(David) Ian Hopper serves as the Government Relations Director for Green and Spiegel. In 2025, Ian retired after almost 23 years of service from the U.S. Department of State as a Senior Foreign Service officer. His specialization was in consular work, including immigration, visas, and the protection of Americans traveling and residing abroad. He completed ten tours of service, adjudicated hundreds of thousands of consular cases, and trained hundreds of consular officers in every region of the world. He is eager to help businesses and individuals navigate a complicated immigration and risk management landscape using his extensive knowledge of worldwide consular operations.
His most recent tour was as Consular Section Chief at the U.S. Consulate General in Toronto, as well as the American Citizen Services Coordinator for the U.S. Mission to Canada. He supervised a team of over 50 American and local staff at the largest post in Canada and harmonized operations to protect the over one million U.S. citizens in Canada. He developed relations with sports leagues and teams to prioritize travel for cross-border leagues and dramatically improved processing for investment visas, which brought over $200 million into the U.S. economy each year.
Ian also served as Consul General in Baghdad, Iraq as well as Amman, Jordan. While serving in Iraq from 2019-2020, he led all consular services during the 2020 siege on the Embassy compound and provided services amidst destroyed facilities and frequent hostile fire. He led interagency task forces to plan and execute the emergency relocation of Embassy personnel and handled multiple cases involving kidnapping and terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens. While in Jordan from 2012-2016, he created a sustainable program to allow thousands of Syrian immigrant visa applicants to finish their consular processing in Jordan despite a Jordanian ban on Syrian entry. He also personally assisted scores of abused and kidnapped U.S. citizen women to safety.
As the State Department’s Supervisory Regional Consular Officer in Frankfurt, Germany, Ian led a team of officers to provide mentorship, supervision, and internal controls monitoring for 116 small- and medium-sized consular sections around the world. He created new Department-wide programs to address enterprise-level issues like staffing management, services consolidation, and new adjudication guidance. In Chennai, India, Ian ran skilled worker visa policy for Mission India from 2006-2009. He also served in consular positions in the Philippines and Togo.
In addition to consular work, Ian ran the Office of Iraqi Affairs from 2020-2022, leading a team to create and implement U.S. foreign policy in Iraq. He implemented a successful effort to provide technical support and monitoring funds for the 2021 Iraqi parliamentary elections.