Accountability is in the air in Washington. At one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Paul Wolfowitz is struggling to save his job as president of the World Bank after getting caught arranging a sweetheart deal for his, well, sweetheart. A few blocks down the road, President Bush faces endless questions...

The ambitious immigration overhaul package that Congress is studying has drawn criticism from conservatives who say it offers amnesty to lawbreakers, and from immigration advocates who say it will not do enough to bring millions of people out of the shadows.

There are two ways to think about the staggering amounts of money given by special interest groups to politicians -- the type of contributions that were detailed for the last quarter in reports filed yesterday by presidential candidates and members of Congress.

Why would David Vitter, a U.S. senator with four young children, have gotten involved with a seedy escort service? Why would Michael Vick, a gifted NFL quarterback, get mixed up with the sordid world of dog fighting? Why would Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar, six-time governor and president of the...

John Duffy lost 67 of his colleagues at the firm of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods six years ago during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Among the dead was Duffy's son Christopher. The investment banking firm, located in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, was among the companies hit hardes...

Four years ago, during a speech in Manila, President Bush drew an analogy between the history of the Philippines and the history he was rewriting in Iraq.

In the courts and in Congress, Sen. Larry Craig is fighting to withdraw his guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge that may suggest he tried to solicit sex from a man in June at a Minneapolis airport bathroom. Rather than resign yesterday, as the senator had promised and Republicans had hoped, Craig...

Last week, a gallon of gas at an Exxon station in the tony suburb of Bethesda cost $2.99.

Let's say there are 10 houses on your street and a giant pothole develops right in the middle of the block. Everyone benefits if the pothole gets fixed, but that might require multiple calls to municipal authorities and a lot of hassle. Since every resident benefits even if he or she does nothing...

What do the war in Iraq, your Christmas shopping and this week's Thanksgiving dinner have in common?

In the interest of promoting democracy, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recently announced that he had to lock up most of his country's democracy activists. And because he wanted the Pakistani Supreme Court to independently rule on whether he could continue as president, Musharraf also...

Social psychologist William B. Swann once had a group of married people evaluate their spouses even as their spouses evaluated them. People with high self-esteem, the psychologist found, felt closer to their partners when they received positive evaluations. People with low self-esteem, however, felt...

Take a step back from the Republican and Democratic presidential primary races and you will see a sharp difference between the two.

Mitt Romney wants to round up 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them. John Edwards wants to put an end to lobbyists. All the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates rail against the ways of Washington.

John McCain once called televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," but now the Republican senator from Arizona is currying favor with social conservatives. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) now opposes the Iraq war, although she used to support it. Sen. Barack Obama...

Sen. John McCain's quest for the Republican presidential nomination was once seen as dead, but like those robots in the "Terminator" movies that reassemble themselves after being blown to smithereens, he came back. Five years ago, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) was a virtually unknown African American ...

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

One hundred forty-three years ago, women's suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton faced a conundrum: With the Civil War over, Stanton had to decide whether to support the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which enabled black men to vote -- at a time when white women such as herself...

Three horrors await Americans who get behind the wheel of a car for a family road trip this summer: the spiraling price of gas, the usual choruses of "are-we-there-yet?" -- and the road rage of fellow drivers.

The United States is awash in gloom. Overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the country's economic direction, and the intensity of unhappiness is greater than it has been in 15 years, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. The answer, pundits, politicians...

Subprime mortgages have been linked to a meltdown in housing and questionable Wall Street practices, and they may have been the original domino that set off America's current economic crisis.

It happens all the time: Two guys in a garage come up with a cool new technology -- and dream of making it big. A thousand people take time off work to campaign for a visionary politician because they feel they are doing something to change the world. A million kids hit baseballs -- and wonder what...

Nearly a century ago, American middle-distance runner Abel Kiviat entered the Stockholm Olympics as the odds-on favorite to win the 1,500-meter race, an event in which he held the world record. Kiviat had the lead 1,492 meters into the race but was passed in the final eight meters by Britain's...

Consider these scenarios. Scandal A: A prominent politician gets caught sleeping with a campaign aide and plunges himself into an ugly paternity dispute -- all while his cancer-stricken wife is fighting for her life.

In the days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with the twin towers vanished from Manhattan's skyline, a poem by W.H. Auden could have been the song of a wounded nation. "September 1, 1939," written on the eve of World War II, seemed eerily prescient:

With America divided right down the middle for the third presidential election in a row, most people would not be surprised to hear that Democratic and Republican partisans perceive a widening gap between their presidential choices. In 2004, for example, die-hards in both parties felt that the...

A few years ago, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Thierry Devos showed the names of a number of celebrities to a group of volunteers and asked them to classify the well-known personalities as American or non-American. The list included television personality Connie Chung and tennis star Michael ...

Every time the White House changes hands between the Democrats and the Republicans, the outgoing party quickly sees the virtues of staffing government departments with competent managers. The incoming party invariably seeks to reward loyal campaign operatives with political appointments.

When nearly 200 people in India were killed in terrorist attacks late last month, the carnage received saturation media coverage around the globe. When nearly 600 people in Zimbabwe died in a cholera outbreak a week ago, the international response was far more muted.

Let's say the FBI hears a senior elected official on a tapped telephone line demanding kickbacks in exchange for favors and shaking down donors for campaign contributions in exchange for plum contracts.

With displacement at a record high, governments around the world are looking for ways to jumpstart, expand, or maximize the impact of their refugee resettlement programs. Yet the evidence base regarding the effectiveness of such programs is particularly thin. This report maps the monitoring and evaluation gaps that exist and identifies areas where further research could help inform policymakers' actions.

