How I Got My Career in Foreign Policy: Andrea R. Flores

Being confronted by a border patrol officer to prove her U.S. citizenship at just twelve years old is a moment CFR member Andrea R. Flores will never forget. Having grown up in New Mexico less than an hour from the U.S. southern border, immigration shaped her life early on. She has since spent more than fifteen years working on immigration policy, both inside and outside the government. Now author of her own Substack newsletter focused on immigration politics, Flores reflects on the benefits of working on the issue across government and advocacy, why reform remains so difficult to achieve, and the importance of standing by your principles.

Here’s how Andrea Flores got her career in foreign policy. If you’re interested in this series, check out more editions here.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I wanted to be a doctor or a research scientist. I was interested in helping people live better lives, but I became interested in politics pretty quickly after the 2000 presidential election.

You grew up in New Mexico in a border community. How did that upbringing shape how you think about immigration?

It was deeply influential because I came of age in the post-9/11 era along the U.S.-Mexico border, when Washington, DC, was debating—and then formed—the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and scaled up massive amounts of resources for border security. I slowly watched my community change after that. My home went from a place where you would occasionally see a patrol officer closer to the border—I lived approximately forty-five minutes north of the U.S.-Mexico boundary—to officers all of a sudden in the grocery store and the local Target. 

My first encounter with one was when I was leaving my middle school at twelve years old. I  was stopped by a border patrol officer and had to prove my identification and my citizenship. That happening at twelve years old is something you don’t forget. It was very confusing to me. 

From that point on, which coincided around the 2000 presidential election, I became really interested with how Washington, DC, understood border communities and how immigration impacted this place I grew up. I come from a multigenerational Mexican American family—and there’s millions of families like mine—but this fact that we were touched by the immigration system felt very significant to me and I wanted to better understand it.

You went from Harvard to Columbia Law and then eventually to Capitol Hill. Did you always want to go into law, or did the policy world pull you in a different direction?

When I got to college, I became very interested in student government. I was the student body president, and that helped me get a job in the Obama administration after undergrad. I worked at DHS as one of my first jobs out of college, and was able to be part of that administration during an incredibly exciting time in immigration politics. I got to work on the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Then I worked at the White House during the Senate 2013 immigration reform bill and my first border crisis in 2014. 

What I realized as a Latina and a woman of color in this field was that there was going to be a ceiling on my career if I didn’t become a lawyer, and I was probably going to be accused of being too close to the issue. Once again, I’m not an immigrant, nor are my parents. But the association with being Latina and working on immigration was something I knew I’d have to navigate throughout my career. Deciding to become a lawyer was a very serious decision because no one in my family had done it before, it’s expensive, and it takes you out of the workforce temporarily. But in the end, it’s been very worth it, and has given me far more tools to navigate this issue than I ever could have hoped.

Is that a common decision—for people to choose the legal route because they are worried about that ceiling?

I had mentors who warned that it would be a ceiling for me, and I now better understand why I was given that advice. There are barriers, and there are still too few Latinos in national security and foreign policy writ large. It was only after I served in government and graduated from law school when I saw the foreign policy and national security communities really recognize immigration as a foreign policy issue. 

That was also when I received mentorship and support to engage more on this issue from the foreign policy side, because it is fundamentally a foreign policy issue, and we too often treat immigration as adjacent to foreign policy rather than a part of it. So, for me, I think being a lawyer helped me enter new professional circles as well.

How do you think about immigration as a foreign policy tool?

One, it’s a tool of soft power. We as the United States are so lucky that people want to work, study, and live here. We forget that it creates goodwill when we create legal pathways to come, learn skills, contribute, and we so often forget that people also want to go back home to share those skills and experiences. When the country has been at its best, we’ve treated immigration as a way to share American culture, to strengthen our own innovation and knowledge sharing, and to reduce brain drain in other countries. 

