Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his team at the State Department are poised to drastically overhaul the way America approaches global refugee problems.
During next week’s United Nations General Assembly, Rubio and his deputies will announce plans to follow through on what many of them told the Senate they plan to do during their confirmation hearing.
That plan will require asylum seekers to claim protection in the first country they enter, not in a nation of their choosing. Furthermore, asylum would be temporary.
This shift doesn’t come out of the blue. For example, Andrew Veprek, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the State Department’s refugee division, wants to reshape how the entire world approaches asylum.
“Perhaps the most important root cause of the mass and illegal migration today is the abuse of refugee and asylum systems,” he recently said. “The current framework of international agreements and norms on migration developed after the Second World War in a completely different geopolitical and economic context. It cannot be expected to function in our modern world, and indeed it does not.”
A senior State Department official outlined Rubio’s goals. “Secretary Rubio’s State Department will continue to advance President Trump’s America First vision, including pushing commonsense reforms to address the outdated and broken refugee and asylum system,” the official explained. “We look forward to having an international conversation to implement common sense reforms about a system that has been abused by malign actors and fueled a mass migration crisis.”
Rubio’s moves received immediate praise from Trump administration alums. One, Bonnie Glick, who spearheaded aid cuts to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) during the first Trump term, told the Reporter that “it would be appropriate to call out the need for the UN General Assembly to review the mandate of UNRWA and for like-minded countries to offer an UNGA resolution that calls for ending UNRWA’s corrupted mandate.”
“The Palestinian ‘refugees’ who have settled in countries around the world should be granted citizenship in those countries which can be facilitated by the UN High Commission for Refugees,” Glick — now a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), added. “UNRWA’s practice of forcing Palestinians to remain perpetual refugees for generations should end.” During the first Trump term, Glick was the Deputy Administrator of the United States Agency of International Development (USAID).
While the Trump administration’s entire approach to immigration policy is a 180 degree turn from that of its predecessor, it will remain bound by some of the international agreements it signed.
The new vision that Rubio and his team will lay out may have some takers from countries like Poland, which saw a marked rightward shift on immigration with the recent election of President Karol Nawrocki, who campaigned on putting “Poland first [and] Poles first.”