The Specious UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration

By Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist —— Bio and Archives July 17, 2018

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The text of the United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration was finalized last Friday, an inter-governmentally negotiated agreement prepared under the auspices of the United Nations to cover all dimensions of international migration. It will be formally adopted by UN member states at the Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration to be held this December in Morocco. UN Secretary General António Guterres said the Global Compact reflected “the shared understanding by Governments that cross-border migration is, by its very nature, an international phenomenon and that effective management of this global reality requires international cooperation to enhance its positive impact for all. It also recognizes that every individual has the right to safety, dignity and protection.”

The United States was conspicuous by its absence during the process leading up to the approval of the Global Compact’s final text. The Trump administration decided last December to withdraw the United States from the negotiations. “We still have 192 countries that agreed on the text of the compact, and we keep the door open for the U.S. to come back,” Miroslav Lajcak, current president of the United Nations General Assembly, said during a news conference the day the final Global Compact text was agreed upon. “I strongly hope that the United States sooner or later will also join this process,” Secretary General Guterres said last Thursday at his own press conference. “Let’s not forget that the United States is in itself a country of immigration.” They should not hold their breath for at least so long as President Trump remains in office. As the president has said repeatedly, the United States welcomes those immigrants to the United States who enter the country legally. Although the Global Compact is not itself a legally binding document in a technical sense, since it does not constitute an official treaty or UN Convention, it establishes certain international norms regarding the governance of cross-border migration. Over time such international norms, especially if observed widely in many countries’ own legal systems, can become part of what international law experts call “customary international law,” which is often invoked by courts. In this way, the Global Compact can readily fit into the globalists’ strategy to use the judiciary as an instrument for bringing the U.S. Constitution and laws into line with "human rights" international norms. The Global Compact commits its participants to implement 23 objectives, which include “providing basic services for migrants” and using “detention only as a measure of last resort.” Objective 13 calls for the use of “existing relevant human rights mechanisms to improve independent monitoring of migrant detention, ensuring that it is a measure of last resort, that human rights violations do not occur, and that States promote, implement and expand alternatives to detention, favouring non-custodial measures and community-based care arrangements, especially in the case of families and children.” Objective 13 calls for changes in existing domestic legislation, policies and practices to ensure that decisions to detain “are taken on an individual basis, in full compliance with due process and procedural safeguards, and that immigration detention is not promoted as a deterrent.”

Significant elements of Objective 13 on detention fly in the face of President Trump’s zero tolerance policy in attempting to enforce U.S. immigration laws against illegal aliens. One can easily imagine the American Civil Liberties Union or other illegal immigrant advocates bringing court cases challenging the detention of illegal immigrants before sympathetic federal judges. Such judges would be all too willing to incorporate into their interpretations of the U.S. Constitution loosely worded “international norms” in the Global Compact adopted by what we will be assured is an international “consensus” garnered from an unaccountable global forum. In fact, one doesn’t have to imagine at all. Even without the Global Compact to reinforce their cases, lawyers for illegal immigrants have already exploited loopholes in current U.S. immigration laws to challenge temporary detentions, especially of children and families. Objective 15 commits its participants to ensuring that “all migrants, regardless of their migration status, can exercise their human rights through safe access to basic services.” Such “basic services” are supposed to include incorporating “the health needs of migrants in national and local health care policies and plans” and providing “inclusive and equitable quality education to migrant children and youth.” In other words, illegal immigrants who are not supposed to be in the country in the first place are to be released into communities for the most part rather than kept in temporary detention and to be granted taxpayer-subsidized health care benefits and education. Such policies will only encourage the flow of more illegal immigrants, which is the overall goal of open borders advocates who say that no immigrant should be considered “illegal.” Again, a key objective of the Global Compact flies in the face of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. However, once again, activist judges may be persuaded to treat this objective as an international norm that becomes the basis for a form of customary international human rights law that such judges in turn transform into a creative reading of new "rights"into the U.S. Constitution that did not exist before. Unless and until the United States Supreme Court finally reigns them in, some federal judges will continue to overstep their judicial role and seek to impose their own moral views and policy preferences rather than interpret the law as written. Lawyers for illegal immigrants, of course, look for just such judges when shopping around their cases, judges who might be moved to incorporate ‘international norms’ into their “judicial” interpretations even if they conflict with the text and animating principles of the U.S. Constitution itself or the relevant statutes. Through such stealth tactics, globalists will likely utilize the United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration as another tool to undermine the Trump administration’s immigration policies. At least the administration did not help them along by joining in this charade, as the Obama administration was prepared to do.