Andrew Selee
Experts & Staff
Andrew Selee
President
Andrew Selee has been President of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan institution that seeks to improve immigration and integration policies through fact-based research, opportunities for learning and dialogue, and the development of new ideas to address complex policy questions, since August 2017. He also chairs MPI Europe's administrative council.
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Prior to joining MPI, he spent 17 years at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he founded the Center’s Mexico Institute and later served as Vice President for Programs and Executive Vice President. He has also worked as staff in the U.S. Congress and on development and migration programs in Tijuana, Mexico.
Dr. Selee’s research focuses on migration globally, with a special emphasis on immigration policies in Latin America and in the United States. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together (PublicAffairs, 2018) and What Should Think Tanks Do? A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact (Stanford University Press, 2013). He is also coauthor of a number of MPI policy reports, including Trump’s First Year on Immigration Policy: Rhetoric vs. Reality (January 2018), Creativity amid Crisis: Legal Pathways for Venezuelan Migrants in Latin America (January 2019), Investing in the Neighborhood: Changing Mexico-U.S. Migration Patterns and Opportunities for Sustainable Cooperation (September 2019), and An Uneven Welcome: Latin American and Caribbean Responses to Venezuelan and Nicaraguan Migration (February 2020).
He has published opinion articles in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union Tribune, CNN.com, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and he writes a regular column in Mexico’s largest newspaper, El Universal. He has been an Adjunct Professor at both Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University, and was a visiting scholar at El Colegio de México.
Dr. Selee was a Co-Director of the Regional Migration Study Group, convened by MPI with the Wilson Center to look at regional migration flows among the Central American countries, Mexico, and the United States, and was part of the steering committee for MPI’s Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, which helped lay an important conceptual foundation for immigration reform efforts in recent years. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relation’s Task Force on Immigration. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he served on the Board of Directors of the YMCA of the USA, the nation’s largest membership organization, and on several committees of the Geneva-based World Alliance of YMCAs.
He holds a PhD in policy studies from the University of Maryland, an MA in Latin American studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA, Phi Beta Kappa, from Washington University in St. Louis. He was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for the 2017-18 period.
Recent Activity
Un desafío y una oportunidad clave que enfrentará la administración de Joe Biden será cómo abordar la cooperación regional en relación a la migración. Este informe explora la evolución de la movilidad entre los Estados Unidos, México y Centroamérica y presenta una estrategia para ampliar las oportunidades en cuanto a la migración legal, abordar necesidades humanitarias, fortalecer la aplicación de la ley y mitigar algunas de las fuerzas que provocan la emigración.
Addressing regional cooperation around migration will be among the immigration challenges and opportunities facing the incoming Biden administration. This report examines how movement between the United States, Mexico, and Central America has evolved in recent decades, and lays out a four-part strategy to expand opportunities for legal migration, address humanitarian protection needs, improve enforcement, and mitigate some of the forces driving people to emigrate.
What actions might the incoming Biden administration take on immigration, whether to unwind some of the most restrictive Trump policies or advance an affirmative agenda of its own? And what challenges and opportunities will the Biden administration face? MPI experts analyze the campaign pledges and prospects ahead, for everything from reversing the Remain in Mexico program and cuts to legal immigration, ending border wall construction, and reviving DACA and refugee resettlement, as well as new policies such as legalization.
En dicho diálogo, algunos de los representantes de las organizaciones que conforman la red en Norteamérica, Centroamérica, Sudamérica y el Caribe, comparten la manera como se coordinan, las acciones que se llevan a cabo y las dificultades, retos y desafíos que atraviesan.
Más de 4 millones de venezolanos han migrado a otros países de América Latina y el Caribe, lo que ha generado preocupación sobre cómo estas llegadas están afectando a las comunidades receptoras. Algunos políticos y expertos han afirmado que la migración está provocando un incremento en la delincuencia, un argumento que este informe examina a través de un análisis detallado de los datos de Chile, Colombia y Perú.
More than 4 million Venezuelans have moved to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, raising concerns about how these arrivals are affecting receiving communities. Some politicians and pundits have asserted that migration is leading to an increase in crime—a claim this issue brief finds misplaced based on examination of official data from Chile, Colombia, and Peru.
En este webinar, expertos de la región discutieron acerca del perfil demográfico de los refugiados y migrantes venezolanos en Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Perú, Trinidad y Tobago y Uruguay.
Following months of rising Central American migration through Mexico to the United States, the U.S. and Mexican governments on June 7, 2019 signed a joint declaration pledging to work together to manage and reduce irregular migration. At the agreement’s one-year anniversary, MPI researchers engaged in discussion with former U.S. and Mexican Ambassadors and a veteran journalist about the changes it has sparked.
Strategic Solutions for the United States and Mexico to Manage the Migration Crisis
Soluciones estratégicas para afrontar la crisis migratoria en Estados Unidos y México