The United States not only hosts the United Nations headquarters, but is also the international organization’s greatest financial benefactor. In 2019, for example, American taxpayers sent the UN $11 billion, funding approximately one-fifth of their annual budget. All nations, including the United States, have the right to expect the UN to respect their sovereignty and interests. Instead, the UN not only continues to criticize everything from the reinstituting of the Migrant Protection Protocols (which is being done very reluctantly and with the intent to eventually terminate the Trump-era policy) to the recent Omicron travel ban on several African nations, but is actually funding illegal immigration into the U.S..
In a recent article in The Federalist, Todd Bensman described what he saw while visiting a migrant camp in Reynosa, Mexico, which is located on the opposite side of the Rio Grande river from McAllen, Texas. The senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) witnessed individuals working for (or with) the International Organization for Migration (IOM) – a part of the UN system – handing out cash debit cards to illegal border crossers.
“One of two workers at a plastic folding table inside the Reynosa camp, which was filled to capacity with at least 1,200 mostly U.S.-expelled Central Americans, said they were distributing the cards for IOM to help migrants waiting until they cross the Rio Grande at greater leisure to claim asylum, for which most will be declared ineligible years later. Many parents, for instance, got about $400 every 15 days, I was told, or $800 a month if they were still there to collect it, although the support level varied,” Bensman reports.
This assistance to illegal migrants is not limited to cash debit cards, but also includes “less-seeable bank transfers, mobile transfers, and e-vouchers that go to intending illegal border crossers en route or at least temporarily blocked,” and so-called “movement assistance” (“in the form of conditional or unrestricted cash transfers”). The IOM’s Emergency Manual also admits to doling out “cash in envelopes (hard cash).”
Moreover, this is “just an iceberg tip,” as Bensman puts it. That’s because “the IOM is handing out cash and other material support to intending illegal border crossers in as many as 100 other shelters it helped build, expand, or supports from Central America north.”
If the UN and its associated agencies wish to help those struggling in Third World countries, they should be doing so in their homelands while simultaneously encouraging the governments of those countries to do more for their own citizens. At the very least, they should be requiring migrants to pursue legal means of migration as a basic qualification for monetary aid. Rewarding those who attempted to cross our borders illegally only incentivizes more migrants to embark on the long, dangerous journey to America’s doorstep.
The author further points out that the IOM greatly expanded its funding of mass illegal migration in recent years, mainly in response to the previous administration’s efforts to secure America’s borders and crack down on large-scale asylum abuse. “Some form of this has been around for years, but starting with a mass-migration event and Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy in 2019, the IOM supercharged the program and ‘institutionalized’ it. This doubled the countries where it is used in 2020 and increased by 77 percent the number of recipients to 1.6 million worldwide, according to an annual 2020 IOM report.”
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising. The UN’s secretary general, the socialist former prime minister of Portugal, Antonio Guterres, has a long record of making statements in favor of open borders. And the head of the IOM, Antonio Vitorino, another socialist from Portugal and a former minister in Guterres’ cabinet, is on the same page.
American citizens deserve better than to see their hard-earned tax dollars go to those who violate the sovereignty of our borders. That is why FAIR supports Representative Lance Gooden’s (R-Texas) “No Tax Dollars for the United Nation’s Immigration Invasion Act,” which would prohibit contributions to several UN agencies, including the IOM. Although we should not forget that it was the Biden administration and its irresponsible policies that massively increased illegal migration in the first place, the UN should not be contributing to the mess created by this administration.