As it happened, Mr. Papademetriou and Kathleen Newland, an expert on refugee issues, founded the Institute of Migration Policy just a few days before September 11, singling it out of from the Carnegie Endowment. Mr. Papademetriou served as President from 2001 to 2014. In 2011, he founded a subsidiary of the institute, European Institute for Migration Policyin Brussels.
He was the author of about two dozen books and dozens of scientific articles on immigration and reintegration. He closely advised European Union politicians during the 2015 and 2016 refugee crises and was a source of information for the media.
Since 2008, he has convened the institute’s annual Transatlantic Council on Migration, a gathering of government officials, business leaders and academics from the US, Canada, Europe and Australia who examine their common immigration concerns and seek to hone their governments’ responses to these issues. .
Mr. Papademetriou has “dedicated his life to understanding the complex nuances of international migration in all its forms,” the institute’s president, Andrew Sely, said in a statement. “He used this knowledge to promote pragmatic, sensible immigration and immigrant integration policies that work in the interests of all elements of society”—not just the migrants themselves, but also the countries they come to and those they leave from.
Demetrios George Papademetriou was born on February 18, 1946 in Patras, Greece. His father, Giorgos Papademetriou, was a dentist. His mother, Vasiliki (Chrysantakopoulos) Papademetriou, was a housewife.
Demetrius, as he was called, arrived in New York in 1964 at the age of 18 under a scholarship program that selected the brightest students in Greece to study in the United States.
He received his bachelor’s degree in political science and history from Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1970. He then entered the University of Maryland, where he received a master’s degree in 1972 and a doctorate in political science in 1976. . He became a US citizen in 1977.