German Chancellor Angela Merkel just got back to Berlin from Marrakech, where more than 160 nations agreed to the United Nations’ Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Next week, the consenting countries at the General Assembly will formally adopt the compact.
The United States will not be one of them. And thank God for that.
The compact, much like the Paris climate accord, is legally nonbinding, a pure act of virtue signaling. It contains a laundry list of sovereignty-threatening ideas, however. The compact calls for nations to “facilitate access to procedures for family reunification for migrants at all skill levels,” which would seemingly rule out the meritocratic migration systems currently in place in Australia, which is also not signing the pact. It also asks that countries “provide access to basic services for migrants,” legal or illegal, and “establish mechanisms for the portability of social security entitlements.” At points, the compact lumps together migrants and refugees, conflating one class of legally protected people fleeing persecution and another broad class that includes illegal immigrants.
The U.S. State Department specifically rejected the compact’s Orwellian provisions to police speech that could be interpreted as xenophobic, citing both fears of the infringement of free speech and the fact that “this language in the Compact could be abused by repressive regimes that seek to limit speech unduly.”
The U.S. is correct not to flatter the egos of brutal dictatorships and failing republics adopting a set of meaningless platitudes to make them feel better about themselves. As heated disputes from far right-wing populists in Brazil and Austria have emerged, the compact has arguably done more harm than good for the cause of immigration activists as well.
The migrant crisis is indeed a crisis, and at some point, many countries will require comprehensive immigration reform. For the United Nations to ham-handedly push through far left dogma that lazily attacks the notion of national sovereignty and leans into every negative stereotype about globalism for literally no reason just serves as fodder for emerging right-wing populist parties across the Western world.
The U.S. is right not to participate in this performative nonsense, and the U.N. should reconsider what good the compact is really achieving.