Marking the release of an MPI Europe report commissioned as part of the EU-FRANK project, this webinar examines critical gaps in the research and evaluation of refugee resettlement programs and recommendations for improving evidence gathering and knowledge sharing between resettlement countries. 

Following the 2015­–16 crisis that saw record numbers of refugees arrive in Europe, policymakers have shown interest in creating managed, legal alternatives to the dangerous, unauthorized journeys many asylum seekers make. While these discussions should be informed by an understanding of current pathways and protection channels, it is "nearly impossible" to know how protection seekers enter and what legal channels are available to them, as this MPI Europe report explains.

As European policymakers and publics continue to grapple with the migration crisis, this conversation offers an opportunity to reflect on the role and responsibility of experts in these politically sensitive debates.

Across Europe, grassroots efforts have emerged in the wake of crisis that draw members of the public into the process of receiving refugees and supporting their integration. This policy brief examines the many forms community-based or private sponsorship can take, what benefits such approaches may hold for European communities, and the tradeoffs policymakers face in their implementation.

In 2016, the European Union announced with fanfare a new Migration Partnership Framework to inform cooperation with countries of origin and transit. While the bloc has long recognized collaboration as key to achieving its migration-management aims, EU partnerships face persistent challenges, including looking beyond short-term enforcement goals and taking into account partner needs, capacity, and objectives.

European policymakers are fixated on reform of the Dublin Regulation, the contentious rules that carve up responsibility for asylum claims between EU states. They see it not only as a long-term prophylactic against future fluctuations in irregular migration, but as a marker of the success or failure of solidarity in Europe overall. Yet rather than doggedly working to salvage Dublin, policymakers need to stop and consider why they regard it as so integral to European cooperation, as this commentary explores.

During the 2015–16 migration crisis, European asylum systems were stretched to a breaking point. Yet many of the structural issues that contributed to failures to register newcomers, insufficient reception capacity, and growing backlogs of asylum cases existed before—and many remain unresolved. This report critically evaluates Common European Asylum System legal and operational shortcomings at a time when reform is on the table.

With pressure mounting on EU Member States to create and scale up refugee resettlement programs, many have turned to peers in other countries for information, advice, and operational support. This report maps the many forms resettlement-focused peer-support initiatives take and discusses common stumbling blocks and strategies for policymakers and program designers looking to make the most of these critical exchanges.

As maritime arrivals climbed in 2015, EU policymakers struggled to mount a coordinated response. A range of ad hoc crisis-response tools emerged, but many officials worry that if another migration emergency were to hit Europe, the European Union may still be unprepared. This report traces the evolution of the EU response to the 2015–16 crisis and lays out recommendations to lock in progress and shore up weaknesses.

EU policy debates about moving asylum seekers from overburdened frontline countries, such as Greece and Italy, to other Member States rarely consider how migrants form and act on preferences for certain destinations—and how difficult it may be to change these views. This issue brief explores decision-making among migrants in Greece, including how living conditions, jobs, and legal status factor in.

European policymakers are negotiating the blueprint for the next EU funding cycle—a plan that will determine how much money is available for migration and integration aims, what it can be used for, and who can access it. This policy brief explores some of the limitations of EU funds, as well as strategies that could help them more effectively serve migration and integration policy goals.

Refugees encounter a range of challenges after resettlement—from adjusting to a new culture and language, to finding a job. Many resettlement countries invest in predeparture orientation to help refugees develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to face these challenges. This report explores the many forms these programs take, highlighting important design questions and key elements that effective programs share.

As European asylum systems are tested again by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has injected the need for social distancing during processing and in reception centers, it appears lessons learned during the 2015-16 migration and refugee crisis may be fading. Chief among them: A number of Member States have phased out their buffer capacity. This MPI Europe commentary explores the diametrically different approaches taken to asylum during the pandemic.

Migration between Mexico and the United States has changed dramatically in recent years, but policies and political rhetoric in both countries have not always kept up. This report, which draws from discussions of a high-level Mexico-U.S. study group convened by MPI and El Colegio de México, explores this new migration reality and how the two governments could work more closely together to address shared policy challenges.

La migración entre México y Estados Unidos ha cambiado dramáticamente en los últimos años, pero las políticas y la retórica política en ambos países no se han actualizado a este contexto a la misma velocidad. Este reporte explora esta nueva realidad migratoria y cómo los dos gobiernos podrían trabajar juntos para abordar los desafíos de políticas públicas que tienen en común.

One of the major challenges Canada faced during its extraordinary push to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees during a four-month period was to find housing for these newcomers. This report explores how the government, resettlement case workers, and private citizens tackled this challenge—balancing cost and location, access to services, and more—and how lessons learned can improve refugee housing practices for other countries going forward.

Seasonal worker programs in the European Union have a long history, but have yet to find the sweet spot of working for migrants, employers, and countries of destination and origin alike. This policy brief explores some of the challenges common to these programs—drawing on examples in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand—and highlights promising practices.

Brussels is searching for bright ideas on how to fix the Common European Asylum System. While recent EU-level legal reforms have stalled, this report examines the many innovative, operations-focused approaches Member States have used since the 2015-16 migration crisis to improve registration and reception systems, asylum case processing, and options for returning failed asylum seekers.

Six million immigrant workers are at the frontlines of keeping U.S. residents healthy and fed during the COVID-19 pandemic, representing disproportionate shares of physicians, home health aides, and retail-store pharmacists, for example. They also are over-represented in sectors most immediately devastated by mass layoffs, yet many will have limited access to safety-net systems and to federal relief, as this fact sheet details.