Marcela Escobari

Marcela Escobari is a senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings.

Her career has spanned the private sector, government, and academia, with a common thread of producing growth that is inclusive and sustainable. She has been twice confirmed by the U.S. Senate under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and most recently served in the White House National Security Council as special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. She led efforts to promote safe, orderly, and humane migration and advance a collaborative, regional response to the displacement of over 8 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean. This regional response contributed to an over 70% decrease in irregular migration at the U.S. border in 2024, helping stabilize and integrate over 4.5 million migrants and refugees within Latin America.

From 2021 to 2024, Escobari was assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, a position she also held from 2016 to 2017 as the first woman to serve in this role. She led a 1,000-person team implementing over $1.4 billion per year in development initiatives across 17 regional offices. She developed and implemented an organizational strategy for the bureau tied to outcome measures, focused on migration management, supporting democratic reformers, strengthening institutions, and improving the productivity of the informal sector to speed economic recovery.

Previously, as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, she launched the Workforce of the Future initiative focused on identifying policies to restore opportunity and enable inclusive growth in U.S. cities and states in the wake of globalization and COVID-19. She created data tools to help displaced workers find economic mobility in job transitions and authored three major publications (Moving Up, Realism About Reskilling and Growing Cities That Work for All) on increasing economic opportunity in the United States. Before joining government, Escobari was the executive director of Harvard’s Center for International Development. Under her tenure, the center grew from three to 80 fellows and staff, quadrupled its yearly budget, and became one of the top five international think tanks in the world according to the University of Pennsylvania’s “Global Go-To Think Tanks Report.” ranking. She began her career as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and worked across the globe on export competitiveness projects as a strategy consultant.

Escobari is recognized for bringing evidence to policymaking, driving results in multistakeholder initiatives, and effectively building bipartisan consensus for development priorities. She is an author and speaker in economic development, inclusive growth, and workforce development and has represented the administration in congressional testimonies, forums, and White House briefings.

Her honors include Freedom House’s 2024 Mark Palmer Prize for diplomats and civil servants whose work has advanced democracy and human rights.