Alexander Kustov is associate professor of migration in the Keough School of Global Affairs and a core faculty affiliate of the Keough School's Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. He has been a Kellogg faculty fellow since 2026.
Kustov studies how democracies manage immigration, ethnic relations and demographic change while sustaining broad public trust. He specializes in survey, experimental and computational methods, drawing on evidence from original polls, behavioral games, political texts and historical records.
Kustov's book In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular (Columbia University Press, 2025) examines when majorities support freer immigration despite pervasive biases. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, The Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics. Kustov is the author of the Popular by Design newsletter, where he writes about immigration policy solutions that make immigration more politically sustainable.
His work has been recognized with leading grants and awards, including those from the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Political Science Association, and the Department of Defense Army Research Office. Kustov has written for The Washington Post and Foreign Affairs, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic and the Financial Times. His work also has been featured by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for Global Development, and the Niskanen Center.
Kustov holds a joint PhD in politics and social policy from Princeton University.