The Trump administration has accused the United Nations of facilitating mass migration into America and Europe while promoting policies it described as “replacement migration.”
In a May 11 post on X, the U.S. State Department said that U.N. agencies had “systematically facilitated mass migration” into the West, even as citizens in those countries have called for tighter migration controls.
The State Department said it did not sign the forum’s May 8 progress declaration because the United States would not “legitimize global compacts that enable mass migration into America or Western nations.”
It said that under President Donald Trump, the department would “facilitate remigration, not replacement migration.”
The department accused U.N. agencies and U.N.-funded NGOs of helping to facilitate migration routes through Central America and toward the U.S. border, including through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.
U.N. officials greeted migrants along the route, and U.N.-funded NGOs handed out maps to people traveling north, the agency said.
As Europe faced sustained illegal immigration pressure, U.N. officials “staffed all ends of the Mediterranean migration route,” from the coast of Libya to the Aegean and the Greek islands, the post said.
In a May 12 post on X, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said that the point of multilateral institutions is "to advance the interests of sovereign nation states, but lately such institutions seem intent on undermining the very sovereignty of the nations that created them."
UK's Rwanda Plan Cited
The department also mentioned the United Kingdom’s failed Rwanda deportation plan, saying U.N. officials had “lobbied aviation regulators to prevent the deportation of migrants,” which it described as “an appalling violation of the UK’s national sovereignty.”Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the policy was intended to deter human trafficking gangs.
In an April 2024 U.N. Special Procedures letter to the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), U.N. human rights experts warned that airlines and aviation regulators could be committing human rights violations if they facilitated removals to Rwanda.
The term “replacement migration” has appeared before in U.N. demographic literature.
It defined replacement migration as the “international migration that would be needed to offset declines in the size of a population, declines in the population of working age as well as to offset the overall ageing of a population.”
In the absence of immigration, countries with below-replacement fertility would see their populations decline, with some projected to lose as much as a quarter or a third of their population during the first half of the 21st century, the study said.
It also said that while migration could help offset population and workforce decline, the level needed to prevent population aging would be far larger.
“By 2050, these larger migration flows would result in populations where the proportion of post-1995 migrants and their descendants would range between 59 per cent and 99 per cent,” the report said, adding that it seems "extremely unlikely that such flows could happen in these countries in the foreseeable future."
Alice Weidel, leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, welcomed the U.S. State Department’s position in a May 12 post on X, saying Washington had “rightly” rejected the U.N. Global Compact on Migration, which she described as a "tool for replacement migration that undermines Western nations."
“Exactly what AfD has been warning about for years,” she said.
The Epoch Times contacted the U.N. for comment.