Op-ed: We Signed the United Nations Refugee Protocol, but We Never Signed up for Mass Migration
By George Fishman on July 14, 2025
Greece just announced that it is suspending the processing of illegal North African immigrants making asylum claims for three months after a dramatic surge in numbers, warning that those arriving by boat will be arrested and detained.
Sound familiar? On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing that “aliens engaged in the invasion across the southern border … are restricted from invoking provisions … that would permit their continued presence … including, but not limited to [federal law’s asylum statute] … until … the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”
If the Supreme Court determines that Trump can’t do this without an act of Congress, as a federal judge recently ruled, then Congress should most assuredly act. As Mark Krikorian, my colleague at the Center for Immigration Studies, has posted, “the whole post-WWII asylum regime needs to be scrapped”, explaining in the National Review that the 1951 United Nations Convention Related to the Status of Refugees has been turned into “a crowbar used by the post-national Left to pry open the borders of democratic societies contrary to the will of their citizens.”
Krikorian also made the extremely important but little-known point that “even the people who drew up the Refugee Convention did not intend for it to apply to mass influxes”. Congress should feel free to act in the national interest, unencumbered by inaccurate perceptions as to what the refugee convention “means.”
https://cis.org/Fishman/Oped-We-Signed-United-Nations-Refugee-Protocol-We-Never-Signed-Mass-Migration
