Amy Pope is the new Director-General of the United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Pope, the first woman to lead IOM, aims to bring a fresh perspective to migration debates.
Member countries of the UN migration agency on Monday, May 15, elected Amy Pope of the United States as its next director general.
Pope, 49, defeated IOM Director General Antonio Vitorino of Portugal, the European Union candidate, who swept into the post five years ago by trouncing a candidate put up by the Trump administration for a job that has long been held by Americans.
“Ms. Pope’s election reflects a broad endorsement by member states of her vision to keep people at the heart of IOM’s mission, while implementing key governance and budget reforms to ensure IOM is prepared to meet the challenges it faces,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
“The situation at the southern border of the United States underscores why it’s so critical that we approach migration from a much more comprehensive point of view,” Pope said. “Many of those migrants have gone through extraordinary circumstances to end up at the border.”
Prior to joining IOM, Pope served as Senior Migration Advisor to US President Joe Biden in 2021.
Pope has previously held official positions on migration in the US, and at the White House, she developed and implemented comprehensive strategies to manage migration flows, address human trafficking, combat the Zika and Ebola outbreaks, and prepare communities to respond to climate crises.
She will help frame the conversation on migration differently
Pope, the new head of IOM, aims to steer the debate on migrants in a different direction:
“I think one of the things that IOM needs to do as we move forward is to help frame the conversation differently. I mean, we know as Americans that migration has actually led to tremendous benefits in our own country. We know even recent evidence shows that migration has revitalized communities that have been dying, in fact.
My view is that if you wait until people have already left home, crossed many different countries, spent their life’s savings to get there and then try to deal with the migration issues at the border, we’ve missed a lot of opportunities to engage and come up with better policies.”
Source: NPR, Le Monde