Nonresident Fellow
University Professor, The New School
T. Alexander Aleinikoff, the former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, is a Nonresident Fellow at MPI, where he works with the U.S. and International programs on asylum and migration and development topics. He is also University Professor at The New School, where he serves as Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.
Mr. Aleinikoff served as the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva from 2010 to mid-2015, and from July-December 2015 was on assignment with the U.N. Secretariat in New York. Prior to his service with the United Nations, Mr. Aleinikoff was a professor at Georgetown University Law Center (1997-2010), where he also served as Dean and as Executive Vice President of Georgetown University (2004-10). He was a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School from 1981 to 1997. And he served as General Counsel, and then Executive Associate Commissioner for Programs, at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from 1994-97. He was Co-Chair of the Immigration Task Force for President Obama's transition team.
A leading scholar in immigration and refugee law, Mr. Aleinikoff has published numerous books and articles in the areas of immigration law policy, refugee law, citizenship, race, statutory interpretation, and constitutional law.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Yale Law School.