When Amy Pope became director of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) one year ago, she took an unconventional route to leadership.
A Biden administration official, Pope had been IOM’s deputy director general for management and reform and since 2021. When the time came to choose the organization’s next leader, she decided to run against her boss, António Vitorino, a high-level Portuguese lawyer and politician
“I feel like within our organization, there was a real interest in having someone bring fresh ideas and fresh perspective made from silly things,” Pope said in an interview on the sideline of the UN General Assembly in September, “like bringing a style of leadership that’s more inclusive, seeking the input of various IOM workers from around the world wherever they are… Being unafraid to be human, doing things like dancing with migrants when we go out and they’re presenting to us or showing us things they’ve learned, or sitting down and talking to people one to one.”
Vitorino had been leading the organization since 2018, but in her campaign, Pope insisted IOM needed a new type of leadership because Vitorino had an “older generation approach.” She also said the organization’s leader should spend more time traveling to talk to communities served by IOM.
But in her campaign, Pope was not only bringing a new generation of leadership to the organization, she was also returning a top job to American hands. At the UN, some leadership jobs are dominated by specific, powerful countries, and in the case of the IOM, the United States had occupied the top job for 50 years until the Trump administration brought forward Ken Isaacs, a Christian charity executive with a history of anti-Islam comments. Vitorino then got the job, and Pope joined IOM as a deputy director shortly after Biden took office. With the support of the Biden administration, Pope ran a six-month campaign while on unpaid leave, visited over 40 countries, and ended up getting the job.
One year in, Pope said she has executed on many of her campaign promises. On the organizational front, she has pushed for more visits on the ground and closer work with IOM teams around the world. “I felt it was really important to demonstrate to our workforce and to our member states that IOM work is out in the world,” she said. “It’s not in Geneva.”
Pope has also appointed a new executive team; the organization’s leadership is now mostly women, “all representing different parts of the world, all who travel, and all who I hope will amplify the work we’re doing,” she said.
Pope herself has also implemented her campaign promise to spend more time in the field. So far, she’s traveled to over 40 countries in a year and said she has visited 90 countries overall since campaigning for the top job. She believes that her leadership and generation are already proving successful in the organization’s “new” culture. She also believes that being the first woman to lead IOM brings something different to the table.
“Wherever they are, from being unafraid to be human, doing things like dancing with migrants when we go out… they’re presenting to us or showing us things they’ve learned, or sitting down and talking to people one to one,” Pope said. “So, I feel like what was maybe missing, or what has been welcomed, is just this very human perspective, which I think is more typical of a new generation of leaders. I also think, frankly, being a woman means I’m not afraid to be emotional.”
More than anything, Pope wants to focus on communications. With hard-right political parties becoming increasingly popular around the world, the topic of migration is often at the forefront of political debates and scapegoated by those parties.
In her own country, former President Donald Trump controversially repeated in the presidential debate a baseless story about Haitian migrants eating pets. While she won’t get involved in specific political debates, Pope wants to emphasize the benefits of migration in many U.S. cities and throughout the world.
“If you look at the election politics, you would think migration is just this huge problem, and it has to be stopped,” she said, “but if you widen the scope a little bit, and you look, for example, at post- Covid economic recovery, the United States’ strong economic recovery is in large part due to the fact that there has been a continued number of migrants who are coming in.”
Pope is also trying to change the way people talk and think about migration and wishes to make it more central to policy discussions.
“I think the mistake has always been to keep migration as an afterthought, as opposed to really bringing it into the strategic conversation,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, whether it’s how do we build more sustainable solutions to climate change, how do we deal with the demographic changes that are happening around the world. How do we deal with globalization of skills and labor?”
A year in, Pope feels good about how she’s carried out her vision, but she’s unsure if she can maintain the same pace for the rest of her term.
“It was really critical to just get out and hear from the members, to hear from the migrants themselves, to talk to our workforce, and it was critical in terms of setting my own agenda and priorities and the organizational reform,” she said, “I don’t know that I need to do another 40 next year.”