Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian to the newsmaker line to discuss his recent call for the withdrawal of the United States from the decades-old 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol as the southern border leaks more than Latin American refugees.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by our very good friend, Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Mark, welcome and thank you, thank you.
Thank you for writing your very important article at the National Review Online. Time to Withdraw from the UN Refugee Treaty. Thanks so much. It’s about time, isn’t it?
Krikorian: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because we’re talking about a lot of loopholes in the law, and how are we going to, you know, sort of nip here and tuck there. But you got to go to the root of the problem which is that we are subject, we signed a treaty 70 years ago.
This is a lifetime ago. A UN treaty on refugees. But it was written in – the terms of it are based on post World War II and the beginning of the Cold War conditions. That’s a world that no longer exists. And yet we have signed the treaty.
We signed the sequel to it, but it doesn’t matter. We’re still subject to its terms, and we incorporated them into our law. And the main problem here is not refugees that we go and pick and resettle in the U.S. That’s a problem.
But that’s something that’s up to us. We run refugee resettlement. I know Nashville has a real issue with a lot of refugee settlements, but that’s something that we under our law and under our decision-makers do. And I think we need to change it, but we have the power to do that ourselves.
The real problem with this treaty is that it sets up asylum law as well. Which are illegal immigrants coming into the U.S., sneaking in, overstaying a visa, whatever it is, and then saying, you have to let me stay because of the terms of this refugee treaty.
And that’s what we need to fix because if we don’t, we don’t have control over our own borders. Basically, the rest of our immigration laws are irrelevant. If illegal immigrants can just hop over and say, you have to let me stay, I don’t really care what your immigration law is.
Leahy: This treaty was the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees. President Harry Truman in 1951 did not sign that because he felt it infringed on U.S. sovereignty. This is from your article.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson reversed course and signed the protocol, and the Senate ratified it, binding the U.S. to its terms. The provisions were formally incorporated into a U.S. statute called the Refugee Act of 1980. But you say in your article, Truman was right not to sign it.
Krikorian: Truman was right because he chose not to sign it at the time – 1951 – because he viewed it as infringements or provisions of it as an infringement on U.S. sovereignty. And we resettled refugees between Truman’s decision and then LBJ’s getting us into that treaty, with Congress, passed legislation.
And we did it on our own decision. What happened in 1968 is we bound ourselves to these asylum provisions. But even then, it didn’t make that much difference because, how many people were sneaking across our borders and then saying political asylum in 1968?
It wasn’t seen as a problem – was only when the Cold War ended and transportation and communications around the world became dirt cheap, relatively speaking, and easy and quick. So now, instead of one ballerina from the Soviet Union defecting – which is what asylum is for, defections.
Now we’ve got 200,000 people a month coming across our Mexican border. Not from Mexico or Central America, but from Uzbekistan, Mauritania, Romania, and you name it. We got people coming from all over the world and saying, oh, I fear return. You have to let me stay and let me stay as a refugee.
And Europe faces the same problem. But you know, that’s their problem. They need to deal with it, too. We need to deal with our own problems. And that is not that we’re never going to give asylum to anybody, but that we need to set asylum rules based on the national interest. Based on what’s good for the United States and not based on some UN treaty.
Leahy: Mark, you reference in your outstanding article at National Review Online, a book written in 2011 by John Fonte called Sovereignty or Submission, which is about the struggle between national sovereignty and global governance. Now, I guess, was prophetic. The past 10 years have not been so great for American sovereignty.
Krikorian: No, definitely not. And this book, Sovereignty or Submission, deals with a whole bunch of things. It’s not about immigration. My point was that this issue of refugees and asylum fit into that broader push by these mainly left-leaning groups that see themselves not as citizens of their country.
Not as American groups or French or German or British organizations. And the people in them don’t think of themselves that way. They think of themselves as citizens of the world and they want there to be more and more rules that countries have to follow, whether their people like it or not.
Globalism is kind of the shorthand we use. This refugee treaty is an important part of that globalism push because the point of it is to limit more and more the control a country has and therefore the people of that country have over their own borders.
Because if there are rules set by the UN about who you can deport, who you are legally required to let stay in your country, even if you didn’t choose it, even if they came against you without your consent, then you progressively lose sovereignty over your own borders.