But what has happened, especially in the last fifteen years in the field, is that it feels like people are forgetting the economic benefits we get from the fact that people want to come here. Instead, we’ve treated it as an adverse foreign policy issue. What I mean by that is that it is an issue where we use our power to force countries to manage migration differently because we are afraid of people coming to our borders—and we are afraid of people coming to our borders because we haven’t updated the immigration system since 1990.

Every decision we make not to modernize the way immigrants come here has foreign policy implications and has created problems for countries along the Western Hemisphere. It’s allowed authoritarian leaders in the hemisphere to weaponize immigration against us because they know that we haven’t updated our immigration laws, and they understand deeply how the border works. And that is our future, as long as Congress still does not recognize the intersection of immigration as a domestic and foreign policy issue.

You’ve worked at a lot of different places, including DHS, the White House Domestic Policy Council, the National Security Council, and the Senate. How did each role inform the next?

I’ve been very fortunate in my career to tackle this issue from a 360-degree perspective. I have now seen how an agency approaches it—the agency with the most authority, DHS. I have seen how two different political White Houses approach it. I have worked for the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as his chief counsel, and I was responsible for much of what he was doing on the committee in terms of international migration. I’ve also worked at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was interesting. 

The reason I point that out is that it’s helped me better spot what the different institutions are misunderstanding about each other, how they communicate with each other, and how they could perhaps be working better together. It’s also made me much smarter on a deeply complex issue that has largely become an executive power issue. Under this current administration, so much of what President Donald Trump is doing is essentially invoking his foreign policy power to change domestic immigration policy. That comes out of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden having only been able to use executive tools to change policy because Congress wasn’t giving them any new tools, so we’re at the culmination of that.

Having sat at all these different places, I wish I didn’t have to move around as much, but when you work in politics, sometimes you have to. The benefit of that is I’ve seen many different ways to work on the issue, and found my own way to approach it that I wouldn’t have thought possible when I was deciding whether I wanted to be a Hill staffer versus going to work in the administration.

Do you think you would not have such a deep understanding of immigration policy if you had not done that kind of 360-degree view?

I think that I have been deeply trained in the politics of immigration. If I had stayed in one of the different branches of government longer, you tend to specialize, and it’s hard sometimes to understand the system at a political level. 

But I think we should actually train more people to understand the politics of it, because that is ultimately how the voters will understand it. And if we really want an immigration system that works for both our domestic and foreign policy interests, we have to be much better at talking about the politics of immigration, regardless of what party you’re in, because it is so easy to mimic very extreme arguments. Misinformation is rampant in the political debate on this issue, and a lot of my work today is simply providing regular information about what is normal, what is not normal, and trying to combat some of that misinformation. So it’s helped me understand more about how the politics either serve the policy or do not.

Given all of your experience, what would you say have been the biggest challenges in progressing immigration policy reform?

First, it is fundamentally a question about who we are as a country and who we are becoming. The reason it’s so hard to answer is because every wave of migration changes our demographics, and when we are already conflicted about the diversification of the country—which demographically will soon be a non-white majority country—then immigration becomes a way for people who are scared of that to respond. So it brings up questions of race, identity, and belonging, and those are really hard to address as simply as you would tech regulation, for example. It’s about who we are, so it’s emotional.

The second barrier, something I’m really trying to learn from in my own work, is that for a very long time this space has been an immigrant rights issue. Many Americans, understandably, maybe never saw how they could benefit from an immigration system that worked better for immigrants, and many leaders—myself included—didn’t previously appreciate making the case to Americans why we want a functioning immigration system. It’s made it easier for anti-immigrant forces to argue that it’s us versus them. They say, “Well, they’re trying to improve the lives of immigrants, and that comes at the expense of the lives of Americans.” Much of the work I’m trying to do now is to show that when you have legal options for immigrants that allow them to be paid fair wages and not be exploited by employers, that lifts everybody up. Or if we have future visas that actually plug into our needs as communities, whether a caregiver visa or a state-sponsored visa for a state to determine what they need, that prevents it from being framed as this us versus them mindset. 

