The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) is a think tank that produces research and policy analysis advocating permanent legal residence for illegal immigrants in the United States as well as increased legal rights for migrants and refugees worldwide. ¹

Migration Policy Institute receives funding from left-of-center foundations including the Gates Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. ²

Activities

Migration Policy Institute (MPI) has offices in Washington, D.C. and Brussels, Belgium, and works on both U.S. and international migration policy. In the United States, the MPI focuses on U.S. immigration policy, border security, immigrant integration, and internal enforcement issues. ³ It publishes Migration Information Source, a regularly updated online journal providing demographic and statistical data relating to migration around the world, including country-by-country and state-by-state snapshots of immigrant populations. ⁴

MPI’s Brussels office, started in 2011, focuses on international refugee policy and humanitarian aid to migrants, as well as immigration policy within the European Union and European countries. ⁵

MPI runs the Latin America and Caribbean Initiative, a policy laboratory dedicated to studying policy proposals concerning immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean. ⁶

The Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative was established in 2022 by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to study policy approaches to modern refugee crises. In 2025, the Initiative left the Center and came under the umbrella of MPI. ⁷

MPI runs the Transatlantic Council on Migration, a research initiative to study policy approaches to European immigration. ⁸ The Council is funded by the governments of Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, and Sweden. ⁹

The MPI runs the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, a hub for studying U.S. immigration policy. ¹⁰

Advocacy

Support for Legal Status

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and its fellows have advocated for permanent legal status for illegal immigrants residing in the United States, paired with increases in border security and workplace enforcement. ¹¹ Demetrios G. Papademetriou, then head of the MPI, supported then-President George W. Bush’s proposed “guest worker” program, which would have provided employment visas to illegal immigrants, describing it as “a step in the right direction and better than the status quo,” but called for it to include a pathway to permanent legal residence for illegal immigrants. ¹²

In 2012, fellows at the MPI argued that enacting the “DREAM Act,” which would have provided permanent legal residence and a pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrants who had been brought into the United States as children, would be a net economic positive. ¹³

First Trump Administration

After 2017, MPI and its fellows emerged as a vocal critics of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies. MPI fellow Doris Meissner, former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, called the Trump administration’s plan to erect a wall across the southern U.S. border “overkill.” ¹⁴

In September 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama administration executive decree that made children brought illegally to the United States before 2012 eligible for renewable two-year deferrals from deportation and for receiving work permits. The administration delayed the end of the program for six months to give the U.S. Congress time to enact a legislative compromise; the MPI issued a series of commentaries and policy papers advocating for passage of the DREAM Act. ¹⁵

In December 2017, MPI policy analysts Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix analyzed the residential and employment distribution of the DREAM Act-eligible population, and argued that permitting them to stay in the country would not significantly impact the employment prospects of native-born young people. ¹⁶

In January 2018, MPI policy analysts Julia Gelatt and Sarah Pierce criticized as “lopsided” the administration’s proposed legislative deal, which would have traded permanent residence for DACA beneficiaries for expanded border security, changes to asylum protocols, and the end to so-called “chain migration” through which green card recipients can petition for legal entry on behalf of parents, children, and other family members. “These major changes to the country’s immigration system are offered in exchange for a path to legal status for a small slice of the country’s unauthorized population,” said MPI, which denounced the proposed deal “a vehicle to enact sweeping, hardline reforms in the guise of a bill for DREAMers.” ¹⁷ Ultimately, no deal on DACA was reached and proponents sued to block the Administration from ending the program. The Supreme Court was expected to resolve the case in 2020, though the closing of the Court in response to coronavirus in March 2020 may delay a decision. ¹⁸

