A U.N. high commissioner used Ke Huy Quan’s Oscar win to lever in some politics, insisting migrant boats “carry big talent”.
Filippo Grandi, the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees, has insisted that small migrant boats known for transporting illegal economic migrants “carry big talent” in a social media post.
The Italian official made the comment in the wake of Ke Huy Quan — a former refugee originally from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), South Vietnam — winning best-supporting actor at the Oscars on Sunday evening.
Writing on Twitter, Grandi took full advantage of Quan’s win, using the Vietnamese man’s victory to push his own open borders agenda regarding illegal migrant boats.
“Small boats carry big talent,” he wrote online, before congratulating Quan as a “former refugee” for winning the award. The remarks could be interpreted as a potshot at the various European states trying to get a handle on the ongoing migrant crises in the Mediterranean, as well as the English Channel.
According to a report by Entertainment Weekly, Quan and his family fled Saigon in 1978, three years after the city was infamously conquered by the Communist regime of North Vietnam, with tens of thousands in the country being sent to camps for “reeducation” in the wake of the war.
By contrast, many illegals arriving in various European nations via small boats are suspected to be economic migrants. For example, the UK has been having particular difficulty with arrivals from Albania, a country that is not currently at war.
As of 2020, Albanians represented the single largest foreign nationality group within UK prisons, with officials fearing that many of those arriving in small boats ultimately aim to join up with organised crime gangs operating in Britain.
Although there are some seemingly stark differences between Quan, a victim of Communism and the cold war proxy conflict that befell Vietnam, and foreign migrants looking to arrive in small boats, Grandi’s decision to conflate the two does not seem to be all that surprising.
The Italian official has a history of equating economic migrants with real war refugees in the past, having previously expressed outrage that some countries were more interested in looking after those fleeing the war in Ukraine than the migrants from Africa and the middle-east arriving on their shores via illegal channels.
The refugee commissioner is also known to be radically pro-open borders, having previously suggested that it is “racist” for a country to implement strong border controls to prevent illegal immigration.
“This is racism,” he said of countries attempting to clamp down on those looking to arrive into their own countries illegally, arguing instead that these states “have the legal and moral duty to welcome [migrants]”.
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