Thursday, March 28, 2024

Rep. Omar Is Wrong: UN Has No Place at US Southern Border

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) recently made the radical suggestion that the United States allow the United Nations to handle the massive influx of immigrants at our southern border. She stated, “We should do what any other country does by dealing with this situation in a serious way.” So, if every other country allows the UN to bulldoze their way to globalism, we should, too? According to Omar, the United Nations has expertise and training to deal with “migrants and asylum seekers.”

Her demand that the United States cede its sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global police force is outrageous. But it’s Omar’s (and the mainstream media’s) continued use of the term “migrant” that is especially dangerous as a matter of policy, as it sets the stage for what the United Nations has advocated for years: open borders.

Despite what many people would have you believe, migrants are not immigrants, and immigrants are not migrants. It’s impossible to be both. A person is either seeking permanent settlement across a national border (i.e. an immigrant) or moving transiently within a country or across national borders without an intent to stay permanently (i.e. a migrant). But the UN, Rep. Omar, and every leftist media organization doing their bidding would like us to believe the words are interchangeable. Unfortunately, many countries and an increasing number of American citizens agree.

The underpinning of Omar’s statement, and why we’re seeing an upsurge in the use of the term “migrant,” comes directly from the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (UN Migration Pact), drafted by the UN General Assembly. The terms of the document were drawn directly from the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The UN Migration Pact was finalized in mid-2018, and adopted in December of that year at the Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for Migration. Of the 193 member states of the United Nations, 14 refused to adopt the pact, including the United States.

Consistent with Omar’s demand to call in the UN to manage US borders, the UN Migration Pact essentially seeks to normalize mass migration and destroy the traditional sovereignty of the nation-state. As the Director of the UN International Office of Migration stated, “This is not the end of the undertaking but the beginning of a new historic effort to shape the global agenda on migration for decades to come.” So while the UN makes assurances the pact is not legally binding and is grounded in values of state sovereignty, the assurances ring particularly hollow when the document around which the UN Migration Pact was written states, “We commit to strengthening global governance of migration,” and rests on the principles of the Charter of the United Nations as well as 27 other UN treaties.

This is not some kumbaya, can’t-we-all-get-along proposal. This is an all out assault on the supremacy of a state and that state’s ability to exercise independent authority within its borders. In essence, the UN Migration Pact declares that migration — in other words, go where you want, when you want, whenever you want, and for whatever reason — is a human right, “…making us all countries of origin, transit, and destination,” and advancing the idea that governments and societies are subject to international law. In fact, the UN Migration Pact makes reference to international law, international obligations, and compliance with international law more than 30 times.

Regardless of migration status, the UN Migration Pact would require “inclusive and equitable quality education” and lifelong learning opportunities, early childhood development, formal schooling, on-the-job training, technical training, and language training, as well as health-care, mental health care, and access to sexual and reproductive health services, i.e., abortion. 

Signatories would also commit to “visa liberalization,” which would allow visa-free travel across borders, and the “right to family life,” which would place adjudication of issues of family separation with the European Court of Human Rights.

The UN Migration Pact includes directives on managing borders in a coordinated manner that would allow for international border management, and it adopts the concept of non-refoulement, which prohibits collective expulsion and returning of migrants.

Additionally, the UN Migration Pact requires signatories to take an active role in promoting certain types of reporting by media outlets and taking action against media outlets that promote intolerance, xenophobia, racism, and other forms of discrimination against migrants. It would essentially criminalize criticism. To that end, the agreement commits signatories to enact legislation that penalizes hate crimes, as well as hate speech in conformity with international law. Penalizing hate speech is in direct conflict with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and established case law acknowledging protection for speech deemed hateful.

None of the above-mentioned items of the UN Migration Pact (a complete dissection of the document isn’t possible in the allotted space) comport with the sovereignty and independence of the United States. As George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton, “But if we are to be told by a foreign Power…what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little.”

The UN Migration Pact is just another pressure from international forces to relinquish sovereignty in favor of global governance despite reassurances that state sovereignty will be upheld. Something about that smacks of “if you like your borders, you can keep your borders.”

Sound familiar?

More From The Pulse