Views from the Center

The previous US administration sought to end all US admissions of refugees, people who face violent persecution in their home countries. After four years of work dedicated to refugee exclusion, Trump officials succeeded in slashing admissions by 86 percent. In this blog, I’ll show how the Trump administration's cuts to US refugee admissions led to 295,000 fewer refugees and cost the US billions in economic growth. First, I explore refugee admittance under the last administration, followed by explaining the economic and fiscal costs of this policy. Lastly, I introduce my new research on the ways cutting refugee and asylum acceptances continues to damage the US economy.

The effects of the conflict in Ukraine are reverberating across the world. In Northeast Africa, its ripples endanger the peaceful governance of food and water. Diminished wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine will make Egypt still more conscious of the threat posed to its agriculture by Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam. The coming months will be crucial, and diplomats and multilateral actors must be prepared to exert pressure to ensure a stable outcome.

The “billions to trillions” vision advanced the notion that some significant part of official development assistance (ODA) should be used to catalyze additional finance from other public and private sources. Seven years later, the expectations that blended finance would expand sharply to help narrow the gaps in financing the SDGs have not been met. We undertook a survey of development agencies to understand the current and future use of blended finance in development agency activities. 

On March 14-15th, the US National Academies hosted a discussion on Africa-US science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) university partnerships, as part of an effort to design a new partnership mechanism. The program opened with representatives from African institutions talking about their experience with previous research partnerships. As the UK redesigns its mechanisms for funding research in the Global South and the US considers a new one, it is a good moment to listen to voices from (supposed) beneficiary countries on what would work better—because it seems like there is a lot to fix.