Meghan Benton
Meghan Benton is Director of the Global Program at MPI, with responsibility for the strategic direction of the Global Program and its flagship Transatlantic Council on Migration, the Latin America and Caribbean Initiative, the Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative, and other international work. She is also on the board of MPI Europe.
Dr. Benton regularly advises governments across key immigration destinations, and is working to expand MPI’s global reach and depth of knowledge of regional mobility systems. Her expertise spans a range of areas including labor mobility, immigrant integration, border management, and humanitarian protection. She has a particular interest in how digital technology is reshaping immigration and asylum systems, and in how innovations can lay the groundwork for a more managed, predictable migration system. In 2016, she co-founded MPI Europe’s Integration Futures Working Group, which seeks to develop a forward-looking agenda for integration policy in Europe. She also co-convenes the Transatlantic Council on Migration.
She previously was a Senior Researcher at Nesta, the United Kingdom’s innovation body, where she led projects on digital government and the future of local public services. Prior to joining Nesta, she was a Policy Analyst at MPI from 2012 to 2015, where she co-led an MPI-International Labor Organization six-country project on pathways to skilled work for newly arrived immigrants in Europe. She also worked on Project UPSTREAM, a four-country project on mainstreaming immigrant integration in the European Union. Previously, she worked for the Constitution Unit at University College London and the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Dr. Benton received her PhD in political science from University College London in 2010, where her PhD research focused on citizenship and the rights of noncitizens. She also holds a master’s degree in legal and political theory (with distinction) from University College London, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and literature from Warwick University.
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In the News
Can Democracies Balance Control and Compassion?
Meghan Benton discusses on The View from Here podcast
Why Is Immigration Policy So Hard to Get Right?
Meghan Benton speaks with Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford
Explore Content by Meghan Benton
Showing 21-30 of 81 total results
Digital Health Credentials in India and Africa: Are COVID-19 Travel Passes Catalyzing New Tech Innovations?
Could the digital health infrastructure built to manage COVID-19 travel become the backbone of how the world responds to the next pandemic?
The Future of Remote Work: Digital Nomads and the Implications for Immigration Systems
More than 25 countries offered digital nomad visas by mid-2022, but most immigration systems remain ill-equipped for remote work and need reform, including to tax and social security systems.
The State of Global Human Mobility More than Two Years into the Pandemic
Coming into the third year of the pandemic, this webcast examined the state of mobility across world regions, remaining travel restrictions, and policy adaptations.
COVID-19 and the State of Global Mobility in 2021
Vaccines spurred a partial recovery of global mobility in 2021, but irregular migrants and asylum seekers remained the most excluded from pandemic relief and reopened travel.
The Ukrainian Conflict Could Be a Tipping Point for Refugee Protection
Recent displacement crises—ranging from Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Myanmar, South Sudan, to most recently Ukraine—have imposed huge stresses on the humanitarian protection regime. Yet individual countries and regional organizations have been innovating to meet the challenge and expand the options available for protection, in some cases bypassing beleaguered asylum systems. This commentary traces the rise of more ad hoc approaches.
Managing Mobility in the Pandemic Era Requires World to Buy In on Shared Principles
Many countries are reopening for international travel and migration after the shutdown forced by the pandemic. Yet there is still no consensus on whether and how to use travel measures to prevent the spread of future variants of COVID-19 or respond to the next public health crisis. This commentary lays out four guiding principles for building an inclusive and effective global mobility system.
The Corporate World’s Response to COVID-19 Pandemic, its Omicron Variant, Digital Nomad Visas & More
Could the pandemic's push toward electronic travel authorizations and integrated vaccine checks give governments unprecedented power to open—or shut—their borders overnight?
Can Omicron Finally Get the World to Cooperate on Pandemic Mobility Management?
The world is once again engaging in a mad scramble to close borders after emergence of the COVID-19 Omicron variant. While the response bears the hallmarks of the initial response to COVID-19 and the Delta variant, with an uncoordinated and single-minded focus on travel restrictions alone, international cooperation and long-term planning are critical to a more equitable and sustainable system of global mobility and pandemic preparedness.
MPI 20th Anniversary Conference: Migration & Humanitarian Protection in a Rapidly Evolving World
MPI’s 20th Anniversary featured the Director-General of the International Organization for Migration, António Vitorino, in an armchair conversation with MPI co-founder and President Emeritus Demetrios G. Papademetriou, and a panel discussion with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi and MPI co-founder Kathleen Newland.
Revisiting the Role of COVID-19 Travel Restrictions in Light of Delta and Other Variants
When novel pathogens spread faster than scientific consensus, what kind of risk-assessment framework would give policymakers a fighting chance at the border?
