The Atlanta Mayor’s Office of International and Immigrant Affairs had a busy 2023, hosting an inbound delegation on average every three days throughout the year.
In total, the office welcomed 120 groups from 55 countries according to its recently released annual report.
Diplomacy and international business are two core focus areas for the office, whose mandate expanded following the combination of international affairs and an immigrant service initiative called Welcoming Atlanta into one office last year.
Many of the inbound delegations focused on youth engagement, appropriate given that Mayor Andre Dickens dubbed 2023 the “Year of the Youth” in Atlanta.
In addition to the Young Leaders of the Americas, a group of 14 fellows from all over the Western Hemisphere, the mayor welcomed a group of Mandela Fellows, a group of African leaders being hosted at Clark Atlanta University. Both groups visited the U.S. under the auspices of the State Department.
Antony Blinken, U.S. secretary of state, met with the mayor at Refuge Coffee in Midtown during an inbound visit in May, during which he also visited the CDC and participated in a roundtable on boosting access to international education with presidents at Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities.
These initiatives were accompanied by multiple forums on city-level diplomacy, an area in which the mayor has taken particular interest.
The mayor also took some outbound trips, traveling to Ethiopia in May with a delegation bound for Atlanta on the inaugural Ethiopian Airlines flight here. In October, he took a small delegation led by Invest Atlanta to London, where the Atlanta Falcons were playing a game at Wembley Stadium. That visit came after the English Premier League brought two preseason matches to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, another example of the city’s embrace of sports diplomacy.
On the business front, Ecosystem and Experience Architect Nicholas…
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