The InterDependent

Eric Schwartz, U.S. assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, announced recently that he was leaving his position at the State Department to work as dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Schwartz, who formerly worked in various capacities at the United Nations, is starting his new position on Oct. 10. He has been in his current post since July 2009.

“This was a very difficult decision, as my job in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration has been the most meaningful and fulfilling position of my professional life,” he said in a press release. “If ever there were an institution that embodied the ideal of public service as a critically important and honorable profession that requires enormous skill and dedication, it is the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration – the institution in which I have been so fortunate to work.”

He has been working on a "protracted refugees program" in six situations: the Afghan population in Pakistan, Bhutanese in Nepal, Burmese in Thailand, Croatian and Bosnian Citizens in Serbia, Liberians in West Africa and Somalis in Kenya. A "protracted" refugee situation is when those who have fled their country seek asylum in another country for at least five years. Over 10 million people live this way, mostly in the Middle East.

Schwartz was formerly executive director of the Connect U.S. Fund, an organization focused on foreign policy and international affairs. From 2005 to 2007, he was UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s deputy special envoy for tsunami recovery. Before that appointment, Schwartz was a lead expert for the Congressionally mandated Mitchell-Gingrich task force on UN reform.

Eric Schwartz, chief of the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, is leaving to become at dean at the University of Minnesota.

In 2003, he worked at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, after Sergio Vieira de Mello, the commissioner at the time, asked him to join the organization. In the year after de Mello’s death in Baghdad, Schwartz was an official at the commissioner headquarters, overseeing planning and budget activities. From 2001 through 2003, Schwartz held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations. As a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he directed the independent task force on post-conflict Iraq, working with Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to the UN (and former co-chairman of UNA-USA), and James Schlesinger.

Schwartz holds a law degree from New York University School of Law; a master’s in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University; and a B.A. in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton.