The UN's "Borderless" World
By Joseph Klein, Frony Page Magazine, April 24, 2006
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22163
The UN's "Borderless" World
By Joseph Klein
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 24, 2006
While pro-immigrant rallies get most of the attention from the mainstream press, many law-abiding American citizens are fed up with the reality of tens of thousands of foreign nationals every few weeks continuing to enter this country illegally through our porous borders, added to the more than 11 million illegal aliens who are already here. Americans are bearing a grossly disproportionate share of the security risks and economic costs associated with such migration, which makes it a national problem for Americans to solve through their elected representatives and through voluntary groups like the Minuteman Project.
Citizens are demanding that their government ensure effective protection at the borders against more illegal entrants, who at the very least will become tax burdens on the American people and could pose a much more serious security threat. Congress and the President must decide what to do about this mounting problem, consistent with the tenets of the U.S. Constitution. Our democratic institutions can and must handle this situation without any outside interference.
The United Nations sees the matter differently. Its bureaucrats envision a “borderless” world where immigration is treated as an international human rights issue and used as a global development tool to encourage free movement of the developing countries’ poor to developed nations. This philosophy underlies their preparations for the United Nations High Level Dialogue concerning international migration and development, scheduled to take place in conjunction with the fall 2006 General Assembly session. They want the agenda for this Dialogue to center on the relationship between international migration and the economic and social development of the poorer countries in the world.
The UN bureaucrats’ aggressive push into the immigration debate fits in with their dogmatic belief that international treaties should trump national sovereignty prerogatives – in this case, a UN treaty that codifies the internationalization of immigration policy called the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. This Convention was adopted by the General Assembly in 1990 but went into effect in 2003 after the twentieth signing country formally ratified it. It is heavily biased against countries like the United States which receive the lion’s share of illegal aliens.
Indeed, the Convention goes so far as to use the term ‘irregular’ as a euphemism for illegal aliens and would require their destination countries to provide them with an array of benefits and justiciable rights. This explains why the ratifying countries are the ones who are effectively exporting their economic problems to the United States and other destination countries, and why the destination countries in turn have not signed on.
The United Nations wants to change all that by seeking to position the right to freely migrate from poor to richer lands as a fundamental human right deserving of universal recognition. Indeed, they view internationally managed migration as an effective means to socially engineer the end of wealth disparities existing between the world’s most developed countries and the world’s developing countries. “Migration must become an integral part of global development strategies”, said a report prepared last fall by the Global Commission on International Migration set up with Kofi Annan’s assistance to help prepare the way for this fall’s United Nations High Level Dialogue. Using the euphemism ‘irregular migration’ to refer to illegal aliens, the Commission warned that restrictive national policies are “neither desirable nor feasible, and may jeopardize the rights of migrants and refugees.”
To the UN ‘experts’ who advocate using migration as a global development tool, the unemployed poor should become the economic charges of their destination countries. For those migrants who do manage to find jobs in their destination countries, they would be expected to send money back to their families still residing in their countries of origin. These remittances, as they are called, are seen by the UN’s migration development advocates as an indirect form of aid generated from the economies of the host countries and adding significantly to the gross national product of the migrants’ countries of origin. If transfers that went through informal channels were added to the official statistics, remittances could be as high as $300 billion. They are larger than official development assistance (ODA) and more than foreign direct investment (FDI).
At the same time, these same UN ‘experts’ want to discourage the movement of those skilled educated workers from a developing country who seek better economic opportunities for themselves and their families where their skills will bring them more reward. With regard to those skilled workers who do migrate, the UN ‘experts’ expect the prosperous destination countries of these skilled workers to compensate the less developed countries of origin for the so-called “brain drain”. Of course, nothing is said about requiring compensation from the countries of origin for the educational and monetary benefits the destination countries are paying to assist their poor nationals who cross the border illegally.
In short, if the UN advocates of open borders have their way, the developing countries would get to transfer their economic underclass without any cost to the destination countries, which would be expected to subsidize them. The developing countries would also receive compensation from the destination countries where their skilled nationals have migrated in order to find gainful employment that is not available back home.
In support of such an approach, UNESCO recently completed a research project – paid for, in part, by American taxpayers - entitled ‘Migration without Borders’. The project investigated the implications of an internationally managed regime of freedom of movement for the world’s migrants, including the impact on economic and social development. The chief of UNESCO’s International Migration Section referred to this project when he advocated that “(A)ll initiatives taken to address the challenges of migration should above all consider the priority of the human rights of migrants.” (International Migration and Development: Key Aspects for the High-Level Dialogue 2006.) He had in mind, no doubt, the poor uneducated persons who leave their impoverished countries, often ruled by corrupt governments that have failed their people. These migrants carry their problems to an economically prosperous country which they enter without permission and the skills or wherewithal to support themselves and their families. The host country is supposed to welcome all migrants desiring entry across an open border and take care of them. Why? Because the United Nations bureaucrats want us to believe that migrants’ human rights must take precedence above all else, including concerns about securing national borders.
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