Andrew Selee

@SeleeAndrew

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.

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.