By Joseph Klein
Tuesday, april 11, 2006
Growing disparities in standards of living are driving workers from the world's poorest countries to cross national borders in search of better opportunities. The United States is not alone among the developed countries in having to deal with the consequences - large inflows of illegal immigrants from less developed countries. However, the way we deal with the approximately 11 million such individuals, who are already residing here — many from neighboring Mexico - is nobody's business but our own. It is the american economy that provides some of these illegal immigrants with the opportunity to earn enough money to support themselves and their families while they live here, and it is the american taxpayers who pay for the health, education and welfare services for those without any means of self-support.
This country is, of course, a nation of immigrants. We understand the vital role that immigration has played in the growth of our economy over the course of our history, but we are also a nation of laws. The United States, like every other nation, has the absolute sovereign right to decide who is entitled to enter its territory. Nothing is more central to our national sovereignty than being able to determine for ourselves the conditions under which non-citizens may be legally admitted to our country and eventually become eligible for benefits and citizenship. This is truer than ever in today's post-9/11 world, as we must do all that we can to guard our borders against national security threats from terrorists who would take advantage of our porous borders to attack us.
For sure, Congress is having trouble reaching a fair bipartisan solution to the thorny issues posed by the illegal immigrants in our midst, but it is the right body to be dealing with these issues on behalf of the american people. Yet the United Nations wants to add its own two cents, putting its nose where it does not belong.
as usual, UN Secretary-General Kofi annan is looking for more reasons to expand the already bloated UN bureaucracy. So annan proposed to the General assembly that it add migration as a priority issue for the international community to consider, which the General assembly was happy to do. The Global Commission on International Migration was launched by annan and a number of governments in 2003. as stated on its website, the Commission's mandate is "to provide the framework for the formulation of a coherent, comprehensive and global response to the issue of international migration". www.gcim.org/en/ Its recommendations will be one of the inputs to the high-level dialogue on international migration that the General assembly will conduct in September 2006.
Surprise, surprise! Mexico happens to be one of the "core group" of member states that have reviewed the mandate of the Commission and have lent it their support. Curiously, so is Iran.
a paper published in connection with the work of the Global Commission on International Migration, entitled "Migration without borders: an investigation into the free movement of people" by antoine Pécoud and Paul de Guchteneire, discusses a global scenario under which, as a fundamental human right, people would be entitled to move freely throughout the world without encountering national border controls. "In a globalised world, movement of people is not an anomaly to be exceptionally tolerated; it is a normal process embedded in socio-economic structures as well as in migrants' transnational lives and identities," the authors concluded. While the paper represents its authors' own views and not those of the Commission, it should be noted that it stemmed from UNESCO's section on International Migration which had launched a research project investigating free global migratory flows without border constraints.
Other studies prepared in support of the Global Commission's work pointed out the range of possible forms of international governance of migration. Such options range all the way from the creation of a World Migration Organization, with rule setting and enforcement authority analogous to the World Trade Organization, to global consensus on international norms for determining whom and under what circumstances a person can leave his or her country of origin and enter freely into another country of that individual's choice. Such norms would, in turn, be incorporated into each country's own laws and judicial rulings. all such options presuppose some loss of national control over a country's own borders.
The Global Commission on International Migration did not embrace any specific structure for international governance in its final set of recommendations issued in October, 2005. In the customary bureaucratese of UN documents, the Commission concluded that "the legal and normative framework affecting international migrants should be strengthened, implemented m ore effectively and applied in a non-discriminatory manner, so as to protect the human rights and labour standards that should be enjoyed by all migrant women and men." and, of course, they proposed the establishment of yet another high-level UN group — this time, "to define the functions and modalities of, and pave the way for, an Inter-agency Global Migration Facility."
We are witnessing the familiar pattern at the UN of creating more layers of bureaucracy, requiring more funding — all to issue more recommendations about an issue that belongs within the province of each country to decide for itself. It is up to our own elected representatives to listen to their constituents and then come up with constructive answers to their concerns. The american people — not some global commission or UN forum — must ultimately decide whether the melting pot that defined the assimilation of earlier generations of immigrants into american society is in danger of becoming a multicultural patchwork of linguistically isolated mini-societies. The treatment of foreign nationals who want to live here and partake of the american dream of economic opportunity is also an issue for the american people to decide for themselves. The fact that other countries are effectively dumping their economic problems on us by not addressing the conditions that drive their people to leave does not turn the consequences for our nation into a matter for global forums to resolve.
Self-righteous globalists preach that no human being is illegal. Nobody disagrees with that self-evident statement. Of course, human beings themselves are not illegal but they can commit illegal acts, including entering our country without following our laws for proper entry. Our democratic process is perfectly capable of working through the complex issues involving immigrants who want to live in our country. There is no role for the United Nations to play in this debate involving our own future.
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