At his speech in Pensacola, Florida Friday, President Donald Trump celebrated his decision to take America out of negotiations for the so-called “Global Compact on Migration.”
“I recently withdrew the United States from the United Nations plan for global governance of immigration and refugee policy,” Trump told the raucous crowd, calling the Global Compact a “no borders plan.”
“I heard about this recently … no borders, everyone can come in! If you don’t mind, I rejected that plan, is that OK?” Trump continued.
The plan Trump referenced was the United Nations’ (U.N.) “Global Compact on Migration,” to which the Obama administration pledged the United States participation last year. Talks began this week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on the massive United Nations (U.N.) plan to create “safe, regular and orderly migration,” from the third whole to wealthy countries in Europe and North America. On the eve of those talks, however, Trump reversed Obama’s decision and pulled U.S. negotiators.
“I told them, not only do we not want ‘no borders,’ we want the strongest borders you’ve ever seen,” Trump boasted. “America is a sovereign country. We set our immigration rules. We don’t listen to foreign bureaucrats.”
The details of the of the Global Compact are yet to be hammered out, but the outline to which the Obama administration signed on, called the “New York Declaration for Refugee and Migrants,” presents a nightmare scenario for immigration restrictionists and border security advocates.
The declaration stipulates that participating countries should drop laws criminalizing illegal entry and stop detaining illegal immigrants that are caught. Paragraph 33 “reaffirms:”
[T]hat all individuals who have crossed or are seeking to cross international borders are entitled to due process in the assessment of their legal status, entry and stay, we will consider reviewing policies that criminalize crossborder movements. We will also pursue alternatives to detention while these assessments are under way.
And later, the declaration calls for the end of all deportations, “encouraging” that “migrants who do not have permission to stay in the country of destination” leave “preferably on a voluntary basis.”
Perhaps most disturbingly to a country with as robust a tradition of free speech as the United States, the New York Declaration casts resistance to mass migration as racism, xenophobia, and illegal under international law. Paragraph 13 reads:
We recall that our obligations under international law prohibit discrimination of any kind on the basis of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Yet in many parts of the world we are witnessing, with great concern, increasingly xenophobic and racist responses to refugees and migrants.
Paragraph 14 then calls for so called “hate speech” laws to be mandatory:
Demonizing refugees or migrants offends profoundly against the values of dignity and equality for every human being … We will take a range of steps to counter such attitudes and behavior, in particular with regard to hate crimes, hate speech and racial violence.
In contrast, Trump offered an unapologetic populist-nationalist vision of national sovereignty and local governance. “America is more than a place on a map, it’s a nation, it’s a family,” he told the crowd. “Our agenda is pro-family, pro-police, pro-workers and 100% pro-American.”
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