Andrew Selee is President of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a global 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, a position he assumed in 2017. He also chairs MPI Europe’s Administrative Council.
Dr. Selee’s research focuses on migration globally, with a special emphasis on immigration policies in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. 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 has published opinion articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Americas Quarterly, and he contributes a regular column to Mexico’s largest newspaper, El Universal. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, teaching courses on global migration, and has previously taught at Johns Hopkins and George Washington universities and been 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, and part of the steering committee for MPI’s Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future. 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.
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 the Center’s Vice President for Programs and Executive Vice President. He has also worked as staff in the U.S. Congress and on programs with migrant youth in Tijuana, Mexico.
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; a BA, Phi Beta Kappa, from Washington University in St. Louis; and a certificate in strategic perspectives on nonprofit management from Harvard Business School. He was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for the 2017-18 period.