In May 2018, the MPI published a report, based on a year-long series of visits to local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices as well as Freedom of Information Act requests, that documented state and local resistance to the administration’s stepped-up immigration enforcement policies. The report noted that “changes in enforcement have resulted in a sudden and substantial increase in arrests and deportations,” but that arrests and deportations had not “reached peak levels set during the Bush and early Obama administrations” largely because of “state and local policies limiting cooperation with ICE,” especially “sanctuary” policies that prohibited or discouraged local enforcement from coordinating with federal immigration officials, programs educating illegal immigrants on their legal rights, and legal changes such as state laws permitting the illegal to obtain driver’s licenses. ¹⁹

The MPI also criticized the “family separation” policy by which the children of asylum seekers were detained separately from the parents. Even after the policy ended in June 2018, Pierce argued that “the price tag in human and financial costs is a long way from being tallied in full” and that “an administration that thrives on chaos may view the crisis as one that has resulted in a significant victory, even at the expense of current PR hits.” ²⁰

With support from the left-of-center funders Ford Foundation, Carnegie Endowment, and Open Society Foundations, in 2020, Pierce published a comprehensive list of the Trump administration’s policies on immigration enforcement and border security. The report noted not only increased border and internal security related to immigration, but also zero-tolerance enforcement of immigration laws, changes to asylum protocols that limited the “credible fear” grounds for seeking asylum, and funding restrictions on “sanctuary cities” as examples of the “unprecedented” scope of the Trump administration’s immigration policy agenda. ²¹

In 2020, the MPI criticized the administration’s “public charge” rule, by which permanent residence could be denied to immigrants based on a determination that they were likely to become a public charge and access welfare and other benefits. An MPI report found “evidence of sizeable disenrollment from public benefit programs by legal immigrants and their U.S.-born children arising from fears that such use could doom future applications for legal permanent residence.” ²²

In February 2022, the MPI released a report summarizing the immigration policy of the first Trump administration. The report stated that the Trump administration’s reforms were almost entirely made through executive actions and resulted in “the U.S.-Mexico border [becoming] more closed off than perhaps any time in U.S. history,” but also more “random” enforcement of immigration laws. While the MPI opposed most of the Trump administration’s immigration reforms, the organization notes, “At the very least, the Trump administration set a precedent for conducting far-reaching immigration changes through executive activism.” ²³

Biden Administration

In December 2024, MPI released a report describing the “mixed immigration legacy” of the Biden administration. MPI commended the Biden administration for enacting “a record level of activity on immigration, advancing 605 immigration-related executive actions,” including granting legal status to an estimated 3.5 million illegal immigrants. However, MPI argued that the Biden administration failed to enact comprehensive reforms to fix the U.S. immigration system, largely due to political pressure from the political right in response to an influx in migration in the early 2020s, arguing, “The administration tried to appease both camps, but ultimately failed to satisfy either one.” ²⁴

Second Trump Administration

In September 2024, during the 2024 presidential election between then-former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, MPI criticized Harris and the Democratic Party for moving closer to Trump and the Republican Party on immigration policy. It argued, “One of the first ads [Harris’s] campaign aired highlighted border security and her record prosecuting drug cartels and trafficking organizations as California’s attorney general … This focus on border security represents a stark contrast to 2020, when now-President Joe Biden pledged to halt construction of the border wall, reverse President Donald Trump’s border policies, and welcome asylum seekers.” ²⁵

In April 2025, the MPI released a report detailing the second Trump administration’s wide-ranging changes to U.S. immigration policy during its first 100 days though “181 immigration-specific executive actions.” MPI claimed that the Trump administration was “not meeting [its] mass deportation aims,” with monthly deportation rates continuing their steep decline from March 2024 to March 2025. ²⁶

In October 2025, MPI published a report detailing the rise in immigrant detention under the second Trump administration to its highest level in U.S. history, with the figure projected to reach 107,000 by January 2026. ²⁷

Funders

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) has received funding from several left-of-center organizations including the Gates Foundation (more than $3 million since 2009), ²⁸ the Open Society Foundations (nearly $3 million since 2016), ²⁹ the Carnegie Corporation of New York (more than $8 million since 2004), ³⁰ and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (nearly $10 million since 2006). ³¹