The third thing that is changing is on the foreign policy front. People need to understand that we had such a massive border crisis from 2021 to 2024 because we had, for the first time, the largest forced displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere coming from Venezuela. We had essentially four countries that were on the verge of collapse or that had collapsed, and that’s unprecedented. It would be unprecedented even if we had a modern immigration system. 

So these three things make it very hard in our political environment to focus on the types of reforms that we could move through Congress, especially when Congress already is not fixing big problems. It is a daunting task. But in this moment in which people are losing their lives because of immigration enforcement and where many legal immigration pathways are being shut down, I hope an outcome is that we see why there are benefits—whether economic, social, or civil liberties benefits—to fixing the system.

You’ve spent a lot of time in government, but you’ve also worked outside of government, like at the ACLU and working on your Substack. How do you think about which policy and advocacy levers actually move the needle on immigration reform? How do you sustain that kind of focus and momentum in the long term?

My ultimate client that I’m serving is the cause of immigration reform. Every decision I make in my work is: Does this serve immigration reform moving forward? Does this keep a door open? Does it close a door? That prevents me from feeling overwhelmed by it, and it allows me to be more strategic. 

A little over a year ago, there were very big deployments of officers and federal agents to Los Angeles, and I would say neither party was ready to be concerned about that yet. The troop presence was rampant. The decision to deploy them went to the Supreme Court over the racial profiling carried out by officers, and all that time I’ve been saying the same thing, which is that mass deportation as a policy is ultimately very harmful to our communities and to American citizens. 

You have to believe your argument and that immigration reform will stop the harm people are seeing. Sometimes you have to keep saying the same thing until people are ready to hear it, because it wasn’t until what happened in Minneapolis that people started being open to hearing it. It wasn’t until a year after these deployments really started happening that I was able to place a piece in the New York Times outlining the same argument I had been making—which is that as long as we have the largest undocumented population in the world, we will have an enforcement presence in our communities that has a negative impact. 

I ask people to consider: what if we simply legalized the dairy workers, the majority of whom are undocumented, instead of mass deporting them? Or the construction workers in Texas? There are policy alternatives, so staying focused on my client and my cause helps me come back to that. That’s how I am on the outside and the inside of the government.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you would give those who want to pursue a career in foreign or public policy?

Go work with people or in institutions that you may not 100 percent agree with. You will learn so much about what the other side believes, and it will inform your work forever. I think many people have the idea that you have to only work in places where you fully support what they do. That’s never served me and it’s never been my goal, because at the end of the day, it’s multiple institutions that will inform whether immigration reform gets done. Of course, it will have to be the right combination of leaders, and you have to be able to work with a broad range of people. 

For me, what’s been really important in Washington is standing by my principles. Careers are long; I’ve taken some difficult positions, and I even left the Biden administration. It’s important to be clear about what lines you will or will not cross, and to find people who will support you through those moments. I wish more people would have talked to me about what that meant as a political staffer earlier on. I think for young people, you have to be discerning and find what your own line is. You may not know it yet, but make sure you have the support system, and never forget why you’re here and in foreign policy or public service.

For people starting their career, in those first few jobs, I always say that you’re really actually answering what you don’t like to do. I worked at a law firm for two years in my twenties. I firmly closed that door, as I learned that I do not want to be a litigator. I’m really glad I tried it; the reason I did it is because it’s important to also eliminate options. 

Finally, do the work that gives you the most energy, because if immigration wasn’t fascinating to me and wasn’t constantly making me feel like I have to get smarter, it’d be hard to stay in this work. So finding the thing that endlessly fascinates you, if you can, is one of the greatest moments I’ve now felt at this point in my career.

I’m sure you’ve traveled a bunch for work over the years. What has been a memorable trip or dinner that sticks with you?

I haven’t traveled a lot because I work a lot, and that’s the true answer. But I recently was in Mexico City, and while in Mexico City, eating a fabulous meal at a restaurant called Rosetta, I was inspired to do my recent piece tying a lot of what we’re seeing right now to the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and that was just an important moment for me. I think, for that reason, taking time to rest and take time out of your work can often be where your greatest inspiration comes from.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.