Leahy: I agree with your suggestion that we withdraw from the UN refugee treaty immediately. Let’s talk about the politics of this. What’s the likelihood that in the current Congress that a proposal like this would have any chance of success?
Krikorian: First of all, it’s the president, whoever the president is can withdraw us from a treaty. The way a treaty works is that the president and the people who work for him sign a treaty, negotiate and sign it, and then the Senate has to ratify it.
Okay it or not. If they do that, it becomes law of the land according to the Constitution. The president can then back out of the treaty on his own. He doesn’t need a vote for that. President Trump, for instance, and I’m pretty sure President Bush got us out of a couple of treaties because all treaties have a provision that says, if you want to get out of it, you have to send us a notice.
And then however much time, in this case, one year later, you’re then free of the treaty. Obviously, (Chuckles) President Biden is not going to be pulling us out of the treaty. So this is something that would have to wait until we had a President who was not just more in touch with his surroundings, but just generally speaking, ideologically and politically, very different.
Maybe, hypothetically, a President DeSantis might do something like that. But even then, it’s the necessary first step. But even then, just getting out of the treaty doesn’t free us from the UN provisions. We have to then change the legislation, the law, and that’s something Congress will have to do.
You’ll have to see what the makeup of Congress is at some point. It’s certainly not going to happen with a Democratic majority. It won’t happen immediately with the Republican majority potentially either, because this is one of the reasons I wrote the article.
And that is that no Republican politicians have submitted changes, proposed changes to the refugee law. So this is a discussion that I’m trying to move along. And this kind of, you’re addressing the issue on your show is one step in that direction.
Leahy: We’re talking with Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Mark, can you stay with us because when you come back, I’m going to ask the big question about the politics and your outstanding proposal that the United States should withdraw from the United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees. Can you stick with us through the break?
Krikorian: Sure. I’d be happy too. Thank you.
Listen to the first hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “1951 Refugee Convention” by UNHCR.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian to the newsmakers line to discuss the repealed immigration policies of Trump that has lead to the Biden administration’s inability to control the border surge.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line right now by our good friend, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Mark Krikorian. Mark, what a terrific piece you had on Thursday in the National Review about Vice President Kamala Harris’s, your words, layover in El Paso.
I wanna take this sentence from your article and just get you to elaborate on this. ‘As hard as it is to believe the Biden-Harris administration was taken by surprise by the border surge that it caused.’ Can you tell us more about that?
Krikorian: Yes. The administration probably knew that there was going to be some increase at the border when they undid all of the things Trump had done which successfully stabilized the border.
I mean, Trump didn’t solve everything but definitely had stabilized the situation. They basically expected a little bit of a surge, but Mexico would help them suppress it, and people would listen to their pleas not to come.
Remember, the Vice President went down there and said, do not come, do not come. They’re kind of like Jimmy Carter back in 1980. I know it’s a long time ago, but Jimmy Carter basically did the same thing with regard to Cuba.
He said, anybody who gets out of Cuba, we will welcome them with open arms and open hearts. And Castro looked up and said, hey, that’s a great idea. So he emptied his jails. 120,000 people streamed out of Cuba until Jimmy Carter was like, oh jeez, that’s not what I meant.
(Leahy laughs) But he was able to shut it down because he hadn’t run on immigration. He wasn’t boxed in politically. This administration has run as the anti-Trump. And since immigration was one of Trump’s top things, they had to undo everything Trump did, creating this disaster that they really don’t have any good idea about how to fix.
Leahy: Yes. It seems very obvious they don’t have any good idea how to fix it. Crom Carmichael is our all-star panelist in Studio. Chrome has a question for you, Mark.
Carmichael: Well, if, Mark, if they do want to fix it, then the obvious answer is to return to Trump’s policies.
Krikorian: Of course. But my point is they can’t do that just psychologically or politically. Right? It’s not going to happen.
Carmichael: I think the obvious conclusion is they don’t want to fix it because there’s an obvious answer on how to fix it. I guess my question to you is that they’re not going to return to the policies of Trump. And so the surge is going to actually get worse. Would you agree?
Krikorian: Yeah, sure. There’s no question. In the summer, it may actually dip. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. The numbers may actually go down a little bit because it is unbelievably hot down there this time of year.