Other funders include the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the Connecticut Project, Arnold Ventures, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the FWD.us Education Fund, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation for Education. ⁹

The MPI’s corporate funders include Bank of America, BAL, Driscoll’s Inc., JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, and Western Union. ⁹

Leadership

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) was co-founded in 2001 by Kathleen Newland and Demetrios G. Papademetriou. The daughter of a Naval officer, Newland had organized Vietnam War protestors as treasurer of the Harvard University chapter of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. ³² Prior to co-founding the MPI, she co-directed the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, was a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and worked at the United Nations University in Tokyo. She has worked as a consultant on migration policy for the International Labour Organization, the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations Secretary General’s office, UNICEF, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Bank. ³³

Papademetriou was the first president of the MPI, holding the post until 2014. He was also the first president of MPI Europe, holding the role until 2018. He has worked as chair of the Global Agenda Council on Migration at the World Economic Forum, chaired advisory boards on migration at the Open Society Foundations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and worked as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Labor. He holds a doctorate in public policy from the University of Maryland. ³⁴

As of December 2025, the president of the MPI was Andrew Selee. A scholar on Latin American migration, Selee holds a doctorate from the University of Maryland and spent 17 years at the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, where he founded the Center’s Mexico Institute and later worked as executive vice president. He has also worked as staff in the U.S. Congress and on development and migration programs in Tijuana. ³⁵ In 2024, Seele’s salary from MPI was $269,512. ³⁶

As of 2025, Camille Le Coz was the director of MPI Europe, as well as a teacher at Sciences Po Paris and a board member of Désinfox Migrations. Le Coz previously worked as a project director of migration policy at Altai Consulting, where she worked on projects for the European Union, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Organization for Migration. ³⁷

As of 2025, Margie McHugh was the director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy at MPI. McHugh previously worked for 15 years as the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. Earlier, she was a deputy director of New York City’s 1990 Census Project and an executive assistant to then-New York Mayor Ed Koch’s (D) chief of staff. ¹⁰ In 2024, McHugh’s salary from the MPI was $209,771. ³⁶

As of 2025, Doris Meissner was a senior fellow at the MPI and directs the organization’s U.S. immigration policy work. Meissner was previously a commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and worked for the U.S. Department of Justice for almost thirty years. As of 2025, she was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Inter-American Dialogue, the Pacific Council on International Diplomacy, the National Academy of Public Administration, the Administrative Conference of the United States, and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. ³⁸ In 2024, Meissner’s salary from the MPI was $195,725. ³⁶

As of 2025, Muzaffar Chishti was a senior fellow and the director of the MPI’s office at the New York University School of Law and sat on the board of the New York Immigration Coalition. Chishti was previously the director of the Immigration Project of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) (now Workers United), the chairman of the boards of the National Immigration Forum and the National Immigration Law Center, a board member of the Asian American Federation, and a member of the American Bar Association’s Coordinating Committee on Immigration. ³⁹

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13. Khara Persad. “DREAM Act report draws skepticism, support.” Arizona Daily Star. Oct. 23, 2012. Accessed on Westlaw (2012 WLNR 21027531) April 11, 2020.
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20. Sarah Pierce. “Far from a Retreat, the Trump Administration’s Border Policies Advance its Enforcement Aims.” Migration Policy Institute. June 2018. Accessed April 10, 2020. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/far-retreat-trump-border-policies-advance-enforcement-aims.
21. Sarah Pierce. “Immigration-Related Policy Changes in the First Two Years of the Trump Administration.” May 2019. Accessed April 10, 2020. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigration-policy-changes-two-years-trump-administration.
22. Randy Capps, Julia Gelatt, and Mark Greenberg. “The Public-Charge Rule: Broad Impacts, But Few Will Be Denied Green Cards Based on Actual Benefits Use.” March 2020. Accessed April 10, 2020. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/public-charge-denial-green-cards-benefits-use
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