2025 presented by the executive to the legislature, citing in-migration as key to resolving VT’s demographic crisis that fuels our dual unaffordable cost of living and workforce shortage issues.
Treasurer Mike Pieciak’s op-ed on the need for an ONA equivalent in VT