And frankly, if you are planning on sneaking into the U.S., not just Central Americans, but now we’re getting people from Romania, Uzbekistan, India, and everywhere trying to get in on the action here, some of them may figure, well, let’s cool our heels for a couple of months somewhere where there’s air conditioning, and then we’ll come.
So the numbers could go down a little. But even if they do, they’re just going to go right back up in the fall. Not to get too long into it but this is not some long historical thing we always have to deal with.
This surge is the result of specific loopholes in the law that was passed in 2008 and 2009 and other changes since then. So this is not something we just have to deal with in perpetuity. Congress and the President over several administrations created this problem.
Trump stabilized it again. That’s what I mean by he didn’t fix the loopholes, but he did stabilize it. Biden took something that was fixed and broke it. And it’s not going away until we fix those loopholes and change the things that make it attractive to sneak in. Because the odds are good that you’ll just be let go.
Leahy: What are the major loopholes and what are the chances of fixing them legislatively?
Krikorian: The chances, I can tell you now are zero until there’s a change in Congress and the White House. But not to get too wonky, there’s a provision that says so-called unaccompanied minors, and we kind of take your word for it that you’re under 18 can’t just be returned home.
They have to be given hearings. They have to be delivered into shelters and delivered to their parents who are here illegally often paying to smuggle them. That has to be changed. There’s a court ruling that Congress can overrule that says minors, even if they’re with their parents, can’t be held in immigration detention for more than three weeks.
But they have to be let go, including the parents. There’s more to it than that. But that’s the kind of thing that we have basically created the situation in a time when there weren’t a lot of kids or families coming over.
People in Congress figured out what’s the harm? Make us feel good. Virtue signaling, and it won’t really have any consequences. Well, within a few years, the problem exploded because these things started really in 2008, and 2009 is when these were passed.
It blew up under Obama in 2014. It’s just been getting these ups and downs, but it’s just been getting worse ever since.
Leahy: What you take on the job, direct Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has been doing?
Krikorian: Terrible but terrible because that’s what he was hired to do. In other words, he’s doing the job that this administration hired him to do, which is, first of all, not to enforce immigration law.
ICE, which is under his purview, is basically not permitted to do immigration enforcement except in the most extreme cases of terrorists and spies. And that sort of thing. Other than that, illegal immigrants have a free pass.
Leahy: Let me ask you this about Mayorkas. Is his failure to enforce our immigration laws an impeachable offense?
Krikorian: That’s kind of up to the Senate. They could impeach him. The House in the Senate, and frankly, they probably should, but they shouldn’t have approved him in the first place. And anybody who replaces them is just going to do the same thing because this is what the President promised to do.
This is a political problem in the sense that we’ve got to get rid of or change who’s in the White House and then change who’s in the majority of Congress before any of this can change.
Carmichael: Mark, is Mayorkas not upholding the law, or is he exploiting loopholes? And the reason I’m asking the question is in a new administration, once he is out of office, could he be indicted for not upholding his oath of office?
Krikorian: I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think he’s upholding his oath of office, but I don’t think the president’s upholding his oath of office. The Constitution requires the executive to faithfully execute the laws, and that’s not what Biden is doing.
It’s not what Mayorkas is doing at Biden’s instruction. So, I mean, potentially, I guess. But I don’t like the criminalization of politics. I think what we need to do, and this is me talking as a citizen, CIS doesn’t get involved in elections, but as a citizen, the solution is to get rid of these guys from office and put in somebody who actually is going to do what’s necessary.
Carmichael: Here is I guess question, and you’re hitting on an excellent I’m asking you something in your responses philosophical in nature, which is appropriate. But if Republicans were to retake the House and have a majority in the Senate, but not 60 and have the presidency, you can’t fix immigration legislation with less than 60 votes.
Krikorian: You can’t fix everything, obviously, because of the filibuster. But the filibuster is protecting us this time. Do you know what I mean? There is a great reason for it. But there’s a lot of smaller things that can be changed that some of them the Democrats may go along with.
You put package deals together. Okay, they get some of this. We get these four immigration loopholes fixed. It’s not impossible. The first thing is, you need to get control of the majorities in Congress and get somebody in the White House.
Leahy: Last question. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the chances of fixing any of this over the next three and a half years?
Krikorian: Oh yeah. I mean, pessimistic isn’t a word. There is zero possibility of any of this getting fixed.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
